Slurm, Popplers and Human Rinds: Food, consumerism and popular trends in Matt Groening's Futurama

In recent years, food has become a recurrent part of popular culture. Occupying a privileged space between necessity and luxury, food features in numerous popular media, ranging from television shows to metaphorical uses of 'hunger' in cinematographic adaptations of the latest vampire phenomena. Food acts not only as a cultural projection of social, ethnic and national affiliation but also bridges the gap between cultural tendencies, mainstream preferences and consumerist desires. Taking eating's popularized status as a point of departure, this article analyses the multiple representations of food and hunger in Matt Groening's Futurama. Focusing on specific examples from the series, I discuss how, through images of food, Futurama offers parodied critiques of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century commercial and cultural trends. I aim to show that, while hinting at connections to popular history, Futurama's improbable foods pluralize the political, intellectual and aesthetic colonization of everyday life by brands, media and product.