Monday, February 26, 2007

A Glimpse of the Year 2000 (New York Times, 1982)

"'You will definitely see this returning to a more human scale society,' said Hazel Henderson, a freelance futurist, from her post in Gainesville, Fla. 'It will be more effecient [to] do things locally. It won't make sense to buy Wonder Bread baked in Illinois'"

That prediction couldn't have been more wrong. Today our food travels further than ever.

If you have a TimesSelect subscription you can read the entire article here.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can you possibly stop posting links to subscription sites?

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you aren't trying to scalp the general public. Maybe.

Link concisely and link correctly (you should have learnt that with the Desolation Row thing). We have no time for your nonsense.

Anonymous said...

That prediction couldn't have been more wrong. Today our food travels further than ever.
yes, but for how long? When the cheap oil era is over, so is the era of fresh food from New Zealand brought in China the next day.

very often futurologists were pretty much following the mood of their times. And most of all they usually did not make the difference between what they wanted the future to be, as opposed to what it could look like.

I really want to go visit another solar system but i very well know that, not only it will not be possible in my lifetime, nor in this millenium, it may be just impossible...

Anonymous said...

It is not so far off. Local food is a big item these days. The extra resources used to send food are sometimes not necessary

W.B. Yeast said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
W.B. Yeast said...

This prediction is not entirely off base. Although the growth in global trade has made manufacturing a distant thing for most of us, food seems to have moved in the opposite direction, toward more local sourcing. Of course, this applies only to the high end of the market— while the ruling class munches on local organic produce, the proletariat subsists on factory-made Soylent Green.

And yes, anonymous is a jackass.