Food History

I’ve just had a flurry of emails from Sydney, regarding the Freecon (science fiction convention) there next Saturday. It made me think about how different societies frame their future food.

The Star Trek universe has a whole range of different foods envisaged by its creators, but not normally in a way that would entice cooks. Early Star Trek episodes had a lot of chopped up vegetables and the occasional lurid jelly, for instance. The Babylon 5 series has its own cookbook, with current US Italian and Russian food alongside some more unusual recipes. This is food attached to specific worlds ie hobby food. It’s a section of how we see our future eating, not the whole picture. It’s the imaginative projection of our current eating into new and distant worlds.

In the seventies we played with those terrible sachets of dehydrated icecream. We drank Tang and thought we were sharing experiences with space explorers. This is another element of the same projection.

Manufacturers dream of new ways of doing things. Scientists and medicos dream of perfect diets. Agriculture specialists change what we eat and create the plants of our future.

One day I’d like to be part of a symposium that brings all this together: the dreaming and the science and the culinary arts and the ethnography and how it fits into foods past. Bringing it all together is the way to get a good idea of how future food fit with foods present and foods past.

Future food is all this and more. It’s how we see ourselves in the future, what we eat and what we dream of. Our food history is an essential part of this. It trains our tastebuds and our expectations of when we will eat, how we will eat and why we will eat.

All this is my roundabout way of saying I am taking most of the rest of the day away from food history and will be revising a novel. It combines food past (Medieval) and food present (modern Katoomba) but not, alas, food future. So my speculative fiction self has caught up with me from two directions and you get speculation instead of history. I’ll make up for it later in the week with lots of recipes and maybe a funny story. Promise.