Manger demain: Food Futures in French Fiction

ABSTRACT:France's national identity has long been inseparable from its culinary culture. From Taillevent's Le Viandier (c.1300) to Escoffier's Le Guide culinaire (1903), French treatises and texts led the way in establishing France's central role in codifying western food discourses. Against this backdrop of gastronomic glory, futuristic food fictions in French are few and far between, but they serve to reveal contemporary preoccupations and predictions related to culinary concerns. In this article, I track food futures in notable selected texts of French writing spanning four centuries—from Louis-Sébastien Mercier's L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais (1771) to Chantal Pelletier's Nos derniers festins (2019)—outlining briefly the gastronomic context from which they emanate and how these projections perform a parallel or meta-interpretation of food cultures in France. I will thereby demonstrate that the utopian and dystopian extremes emerging in these examples of food futures in French speculative narratives relate to and/or challenge the historical and literary contexts of culinary cultures in France.