Opinion: To Find the Future of Food, We Need to Look to the Past

The following is excerpted from Taras Grescoe’s The Lost Supper, and has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

There were times during this voyage that it seemed humanity was driving down an alley toward a brick wall, fast. Catastrophe loomed everywhere I looked: in the dust bowls on the once-fertile plains of central Turkey, in the vanishing lakes of Mexico City, in the fetid cesspools outside the factory farms of North Carolina, in the disease-ravaged olive trees of Puglia, in the rapid wiping away of diverse food webs in every biome. The demographers’ scenario, where we’ll have to produce 50 percent more food by midcentury to feed a population of ten billion or face famine, sometimes seemed like the only possible outcome.

For the time being, our cunning plan seems to be to wait until the last second and hope an airbag will deploy to cushion us from the final impact. In modern times, there’s a long tradition of techno-optimists or cornucopians–science writer Charles C. Mann calls them “wizards”–telling us that technology will come to our rescue. In the 1930s, Winston Churchill predicted in the pages of a Canadian magazine that future famines would be averted by raising edible bacteria in underground cellars using artificial radiation. Others saw yeast factories and transcontinental algae pipelines nourishing the domed metropolises of the 21st century. 

According to the techno-optimists, hacking photosynthesis by genetically modifying rubisco, the enzyme found in all plants that turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into starches, proteins, and other nutrients will allow us to radically increase rice yields in Asia. Growing perennial grasses, rather than annuals like wheat, will permit us to mow the cereals we eat