Eating Albion

The future seen from now…

I’ve had this post on a slow boil since New Year, and as we’ve (just) seen the end of January, it’s sort of topical. It’s about the future. When the calendar clicks over another year, most of the media do a review of the past 12 months. Occasionally a few periodicals, particularly in America, ask a selection of laymen, pundits and thought-shapers to speculate what the future might look like 50 or a 100 years from now. The writers often focus on physical things like technology, transport, medicine, and sometimes diet and food.

Jim Rasenberger of the New York Times did just such a piece at the end of December, in which he consulted a broad range of people from schoolchildren to scientists. Here’s what chef Daniel Boulud had to say:

‘I think the children of today will have a big challenge persuading their children to take time to enjoy food. But restaurants will always be important in New York. People will see restaurants as a home away from home, where they feel secure…Genetically engineered food is something I don’t think anyone can escape, but the great chefs will still want a product that is natural… More food will be grown locally.’

They’re fairly conservative predictions – in fact I’d say they’re almost being met right now. Futurology is now a fully-fledged discipline, but nowadays future predictions tend to be more anti-Utopian and cautious. Why? Well, I think Leo McGarry summed it up best in the West Wing when he said:

Leo: My generation never got the future it was promised… Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don’t even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped.
Josh: The personal computer…
Leo: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where’s my jet pack, my colonies on the moon?

The future seen from 1900…

Rasenberger is by no means the first to solicit opinions from people about the future. This excerpt from The Ladies Home Journal did the rounds at Christmas last year, in which the author asked ‘most learned and conservative minds in America’ what the year 2000 would be like. You can read it in full here, but it’s worth pulling out the ones related to food, farming and nature:

“Prediction #11: No Mosquitoes nor Flies. Insect screens will be unnecessary. Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been practically exterminated. Boards of health will have destroyed all mosquito haunts and breeding-grounds, drained all stagnant pools, filled in all swamp-lands, and chemically treated all still-water streams. The extermination of the horse and its stable will reduce the house-fly.

Prediction #12: Peas and beans will be as large as beets are to-day. Sugar cane will produce twice as much sugar as the sugar beet now does… Plants will be made proof against disease microbes just as readily as man is to-day against smallpox. The soil will be kept enriched by plants which take their nutrition from the air and give fertility to the earth.

Prediction #13: Strawberries as Large as Apples will be eaten by our great-great-grandchildren for their Christmas dinners a hundred years hence. Raspberries and blackberries will be as large. One will suffice for the fruit course of each person. Strawberries and cranberries will be grown upon tall bushes. Cranberries, gooseberries and currants will be as large as oranges. One cantaloupe will supply an entire family. Melons, cherries, grapes, plums, apples, pears, peaches and all berries will be seedless. Figs will be cultivated over the entire United States.

Prediction #15: No Foods will be Exposed. Storekeepers who expose food to air breathed out by patrons or to the atmosphere of the busy streets will be arrested with those who sell stale or adulterated produce. Liquid-air refrigerators will keep great quantities of food fresh for long intervals.

Prediction #23: Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today. They will purchase materials in tremendous wholesale quantities and sell the cooked foods at a price much lower than the cost of individual cooking. Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile wagons. The meal being over, the dishes used will be packed and returned to the cooking establishments where they will be washed. Such wholesale cookery will be done in electric laboratories rather than in kitchens. These laboratories will be equipped with electric stoves, and all sorts of electric devices, such as coffee-grinders, egg-beaters, stirrers, shakers, parers, meat-choppers, meat-saws, potato-mashers, lemon-squeezers, dish-washers, dish-dryers and the like. All such utensils will be washed in chemicals fatal to disease microbes. Having one’s own cook and purchasing one’s own food will be an extravagance.

Prediction #24: Vegetables Grown by Electricity. Winter will be turned into summer and night into day by the farmer. In cold weather he will place heat-conducting electric wires under the soil of his garden and thus warm his growing plants. He will also grow large gardens under glass. At night his vegetables will be bathed in powerful electric light, serving, like sunlight, to hasten their growth. Electric currents applied to the soil will make valuable plants grow larger and faster, and will kill troublesome weeds. Rays of colored light will hasten the growth of many plants. Electricity applied to garden seeds will make them sprout and develop unusually early.

Prediction #25: Oranges will grow in Philadelphia. Fast-flying refrigerators on land and sea will bring delicious fruits from the tropics and southern temperate zone within a few days. The farmers of South America, South Africa, Australia and the South Sea Islands, whose seasons are directly opposite to ours, will thus supply us in winter with fresh summer foods, which cannot be grown here. Scientists will have discovered how to raise here many fruits now confined to much hotter or colder climates. Delicious oranges will be grown in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Cantaloupes and other summer fruits will be of such a hardy nature that they can be stored through the winter as potatoes are now.

Prediction #28: There will be no wild animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. The horse will have become practically extinct. A few of high breed will be kept by the rich for racing, hunting and exercise. The automobile will have driven out the horse. Cattle and sheep will have no horns. They will be unable to run faster than the fattened hog of today. A century ago the wild hog could outrun a horse. Food animals will be bred to expend practically all of their life energy in producing meat, milk, wool and other by-products. Horns, bones, muscles and lungs will have been neglected.”

Some of this sounds like hell, and some of it sounds scarily like now. There are two things to take from this. Firstly, the assumption that the extermination of wild species seems to be a given – especially insects. If you look at the world now, important pollinating species like bees are under threat from loss of habitat, colony collapse disorder and suchlike, while flies and mosquitos are having a whale of a time living in our filth and killing millions worldwide.

The second point worth noting is that the food described in the excerpt is all massive. Farm animals are hornless and grotesquely deformed to produce more meat. Vegetables are all gigantic and climate-resistant. The prediction ‘Strawberries as Large as Apples will be eaten by our great-great-grandchildren for their Christmas dinners a hundred years hence’ is like some unseasonal Alice in Wonderland image. Until you realise it’s actually very nearly true. The Dutch Elsanta strawberry is a whopper, grown more for its shelf-life than its flavour, and is available 365 days of the year in most supermarkets.

Prediction 15 has also very nearly come true , as a large amount of food today is shrink-wrapped and sealed. Think about walking round your average supermarket - vegetables and fruit are the only things that you can pick up and sniff. And Prediction 25 is bang-on in describing the concept of food miles.

The future seen from the 70s…

Fast-forward now to the late 70s. I’ve got a book called Future World, by Peter Goodwin. It’s the sort of annual young boys up and down the land got for Christmas along with an eagle-eyed Action Man, a selection box and a new bike.

It’s split into sections like space travel, communications, medicine and food. Here are some pages from the food section, the title being ‘Food – the quest for abundance’. It talks about the hazards of mono-culture environments and a return to some older mixed farming techniques, as well as the latest cutting-edge application of science to create fertilisers that are ‘a by-product’ from the oil industry’.

And take this example.

‘This deep-fried breaded chicken is in fact made from mycoprotein, a fibrous substance produced from mycrofungi’. Mmmm, perhaps it’s a case of just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

It’s also illustrated with those wonderful Syd Mead-style drawings, in which beautiful young people step from air-cars into trans-continental shuttle tubes, while a spacecraft roars upward in the background. In the one below a diver returns fish samples from a giant sea-fish farm. Like Leo, this was the future I wanted as a child.

So where now for the future of food? Locally grown fruits as big as your head, all year round? Or economic collapse and species extinction? Well, maybe both. Scientists at the University of Warwick have a selection of podcasts looking at producing better tomatoes and broccoli (actually the tomato one is really interesting), while other scientists are looking at species decline in everything from cod to bees. If all the apples in the UK disappeared overnight there would be outrage, yet slow losses of species and gradual price rises over decades mean people forget, lose interest or stop caring. Food still comes way down the list in a lot of people’s lists of things that ‘are important’ – that is until we all start to get a little hungry.