Food for Thought

When it comes to food, our expectations of the future often tend toward the dystopian. At the turn of the nineteenth century, for example, the English political economist Thomas Malthus wrote a now-infamous essay, in which he argued that while population grows exponentially (doubling every generation, roughly), food supplies grow arithmetically, meaning they will never be able to keep up. Eventually, unchecked growth will send the global population toward mass starvation, disease, and war. Malthus’s most extreme ­followers promoted forced sterilizations to regulate population numbers, and many historians believe that the Malthusian philosophy — which saw famine as “nature taking its course”— led to the British government’s lack of action during the Irish potato famine, which killed more than a million.

Though Malthus’s ideas have been used to justify horrible measures, they also tapped into a more general and quite modern anxiety: the relentless feeling that a...