A Review of: “Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food”
Abstract
Meals to Come is a cheeky and stylish take on a somber subject—Anglo-American projections about hunger over the last 200 years and the means of assuaging it. It is also a detailed, comprehensive, and interminably long book, with tightly packed pages. Belasco catalogues rather than explains why projections about the future have been so prevalent, popular, and powerful. He neatly reduces the outpouring of futurists and policy mavens into a three-way debate about the future of the food-system. On one corner are the techno-cornucopian optimists such as the eighteenth-century French mathematician Marquis de Condorcet 1743-1836, whose legacy today is carried by scientists working for the United States Department of Agriculture, World Bank, and spokespersons for Monsanto and Archer Daniels & Midland. The second corner is peopled by Malthusian (named after the English pastor Thomas Robert Malthus, 1766-1834) environmental pessimists who brought a dose of mathematical modeling and realism to spacey futurism. Yet Malthus' followers carried deep-seated racial anxieties about being swamped by the poor, the wretched, and the colored. Today that corner is exemplified (with some irony) by environmental progressives such as Paul Ehrlich and Lester Brown, of course without the explicit racial anxieties of the past. And