33 What Will We Eat? Food as Signifier in the Projection of Futurities in Climate Change Fiction Teresa Botelho Introduction When the draft Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report on climate change and land use came to the attention of public opinion, in the summer of 2019 1 it presented the world community with a clear choice – introduce substantial changes to the current protocols of food production and land management, with a direct impact on consumption, or face the impossibility of keeping global warming within the boundaries of minimal sustainability. Pointing out that more than 70% of the global ice-free land surface is already used to supply food and other vital resources to the current 7.7 billion humans, a number that is likely to rise to 10 billion in 2050 and more than 11 billion in 2100, according to recent United Nations estimates, 2 the report describes how intensive industrialised agriculture and livestock breeding, 3 deforestation, and the removal of peatlands have increased soil erosion, desertification and raised methane emissions to very dangerous levels, diminishing the capacity of the land to perform its carbon-sink function, and threatening food security for large sections of the world’s population. These predictions and the mitigative recommendations of the report 4 have imposed on the public debate questions which literary exercises of anticipatory imagination of risk have frequently scrutinised, when, extrapolating from present tendencies, they invoke the indispensable human needs for nourishment to call attention to the cultural implications of food production and consumption that function as evidentiary signs of alternative or possible future horizons. In these imagined landscapes to come, foodways have been used as symbolic tools to represent loss of or threat to what is perceived to be the natural order and to pinpoint the challenges to human inventiveness and empathy created by the collapse of environmental sustainability, confirming Jean Retzinger’s insight that food “not only signifies the needs of the individual biological body and the grammar of a particular society and culture”, but also our fundamental connection with the environment “and simultaneously our indebtedness to science and technology” (2008: 371). This chapter examines the literary history of these productive metaphors, identifying thematic choices and creative strategies in a corpus of twentieth/twenty-first century American