The Futures of Food and the Prospects of a Perfect Society
The Futures of Food and the Prospects of a Perfect Society

Summary/Abstract: The contemporary societies face the obstacles encountered in developing a deeper understanding of the role played by ration and logic, on the one hand, and, on the other, by fantasies and dreams in imagining and planning the future. These difficulties and obstacles have yet to be overcome, despite today’s well-known confluence between science and popular culture, and scholarly interest in understanding the connection between people’s feelings toward a fictional text and research policy. Over time, imaginative narratives have allowed people either to escape from real life (through fantasy or daydreaming) or to make predictions about the future of reality, constituting a source of inspiration for the progress of mankind. The purpose of this article is to point out a “map” of the methods used in a project about the future of food and the food of the future as they result from existing scientific literature on this topic. After the presentation of specific methods of research that can be used in such a project about food and future, the article presents also the first results of a first pre-test of the “First-person theory of documentation” method which was performed on a sample of fifteen students from the University of Bucharest. The results confirmed existence of a typology of approaches to the future from the food point of view proposed by Belasco, namely the “modern future”, and the “future recombination”.

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