Devouring Tomorrow: Fiction from the Future of Food

Devouring Tomorrow is an eclectic collection of imagined food futures, speculative and dystopian, by some established and creative Canadian writers, edited by Jeff Dupuis and A.G. Pasquella.

As someone who has been teaching international students and immigrants for over 15 years, I know there is one topic that I can always get pretty much anyone to speak on or write about and that is food. Every human, every culture, every soul in this big world, has some connection to food or our lack thereof. As we continue to have worries about climate change, overpopulation and disease, these worries apply to food. Will we have enough of it in the future? Will the world be able to feed everyone? Will we have to resort to eating only science-formed, lab-based food? Is meat a thing of the not-so-distant past? As A.G.A Wilmot ponders in Just a Taste, “It has been predicted, more than two centuries prior, that an out-of-control population crisis would one day spell the end of fresh meat.”

This is what this collection deals with in new and mind-bending ways: the threat to food, not even just the idea of food, or food itself, but how and what we are going to be eating in the future. And perhaps tomorrow is going to come sooner than we’d like. Sometimes these stories even seem to read as “non-fiction” as tomorrow is too close for comfort and the plausibility is frightening.

Devouring Tomorrow will leave you thinking about what the future holds, who gets to survive and thrive and just what food might mean at the end of time.

As with any collection of short stories, some stories you will love and others will be misses, but as a whole the collection is coherent, and the stories build together nicely on the topic of food. There are some stories that are almost funny, like “Succulent” where people eat clean, delicious, reputable celebrity flesh donated from their genetic sequence. “Pollinators“ is about all of the bees disappearing, which is downright terrifying. Through disturbing end of the world apocalypses to exploration of food and motherhood and who gets the right to eat what, Devouring Tomorrow will leave you thinking about what the future holds, who gets to survive and thrive and just what food might mean at the end of time. Some of the stories are truly bizarre, but all will leave you pondering the coming days and what surprises the future of food might hold.

Jeff Dupuis is the author of the Creature X Mystery series. When not in front of a computer, he can be found haunting the river valleys of Toronto, where he lives and works.

A.G. Pasquella is the author of the Jack Palace series, which include Yard Dog, Carve the Heart, and Season of Smoke. When he’s not writing, he makes music with the bands Miracle Beard and LaserGnu. Born in Dallas, Texas, he now lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Publisher: Dundurn Press (March 25, 2025)
Paperback 8″ x 6″ | 240 pages
ISBN: 9781459754980