Today I present an alternate future in the white linen banquet rooms of the mega steakhouses. A different path for the smoke and mirrors of molecular gastronomy. The flip to a different page in the choose-your-own-adventure book of haute cuisine. The next best sellers in a not-too-distant future, in a galaxy here and now: pan-seared Amazon tarantulas paired with roasted durian puree, tender bulldog tenderloin flavored with Siamese cat bacon, and cow feces stew sprinkled with pickled iquana eggs.

Disgusting?  As of today yes…but who’s to say that they won’t be best-sellers at five-star restaurants tomorrow?  Strange as it sounds, it was not too long ago that the “in” foods today were regarded as horrific, reserved for the unwashed masses, and only worthy for some freak tribe lost in the jungles of a faraway nation.  For example, that lobsters, as fancy and overpriced as they are now, were once regarded as a “poor man’s dish”. If you really think about it – or at least I, in my infinite capacity for weird thoughts during lunch do – the lobster is the underwater version of a garbage-feeding cockroach, much like the crab is akin to a spider.  Yet somehow lobster tails and surf-and-turf command high prices.

Would it really be out of the realm of possibility that the foods we’ll be eating in the future be the very things we refuse to eat today?

How then do we keep the wheels of culinary progress chugging along?  Not necessarily towards the vomit-inducing dishes above, but to the new, the bold, and ultimately, the delicious?