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Essays Magazine Science & Technology

Why the future of food is fake

As the threat from global warming grows, local produce and "slow food" might seem like an answer. In reality, we don't have time

By Stephanie Boland  
December 11, 2017
January 2018

Food being manufactured in a lab in Beijing. Photo: PA

In 2014, the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award—awarded for the best food writing each year—was won by the journalist John Jeremiah Sullivan for an essay on jam.

Taking its title from the first line of a 1919 Wallace Stevens poem, “I placed a jar in Tennessee” described a process of preservation and transformation through sugars, jellies and canning that Sullivan—and the preserve-mad friend whose story he tells—fears is becoming a lost art. His friend’s obsession is kicked off…

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Stephanie Boland

Stephanie Boland was Head of Digital at Prospect

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