An important step in battling the climate crisis is what climate science name “a Great Food Transformation” (Willett et al. 2019). In order to reach the UN sustainable development goals we need to radically rethink food production, processing, distribution and consumption. Crucial for this transformation is how future food cultures are communicated through a diverse and partly commodified media landscape. Recently The Lancet published a significant call to action titled Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. This publication argues that the “civilization is in crisis” partly because “we can no longer feed out population a healthy diet while balancing planetary resources” (Willett et al. 2019). The rationale of the commission is to help outline how this shift in “how the world eats” can come about. In their summary report they launch a very ambitious program aimed at making people eat in ways that are more sustainable both for their bodies and for their environment. This program is scientifically very well grounded and a necessary step towards addressing both poor diets and climate change. Science communication is one thing, but how does scientific facts translate into a digestible format for ordinary people? And how are future food cultures communicated across media borders?
This paper sets out to discuss some preliminary ideas about mediated future food cultures by exploring two very diverse media products: the website Eatforum.org (2020), which is a popularized and activist rendering of the scientific Lancet report, and the speculative climate fiction film Bladerunner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017). The paper aims to discuss how the two different media types website and fiction film work very differently in communicating future food cultures through their media types’ respective different affordances even if both are in a broad sense transmediations of scientific knowledge.