Hello, and welcome to tomorrow’s world. Perhaps that introduction conjures up fond memories of the cheerily optimistic BBC science programme, or possibly evokes darker images of bunkers, radiation and inevitable cannibalism. Just as sweet goes with sour, this first in a series of food articles tastes a little of both, as I turn my attention to the likely diet of our nearby human future.
If the reliably hysterical science coverage of British newspapers is to be believed, we’re about to run out of fish, bees and bananas, and those are merely the media-friendly tip of the extinction iceberg represented by an expanding population and manmade climate change. On this small planet, our mushrooming population of gluttons, gourmands and gastric bypasses will inevitably run out of things to eat, and unless we start on each other our diets are going to be required to evolve to incorporate some ‘unusual’ new tastes, just to put it mildly.
You are what you eat
Mould, industrial waste, lab-grown fish fingers; these are some of the protein sources already shuffling their way towards your plate, and it’s hard to predict exactly which aisle of the global supermarket stocks the grotesque superfoods that will be needed to save hungry, stupid humanity from gnawing off its own buttocks.
Imagine a culinary car-crash between Heston Blumenthal and Ray Mears, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of our future menu: grasshoppers poached in liquid nitrogen; squirrels toasted over a pile of burning tyres.
If that sounds too weird for you, look away and concentrate on enjoying those beefburgers for the next decade or two. You’ll want to remember them in the future, when even a fancy dinner resembles a surgeon’s binbag, and decade-old cinema hotdogs are so desirable that they’re regularly hijacked at gunpoint by starving migrants from the encroaching euro-desert.
Well done humanity, you’ve eaten pretty much everything
Exaggeration aside, we really are chewing towards a gigantic helping of environmental apocalypse. We waste more food than at any time in history, whilst clearing the rainforests to make burgers and busily scoffing our way to the bottom of the ocean floor.
Where is the next course going to come from? Who’s going to bother growing it? We may as well forget about the luckless inhabitants of the developing world (part of the problem is that most of us have already), because they’ll be too busy dealing with hurricanes, flooding and widespread pestilence to produce much in the way of stimulating ethnic cuisine.
An order of doom, topped with gloom, stuffed with woe
Intensive farming is poisoning our land and eradicating pollinating insects, yet pests proliferate whilst useful birds and bees expire in their millions. Urban rodents multiply faster than at any time since the bubonic plague whilst overfed kitty cats maim songbirds and consume enough tinned meat to feed a small third-world family.
We really don’t have enough farmland in the world for humans to eat so much cow, let alone an auxiliary population of obese housepets. What this means is that every time you see a mad old woman with twenty cats, an entire African village is going hungry. Bear that in mind when the bomb falls and you’re having second thoughts about the moral implications of cannibalism.
You’re probably thinking that this is all getting a bit dark, so it’s lucky that scientists have been working hard to solve these problems before we start dreaming up exotic marinades for their juicy PHD brains. In labs across the world, white coats are spattered with a variety of delectable stains, ready for that fateful day when society collapses like an underdone soufflé and Jamie Oliver must roam the street, mugging grandmothers for their hoarded tins of corned beef.
This might seem a long way off, so you may be surprised and/or disgusted to find that many of these monstrous science foods are already on your shelves. If this makes you a little queasy, you’d best learn to swallow it down with a smile on your face, because your future offers a stark choice between starvation, Soylent Green or an outlandish smorgasbord of artificial foodstuffs scraped out of warm Pyrex beakers.
Overfed kitties maiming songbirds… gee, I was always so proud of the fact that my declawed late cat Claudia (I didn’t have her declawed; her previous owner did) was still able to catch birds. When she died I wrote a little essay called “Mice in Heaven,” but I should have called it “Birds in Heaven!”