Clockwise from top left: J.J. Dupuis; Ian Thomas Shaw; Tim Niedermann; A.G. Pasquella.

The future. Since at least the publication of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine in 1895, it’s always right over there.

That’s true for me, absolutely. I grew up with space-age Tang – flavour crystals that astronauts mixed with water, in orbit! A scene in 1973’s 2022-set dystopian Soylent Green, where Martha, a sex worker, savours spoonfuls from a jar of strawberry jam that cost $150, riveted me. Closer to home, the ’70s food scarcity bestseller, Diet for a Small Planet, was my bible as an angsty vegetarian adolescent.

A key question of the forward glance – “Feast or famine, and in what form?” – is answered across the 29 stories of Devouring Tomorrow and Green to Grey. Considering our anxious era, it’s no surprise that portrayals of lack outnumber those of bounty.

A brief introduction in Devouring Tomorrow explains that editors A.G. Pasquella and Jeff Dupuis tasked writers with “answering a very important question: ‘As the future unfolds, how will food change and how will it change us?’” For Green to Grey, editors Ian Thomas Shaw and Tim Niedermann opted for two sections, Green (present day) and Grey (projected future). In their similarly economical introduction, they frame their selections as speaking “to our changing climate and degrading environment—the transformation of our world from green to grey.” The stories, they note, range from “whimsical, even bitterly so” to “sweetly poetic,” and are unified by a message: “it is time to act.”

In both collections, the results are uneven.

Satire takes pride of place in Devouring Tomorrow. Lab meat, “cellular, molecular, conscious,” narrates Catherine Bush’s story “Pleased to Meet You.” “Succulent,” by Elan Mastai, envisions a future where – shades of Cameo™ – celebrities license their genes to protein synthesizer businesses. Voila, Angelina Jolie Burgers! In a world with absentee pollinators, Carleigh Baker imagines robot bees as well as the use of nocturnal moths that would necessitate blackouts – but rather than the health of species and the need for sufficient food supply, the day’s pressing question is, “How would nightclubs survive?” Set about 150 years in the future, where online Yelp-like reviews are still going strong, Dina Del Bucchia’s “I Want Candy” presents a series of reviews by restaurant patrons  who highlight future cuisine, such as “ketamine-infused egg bite,” in a narcotized Vancouver where people are sardined in shipping-container condos.

Individually, the pieces amuse. Taken together, the tonal sameness doesn’t work in the book’s favour.

Still other pieces seem out of place. Although the geriatric narrator of Lisa de Nikolits’s “Time to Fly,” a former “hot, rich mess” now on “a residential community at sea,” does bake a Dobos torte, food isn’t really thematized in a light-hearted, post-Third World War snapshot. Similarly, food does figure in Terri Favro’s “Rubber Road,” an apocalyptic scenario where the “land had been wiped clean of dogs, cats, cows, horses, pretty much every warm-blooded thing,” but fundamentally, it’s an account of loss and survival. As much as I appreciated Jowita Bydlowska’s “Marianne is Not Hungry,” which is narrated by the hungering body of a woman with an eating disorder, everything about it suggests the present, and not the future.

Elsewhere, from “synthetic potatoes” in Chris Benjamin’s “Food Fight” and the “conjured food” of Mark Sampson’s “Unlimited Dream,” to artificial dream and memory technology showcased in “Just a Taste” by A.G.A. Wilmot and the wastelands etiquette of Ji Hong Sayo’s mock-Austen “Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions,” authors yoke together satire, realism, and science fiction in winning ways to characterize future foodstuffs that may not be desirable but are undoubtedly interesting.

Green and grey sections might be an effective way to organize a volume about the environment, but the choice of eight stories to account for “the green of the present” and considerably fewer to represent “the grey of the future” in Green to Grey suggests a project in need of fine-tuning and greater variety. Further, with four stories written by the editors themselves, and two other authors featured twice, the anthology over-promises and under-delivers with its aim to address global climate change and the environmental crisis, both in the present and future.

Though placed in different sections, Shaw’s “Green-ish” and “Grey-ish,” each narrated by an “elderly gent,” are of a kind; they both present as rant-monologues widely available on Facebook: “After the interminable Trudeau government declared bankruptcy thanks to Canada’s IMF debts and arrears in paying NATO assessments of fifty percent of GDP …” While the voice may mimic a kind of person and perspective, tuning out is almost instinctive, which has to be bad news for any story. Niedermann’s “Green Toe” and “Trash Day,” gently satiric stories portraying small eurekas about the natural world and one’s relation to it, fare much better.

Changing geographical focus, Cora Siré’s “Patagonia” recounts trips to Argentina and notes changes to the region’s ecology, though in passing; the travelogue narrator’s relationship with fellow travellers and locals form the story’s core. Set in and near a Bolivian mine, Matthew Murphy’s “Tio” is placed in the Green section, though its mood is far greyer.

In addition to Shaw’s “Grey-ish,” the four futuristic stories of the second section curtail the anthology’s purview. Two focus on aliens; the other two are set “against a backdrop of war and climate chaos.” The book’s introduction says, “If fiction is to serve a purpose, it should be to stimulate reflection on what we have done and are doing.” Yet, the editorial choices might have readers reflecting on more immediate puzzles of story inclusion and the overall goal of the anthology itself.