Danger!! Flesh-Eating Pig Zombies!!

As William Gibson once pointed out, "the future is here, it's just distributed unevenly." And every now and then I read something in the blogosphere that makes me realize I've just bumped up against a lovely little piece of it. Today's piece of future shock comes from Michael Pollan.

Pollan, traditional foods guru extraordinaire, has long been one of my favorite bloggers, if only for spreading two of my favorite food rules ("Don't eat anything you're not willing to kill" -- a rule that works equally well for hunters and vegans -- and "If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, you're not hungry"). However, his recent post about the death of honey bees and the rise of skin-eating bacteria on hog farms really is worth reading even if you're not a foodie.

I can't think of much to say about this, beyond the points Pollan himself makes so forcefully. Such as that high density factory pig farming and intercontinental shipping of bee colonies are both Really Bad Ideas from a public health perspective. For those among us who either require food to live and/or do not wish to become food for penicillin-resistant flesh-eating bacteria it's all rather depressing. But for SF writers .... well ... this stuff is pure gold! We spend so much time reading and writing about high-tech disaster that it's easy to forget that the Next Big Bad Thing could just as easily come from pig farms as supercolliders.

I keep thinking of Greg Bear's wonderful book, Blood Music, with its vision of futuristic high-tech pandemic. That was the primary vision of our science fictional future in the 1980s. And for the most part, high-tech mahem (well, and zombies and vampires) still seem to dominate people's SFnal imagination today. Still, I sense the tide is turning. I see humbler and grittier dangers on our fictional horizon.

Forget Armageddon! Start worrying about Farmageddon! And while we're waiting for the future to get here, can I offer anyone a nice plate of Honey Bee Flu with a side order of Flesh-eating Pig Zombies?