what is future food imaginaries?

about

What stories do people tell about how we will eat in a future transformed by climate change?
The project Future Food Imaginaries in Global Climate Fiction begins with the realisation that one of the main reasons why there is a climate crisis is because the world’s food system is unsustainable. A large percentage of all greenhouse gases that are warming the planet are produced by the food system. To keep the planet from warming, and to stop overfishing, soil depletion, and many other erosive processes, it is necessary to change the way that people in many parts of the world eat. The planet is thus facing what climate scientists are calling the Great Food Transition. This is a major project not only because it involves so many political decisions inside and across political borders, so many extremely large food corporations, and so many jobs, but also because people make themselves through food and eating. In other words, changing the way that people eat is as much a cultural challenge as it is a systemic undertaking.
 

How will people in different parts of the world react to this cultural and systemic transformation? What does it mean to change what people eat and how people eat? What will food and eating look like during the transition? What will they look like if there is a sudden major breakdown that prevents food from being grown or from reaching people in need? What will they look like in a future where new food systems, and new food cultures, have developed? These are questions that hard-science research initiatives struggle to come to terms with but that the literary genre climate fiction explores in a multitude of texts.

Climate fiction consists of novels, short stories, films, games and other types of media that tell stories about what it will be like to live in futures that are transforming, or that have been transformed, due to climate change. The research project Future Food Imaginaries in Global Climate Fiction (FoodImagine) investigates this body of literature to see how it imagines food and eating in such futures. As the project reveals, food is one of the primary ways for such fiction to describe what climate-transformed futures are like.

The aim of this project is to help readers, stakeholders (governments, NGOs, food corporations, food retailers) and food science and food studies researchers to understand how people/authors in different parts of the world understand the immanent transformation of food and eating. In this way, it is at the same time a literary project and an attempt to connect the study of fiction both to hard climate science that focuses on food and to various initiatives to change people’s relationships to food and eating. Because the climate crisis is experienced in very different ways in different parts of the world, with the Global South affected much more severely than the Global North, the project investigates climate fiction from three different regions: North America, the Nordic countries, and anglophone sub-Saharan Africa. The project is funded by FORMAS, a Swedish research council for sustainability, and co-funded by the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.

This home page contains information about the project, it maps the scientific and scholarly territory that the project interacts with, and it also reports research findings as they occur. You can interact with the project via the Contact page or through the project’s Facebook or Twitter accounts.