Recipes for the Future: Traces of Past Utopias in The Futurist Cookbook

Abstract

This essay suggests an interpretation of F. T. Marinetti and Fillìa's La cucina futurista (The Futurist Cookbook) as a fundamentally utopian text that re-proposes and carries into the twentieth century some aspects of the nineteenth-century utopian tradition. In particular, it intends to further investigate the possibility that the alimentary discourse in La cucina shares some similarities with, and was influenced by the “gastrosophic” theory on the social role of meals and gastronomy, originally conceived by Charles Fourier (1772–1837), one of the founding figures of the French utopian tradition. While strengthening the connection between futurism and French utopian thought and reasserting the centrality of food aesthetics in the avant-garde, this analysis provides another perspective on futurism's contradictory relation to tradition, exemplified in this additional re-appropriation and, to quote Cinzia Sartini Blum, “recycling of the past.”