Food Security > Imagine // Four Possibilities

To resolutely make a statement on what I will be eating ten years from now would be irresponsible unless taking into account several variables. Therefore, instead of writing one possible future and state is as the one and only possibility, I will write four possible outcomes based on four very different scenarios, all of them relative to where I want to be versus where the world seems to be heading.

Scenario 1: My wife and I have both successfully secured the positions we want and the world has found a solution for the coming food crisis.

I am sitting in my dining room, or perhaps on my balcony, enjoying a home cooked meal that my wife made. We bought the ingredients from a store who, in turn, got its supplies from either a food cloning factory or a massive organic farm (depending on which way the world decides to go). The food was very costly for us, despite the extremely cheap production price, and we talk about how big corporations take advantage of bad situations to make a big profit and how the world would be better off with a more regulated system. We wish that the world governments had shifted towards more, not less, regulation during the previous 10 years.

Scenario 2: My wife and I have not secured the positions we want and the world has found a solution for the coming food crisis.

Sure, there is plenty of food for everyone, but it is extremely expensive for us to afford. We can’t grow our own because we are living in a small rent apartment with no backyard. We are either eating a loaf of bread and drinking some, possibly polluted, water and talking about how much we hate big corporations for taking advantage of bad situations and how we wish the government would have shifted towards more, not less, regulation during the previous 10 years.

Scenario 3: My wife and I have secured the positions we want in the world, but the world failed to find a solution for the coming food crisis.

My wife and I are eating fruits and vegetables grown using hydroponics. I never liked fruits or vegetables and still favor meat, but the lack of pasture have all but eradicated game. Those are saved for special occasions. We converse on how the many bad decisions taken by corporations f***ed up the world and how now only a very minor percentage of the people can make-do.

Scenario 4: My wife and I did not secure the positions we wanted AND the world failed to find a solution to the food crisis.

We don’t have access to food or water, so we turned into cannibalism to feed ourselves. The stench of meat is that of burnt human – the last one who died of starvation – and the red liquid we drink from our plates is his blood. I think about how low humans will sink to survive, even going as far as eating other humans and drinking their blood, and I think about how the government meant to protect us f***ed us up and how big corporations destroyed not only the world, but society, culture, and humanity, and have effectively turned everyone below a certain level of poverty into the darkness and shadow that Conrad wrote Africans were in the Heart of Darkness. I dare not say anything. I failed my family.