Abstractabstract:This article focuses on the 1954 short story “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.,” which predicted that frozen meals and microwave cooking would ensure global cooperation and reduce domestic labor, “emancipating” women and inspiring new technologies. This frozen fantasy both reflects the structure of earlier utopian motifs and challenges their essential arguments, particularly when examined alongside Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward and medieval Cockaigne stories of abundant food and feasting. “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.” also describes the culinary transformations in the United (...) States in subsequent decades, making it a remarkably prescient utopian text, and its vision of the future was largely (though not completely) realized by the end of the twentieth century. Because frozen meals and kitchen conveniences have proliferated since its publication, “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.” no longer seems utopian. Instead, American kitchens, and eaters, now view Williams’s futuristic vision as commonplace and expected. (shrink)

This article examines Lyman Sargent's article “The American Cockaigne” alongside the 2017 novel Sourdough by Robin Sloan. Both Sargent and Sloan examine modern approaches to food and utopianism that build on earlier Cockaigne tales—medieval “peasant utopias” imagining abundant magical foods and satisfying laziness. Sargent contends that similar stories remained prevalent in America among socially marginalized groups. Sourdough imagines how a group of inventors might create a utopian community by blending food traditions with innovative technologies. Both Sargent and Sloan suggest that (...) Cockaigne stories and their later antecedents should be seen as part of the utopian tradition and that visions of unusual foods demonstrate the importance of social communities. (shrink)