IMAGINE2-My future meal... worms.

Its eighteen thirty and I'm late getting home from work. On the way back from the community film centre's office that I use to edit at, I stop at my small grocery to get some food for the kid's supper: locally grown root vegetables (stored over winter in a 'root house' next door), some fresh rocket lettuce (grown in the rooftop geodesic-dome hot house down the street), some brown rice and of course the meaty protein, meal worms (grown in pallets like bee hives in the grocer's basement).

I bring home these few ingredients from the grocer after trading work-credits with her electronically, and after friendly reminder that I'm due to help harvest the hot house soon before my credits run out. The kids are home already, so I head straight for the kitchen where they're doing homework and bickering over the kitchen table. I break up a fight about the selection of music, Tu Pac oldies vs. Hypermedium (the newest turbo pop release), and I start opening the zip-seal packages that I had to remember to bring to the store from work.

First on the menu, I get the rice cooking in a pot of instantly-boiling water. Next come carrots and sweet potatoes, I cube them and stick them into a oiled pan with some salt to cook faster. I grab the zip-bag of meal worms and get the eldest kid, who is still arguing about the righteousness of Tu Pac as a father figure to an entire generation of Americans, and get her to clean them in the fog-sink ( a water conserving, vapor tap that cleans anything efficiently and quickly). She's used to helping, and has more of a stomach for handling worms than I do, but still can't handle blood from animal meat.

As she preps the worms in the sink, I'm getting a cookie sheet out from below the oven and oiling, salting, and adding cayenne pepper to the sheet's surface for flavor. She routinely pa**** me the sieve full of white worms, and I start spreading them over the cookie sheet. She goes back to the table, asking 'Dad, why don't you like doing the worms?'

I tell her, 'Its not that I don't like them. They've got the least impact on methane production, more protein per inch compared to any other animal we eat, and they can be grown almost anywhere. Its just that when I was growing up, worms were in the garden, and animals were on the table. I sure enjoy them now that I've got that recipe that we all like from Mrs. Gerber at your school.'

I'm re-telling here these well known facts that we see on banner ads all the time, half paying attention to the cookie sheet full of white larvae that I'm shaking the spices onto, and moving to put the tray into the oven. She rolls her eyes when I mention animals on the table, and I'm reminded of a fight we had over vegetarianism that we had on the weekend.

I move on to the root veggies, making sure that they're browning and sizzling on the surface of the saucepan that I've set in motion, and I check the rice. With the meal in the oven, I move on to the rocket lettuce using the fog-sink to clean the leaves one handful at a time and putting them directly into a bowl. I grab bottles of vinegar and olive oil from the cupboard and spread it over the leaves. I grab two tomatoes and a red onion from the fridge, cut them up quickly and toss them into the bowl. I tell the kids "I wish we had an orange for this salad, I used to make this same thing with an orange sliced into it for a bit of sweet, and your mother loved it."

The kids both finish my sentence for me, chiming in on the "your mother loved it!" having heard this kind of complaint many times before. They have never seen an orange in their lives.

Smoke comes out of the oven and the alarm goes crazy, I jump towards the oven and my youngest son grabs a chair, sets it up below the fire alarm and with his writing pad fans the sensor on the ceiling. I've cursed under my breath a few times in the commotion, and removed the cookie sheet from the oven. Dinner is served.

After each of my children obediently wash their hands in the fog-sink's vapor and once I've called their mother, who is outside on the rooftop garden, for dinner we all sit down together. The room is quiet for a moment when we each look at the food and at one another in the eyes to silently acknowledge our connection with each other and with the source of this food, a family tradition that we've been doing since the 2018 famine.

Bon appetit! I say, and the eldest reaches for a spoon to start serving herself some hot-spicy worms.