Harare Review of Books

240 pp. Published March 25, 2025 (Canada) and April 22, 2025 (US) by Dundurn Press. SF anthology.

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Dear Reader: What’s the worst thing you’ve ever eaten?

We have a “delicacy” here, amacimbi/madora/mopane worms—edible caterpillars of the emperor moth (Gonimbrasia belina) that you find on mopane/iphane tree leaves in a particular season. Iphane grows in arid areas of southern Africa, so amacimbi are popular as they’re kind of “manna,” food found from foraging, and therefore accessible to the rural poor. I’ll spare you the details of how they’re prepared (or how they smell so fatty and greasy); suffice it to say, I have never eaten them and would leave the house whenever my family partook (which they eventually stopped doing because of me). But I am a squeamish eater in general; this is really just me, an anomaly in my part of the world. To answer my own question: The worst thing I’ve ever eaten is kangaroo—not because it tasted bad, because it really didn’t, but because I was tricked into it. And because it’s Skippy innit.

Anyway, it would seem like madora are a food of the future—along with crickets and possibly cockroaches, as well as other assorted bugs. And then there’ll be the stuff you grow in a lab—petri dish meat. Add to this the fact that fresh water may be hard to come by in our warmed Earth future? I will simply sign up for a quick death, I think.

A topic like “the future of food” can have really broad implications and interpretations; that’s what Devouring Tomorrow highlights. Stories in this imaginative and interesting collection include ones about—necessarily, as this is topical—cultured meat (cannibalism, anyone? This is how I may sign up to go out); futures where diets are even more class-based than today, sadly; the future of agrarian technology in the form of drone-aided pollination; memories of taste and flavour, because it’s becoming clear some foods will just no longer exist in the future (like coffee and chocolate—kill me now); and yes, water scarcity. For most of the stories, climate change is what haunts, and future means the absence of the abundance we are so reckless with now.

The collection as a whole has stories that lean towards sci-fi, horror, fantasy, as well as themes that defy genre classification. There’s a fun story about really rather unpleasantly rude dinner guests (Ji Hong Sayo’s Novel Suggestions For Social Occasions). There are people who generate food by “dreaming” (in Mark Sampson’s Unlimited Dream). There’s a deeply mournful story about the last fig tree (Lorenzo And the Last Fig by Eddy Boudel Tan). In one memorable story at the beginning of the collection, food is the protagonist (Catherine Bush’s Pleased To Meet You).

All of these stories are different visions of the end of the world (which, again, I am not going to stick around for). Come for imaginings of how the way we live today will impact tomorrow’s food. Stick around for some very dark humour, thoughts on the sociality around how we eat and also the taboos, and possible new ways we’ll make food. What food will you miss in the future? Devouring Tomorrow gets readers pondering.

Thanks to Dundurn and NetGalley for early DRC access.

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