Devouring Tomorrow: Fiction from the Future of Food - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1459754980 ISBN 13: 9781459754980

Publisher: Rare Machines, 2025

Synopsis

An anthology of speculative short fiction imagining the possibilities of our food-insecure future.

Our lives, our culture, our community all start with and revolve around food and eating. Sharing meals with family and friends has been a hallmark of human society from our earliest beginnings. But we are entering an era of unprecedented change. Climate, technology, the global spread of crop diseases, droughts, and the loss of pollinators threaten to change not only how much food we eat, but what we eat and how we eat it.

Devouring Tomorrow explores this strange new menu through the eyes and palates of some of Canada’s most exciting authors. See a world with no bees left to pollinate our crops. Encounter lab-grown meat so advanced that it becomes sentient. Visit a land where diseases wipe out a common fruit and the society of a nation changes around its loss. This is not the world of the distant future ― this is tomorrow.

Featuring stories from:
Sifton Tracey Anipare • Carleigh Baker • Gary Barwin • Chris Benjamin • Eddy Boudel Tan • Catherine Bush • Jowita Bydlowska • Lisa de Nikolits • Dina Del Bucchia • Terri Favro • Elan Mastai • Mark Sampson • Ji Hong Sayo • Jacqueline Valencia • Anuja Varghese • A.G.A. Wilmot

About this title

About the Authors

Jeff Dupuis is the author of the Creature X Mystery series. When not in front of a computer, he can be found haunting the river valleys of Toronto, where he lives and works.

A.G. Pasquella is the author of the Jack Palace series. When he’s not writing, he makes music with the bands Miracle Beard and LaserGnu. Born in Dallas, Texas, he now lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

To say “you are what you eat” is both the oldest of clichés and the most accurate of observations. Food is not only the key to human survival, but the bedrock of human culture. What we eat, how we procure it, how we prepare it, and how we consume it has helped define our species from our earliest days. Our ancestors left us cave paintings of game and the legacy of the hunt. Our farming forebears built our holidays around the seasons and our civilizations around the storage of grain and gave us pottery as both tool and art form. We have always been shaped by food.

In an era of rapid change on a swiftly warming planet, it’s anyone’s guess how food and food culture will evolve. This very question sparked a conversation on Facebook Messenger one morning, and we soon realized we had the glimmer of an anthology on our hands. So we set out to assemble a killer roster of Canadian writers, tasking them with answering a very important question: As the future unfolds, how will food change and how will it change us?

How will we grow the number of crops necessary to feed the planet’s population if the pollinators we rely on go extinct? In her piece, “Pollinators,” Carleigh Baker gives us a glimpse into that very possible future. When lab-grown meat develops far enough to achieve sentience, what will it think, and what will it want to tell us? Catherine Bush takes on this tricky subject in her story, “Pleased to Meet You.” What food and drinks will be served when water becomes so rare it is both currency and means of survival? Anuja Varghese pours out a possible solution in her story, “A View Worth All the Aqua in the World.” Elan Mastai’s “Succulent” tackles a heavy moral question in a very funny way: Is it cannibalism to eat a clone?

Devouring Tomorrow explores these questions and many more, taking us down an all-too-possible road based on the world’s current trajectory of climate change denial, unmitigated consumption, and greed. From authors who have shaped Canadian fiction for decades as well as the hottest up-and-coming talents, Devouring Tomorrow offers a smorgasbord of stories that show us who we are and who we will be, through our stomachs. Everything we are begins with food, and perhaps that is how it will end. You’ll have to read all the way through to find out. So grab a knife and fork and dig in. Bon appétit!

A.G. Pasquella and Jeff Dupuis

Edition details

• Publisher: Rare Machines
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1459754980
• ISBN 13: 9781459754980
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Dupuis Jeff, Pasquella A.G.