Double the bites: a preview of tomorrow's meal

Benoit Gaboriaud | 12/6/23, 11:40 AM

In the comic strip "Bouchées doubles", fourteen comic strip author-chef tandems imagine the food of tomorrow in short stories, with humor but lucidity.

Aurélia Aurita & Alexandre Gauthier, Donatien Mary & Céline Pham and Mathieu Sapin & Cyril Bordarier - a total of fourteen female and male comic book authors have teamed up with male and female chefs to paint a portrait of our food of the future. The result is fourteen singular science-fiction still lifes, as many visions of tomorrow's cuisine, funny or alarming, all converging on a fundamental message: food shapes society.

The end of restaurants soon?

Each storyconsists of four or five plates, preceded by a short biography of the contributors. Mathieu Bablet and Claire Vallée open the ball and plunge the reader into a vegetalized Paris, at a time when food self-sufficiencyis no longer a choice but an obligation. The city has been rethought with this in mind, and "from now on, the adage ' Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed ' has become a profession of faith".

For one reason or another, most of these artists predict the death of the restaurant. The duo Jean-Louis Tripp - Jérôme Ferrer equate this phenomenon with the Airbnb syndrome. One of the characters in their story anticipates that people will soon prefer to eat inprivate homes rather than restaurants. So why not go straight to the chefs? he wonders. The authors don't see anything wrong with this, since customers will now be able to admire all their art. Bouchées doubles isas much an overview of the gastronomy of the future as it is of today's comics.

The tone varies from serious to light-hearted. Didactic and/or entertaining, each story seems credible and prepares us for the change in the way we eat, which we know is inevitable. This book is a precursor to the major exhibition Croquez! la BD,which will take place at the Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l'image d'Angoulême, at the time of the Festival, in January 2024.

Bouchées doubles. Edited by Marine Bidaud and Mathieu Charrier.
Price: €22.50. Co-published byCité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l'image & Keribus éditions.