Meda. A Tale of the Future. As Related by Kenneth Folingsby (1891)

The focus of this «tale of the future» is the relationship between utopia and dietary habits. «If eating and drinking could be dispensed with, man’s intellectual power would increase and permanent morality would be ensued». A believer in evolution by mutation, the author develops the recurrent utopian topos of an ideal mankind transformed by correct nutritional principles. He takes these premises to extremes; the stomach becomes the «sink of iniquity» bearing the stamp of moral/bodily corruption and betraying the «gormandising habits and greed for gain of bloated gluttons». Hygienics, ethics and aesthetics are thus deeply interwoven: by eradicating base bodily appetite, the atrophy of digestive organs has enhanced the nurture of the intellect as well as healed moral abjection. Folingsby’s utopia is based on the power of mental and physical health to elicit a refinement of ethos as well as to redraw aesthetic criteria. This idea is further validated by the traveller’s process of estrangement and subsequent acquisition of a radically transformed frame of mind which modifies his critical parameters and re-defines his identity. By describing the mutants as keen observers of life on other planets as well as of the vital functions of the ancient specimen, the author emphasises heuristics as the discipline fundamental to human development