Our Opinions Are Correct: Episode 51: The Delicious Significance of Food in Science Fiction

Our Opinions Are Correct, the Hugo winning podcast hosted by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders is one of my favorites and someday I’m going to do an article on where you can hear smart people talk critically about SF, but not today. Today I just want to say how happy I was to see that the latest (Feb 13, 2020) episode was all about food in SF. Well, and Fantasy, if you have to be honest.

There was a panel at a World Fantasy about the difference between food in SF and Fantasy a few years back, and I really wanted to go…but somehow missed it. This seemed like a second chance.

It was, and it wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong. It was deliciously, scrumptiously, tantalizingly informative and they made a lot of great points. Food as a shortcut to cultural values, weird food as a signifier of the “other” ( and they gave props to Riker for eating the Gagh, wiggles and all), food as a bond between guest and host (and all that Red Wedding stuff), and more. A 6-course meal of speculative culinary goodness.

But they missed the part I wanted to hear about. Major Tom, it’s time to take your protein pill and put your helmet on. But it never got to be time to talk about space food.

Annalee and Charlie Jane look at things through a collection of critical lenses, including Queer/Feminist, Marxist, and Colonialist, so they don’t tend to walk on the Anglo side to look at things. This really is not a criticism, because those are some of the most informative critical approaches to SF. Also, as an older anglo male, it’s tremendously important to me to have voices that can inform me about experiences I don’t have. SF, after all, is about “the other”, so it’s the perfect place to find out what that’s like, and besides. 

But I was hoping to hear a bit more about the significance of the food replicators on the Enterprise and whether the chicken soup was any food or the freeze-dried food that Alex whips up in the Rocinante’s galley, or the genetically engineered and resurrected from extinction fowl ( I forget which one) that Louis Wu cooked up while stuck on Ringworld. Not to mention Soylent Green.  Not so much from a technolo-critical viewpoint, but from the same ones as the other examples. (I just noticed that all those “cooks” were white males. Women don’t tend to stoop so low as to re-hydrate food, which is an interesting thing in itself.)

But on the subject of tecnho-foodism. What does the imagined food of humans say about us, and why do we vilify future food for its lack of naturalness? Do we really believe that we’re unable to engineer food that fills our physical and social needs?

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