Images of the Future: relating being and eating in the history of food

Abstract

The book under review, Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, by Warren Belasco, explores the theme of the future of food, retracing the historical arguments and the way these discussions were structured. It also contextualizes them in a wider cultural debate with complex political and economic linkages. One interesting feature in Belasco’s writing – one of the founders of the “Food Studies” – is the way he develops a genealogy of contemporary issues, unrooting hidden prejudices and assumptions that manifest themselves in any modern discussion about the future of humanity. Starting on food, this plot ends up weaving together the most diverse themes referring to a chain of historical associations between what we are and what we eat. So intimate to humans, food has permeated central debates about social organization and production, and has populated the images of power and strength of empires, as well as the utopian dreams of social emancipation. In his work, Belasco succeeds in showing that the construction of a political and cultural hegemony has been historically coupled to a food hegemony that has spread Western habits of meat consumption, and in reconstructing the associations between structural racism, sexism and classism through food issues.