Consumer Reports

The editors Jeff Dupuis and A. G. Pasquella begin their science fiction anthology with a lean introduction. They conjure an old friend of the food writing world, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, whose The Physiology of Taste, or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, from 1825, left us with several gems of wisdom, including the opening line of Devouring Tomorrow: “You are what you eat.”

Brillat-Savarin’s original claim was “Dis‑moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.” Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are. The English translation of Brillat-Savarin’s aphorism is often interpreted as a warning against sensory appetites. In it, I hear the finger wagging of generations of Canadian and American dietary guidance: make wise meal choices, or else. This realm of nutrition is inherently adversarial, less a place of nourishment and delight than of temptation, peril, and discipline. But Brillat-Savarin was not writing an escape route from the dangers of the table. He indulged with purpose, hoping to clarify the relationship between alimentary health and gastronomic pleasure.

Brillat-Savarin escaped the French Revolution by fleeing to Switzerland and then to the United States. He was precisely the sort of hedonistic sophisticate who served as a foil for the republican values and aesthetics that would come to define American democracy. Since then, nutritional and agricultural science has advanced out of a desire to control risks and outcomes, examining food as something to be used, reverse-engineered, or optimized, rather than respected and savoured.

Devouring Tomorrow considers the long-term effects of this kind of thinking. These stories are full of ecological disaster and destruction. Earth has been altered, in turn, by severe droughts, great floods, bovine flus, and irradiated carnivorous moths released from melted ice caps. In Anuja Varghese’s particular hellscape, “A View Worth All the Aqua in the World,” people wear digital interfaces called Personal Protective Pods to navigate an environment filled with airborne toxins. The characters name themselves after animals, which, like lakes and trees, are recalled only as myth.

Elsewhere, set in a future far beyond the “dark ages of animal exploitation,” Elan Mastai’s “Succulent” seats three friends around a restaurant table. The menu sparks a debate on dietary and romantic ethics. Consent, one friend insists, is the reason people should eat only meat made of cloned celebrities — like “Steamed Charlize Theron” or “Pan-Fried Halle Berry”— which has been mass-produced as a sustainable protein source. It’s better still, the same friend proposes, to live off a “local, artisanal” slurry of your own and your neighbours’ synthetic flesh. While the diners struggle to order, another friend pesters his companions to leave behind the “dating lattice” and enter into a “legally binding mating unit” together — or at least let him have simulated sex with one of their digital selves.

This entry, which consists only of dialogue, is one of many in the collection that suggest food and intimacy are indicative of our deepest societal values. Do we interrelate through competition, control, and exploitation? Or with mutuality, respect, and care? Devouring Tomorrow prompts the reader to question why we would keep exploiting each other and nature when doing so never satisfies us.

Most of these protagonists do not cope well. In “Pollinators,” Carleigh Baker invents a scientist who, in a race against mass starvation, competes with Silicon Valley robo-bees and the extortionate corporate contracts behind their production. “This is how it ends,” she thinks. “A bunch of fools hacking nature.” To deal with her stress, she numbs herself with synthetic wine. Aboard Lisa de Nikolits’s ship in “Time to Fly,” a few thousand survivors have been at sea for a decade following the Third World War. The post-apocalyptic tale is narrated by an heiress to a “canned food and dessert empire” who stays high on her stockpile of pharmaceuticals.

In Mark Sampson’s “Unlimited Dream,” edible produce can be “conjured” by a subset of the population. Those whose dreams score high on a scale of “vividness,” such as Sampson’s anti-hero, Ted, can excrete sustenance to feed the starving planet — but they cannot eat it themselves. In exchange for his service, Ted has access to a paradisaical simulation. He drifts through visions of an idyllic childhood and unending success. Meanwhile, his body suffers an annihilating hunger that ultimately drives him to self-cannibalize.

The Florentine boy at the centre of Eddy Boudel Tan’s “Lorenzo and the Last Fig” manages his grief rather differently. The story begins long after a virulent fungus has eliminated all fruit. During his childhood, Lorenzo’s mother secretly protected a handful of fig trees. Later in life, Lorenzo smuggles a few cuttings into British Columbia and plants them in the woods, where, unbeknownst to anyone, they flourish. He follows his mother’s advice to sing “Amori infiniti” to the saplings. “The tree must know it is loved,” she always said. Unlike many of the disillusioned characters in these pages, he does not seek out vices or mindless oblivion. Instead, he grows something that is important to him, and he does so carefully, knowledgeably, and in a manner Brillat-Savarin might approve of.

The only piece set in the present day has food itself as its narrator. Jowita Bydlowska’s “Marianne Is Not Hungry” depicts what drives disordered eating. “The enemy is the absence of me, what shows up when I’m not around, a wound the size of Marianne’s heart,” Food says. “But it’s Marianne who perverts me. And it’s Hunger that controls her, eats her.”

Bydlowska’s story zeroes in on a truth that is only hinted at elsewhere in these speculative works: that we are devouring our own future. Pleasurable technologies of today — from Doritos to iPhones — distract us from the reality of feeling lonely, abandoned, or unlovable. Extractive capitalist systems ensure that we thirst for escape — to a somewhere, someone, or sometime else. And this is the marrow of Devouring Tomorrow, which is less about possible futures than it is about pasts full of painfully disconnected and alienated consumption. Grow something instead, these stories suggest, if you want to be fed. Grow something that matters. And savour it, so it knows it is loved.