大象传媒

Leo

There is a knock on the door. Timandra and I are in the studio, arguing over the Future of Food. It is Sam Francis, the ferociously bright 大象传媒 researcher, moving slowly towards me with a white Styrofoam cup. There is something about the way he is carrying this cup. A la urine specimen.聽 Sam places it on the table in front of me and I pull off the lid. Inside the cup, eyeballing me, there is a gruel-coloured liquid with a yellow slick of oil round the rim. I have what in Greek tragedy is called the anagnoresis, the moment of tragic recognition. It is Soylent, the 鈥渇ood substitute鈥� (just stir up the chemical ingredients with some water and there鈥檚 your nutrient-rich meal to share with all your friends.). I know what this cup means. For the last ten minutes I have been going through a whole shtick with Timandra about the valuable role technologies like Soylent and in vitro meat 聽(or 鈥淭ubesteak鈥�, next time you鈥檙e in a restaurant) can play in the future of food; slashing carbon, slashing water use, saving livestock from slaughter, liberating farmers - women especially - from the back-breaking work of agriculture. Now I鈥檝e got to walk the walk. I鈥檝e got to drink it. I man up. Ready Brek, is my first thought. I could do this. By sip three I am flagging. I down the rest in a gulp and look up at the ceiling. 聽Then Sam hands over a second cup. 鈥淭his one is Queal鈥�, he says. 鈥淛ust as good.鈥� I wake up at four in the morning, my stomach in a state of unrest, bordering on civil war. And I have a thought.

Food, explained the anthropologist Claude L茅vi-Strauss, is culture. It鈥檚 food that reveals our culture鈥檚 myths and governing assumptions. After centuries dominated by the task of taming and industrializing nature for our food, maybe a new myth is emerging, a techno-fantasy that we can instead bypass the ecosystem for food, not industrialising nature but synthetically recreating and replacing it. There is only one thing, I realize at four a.m., that this myth doesn鈥檛 take into account. We are not the boss. We can maybe bypass the microbes when it comes to making food, but it鈥檚 the bugs, 90% of the cells of our body, that call the shots when it comes to tasting it. The stomach, I suddenly see, as the skies lighten, is a democracy - a parliament of microbes that vote on the food proposals of the esophagus. And when they don鈥檛 like what鈥檚 on offer, it鈥檚 the whole body politic that suffers.