Prophets of the past often kick-started our future: Think of Leonardo da Vinci’s 33-barrel machine gun, Mark Twain’s “telectroscope” Internet or Aldous Huxley’s “soma” antidepressants. But they simply can’t do food. What our culture sees as forward-thinking today is more about returning to basics (slow, local, organic, paleo) than about harnessing new technology and hatching new ideas. Somehow, our greatest prandial innovators haven’t been futurists. They’ve been corporations playing to our salty, sugary and fatty desires by finding new — admittedly delicious — ways to combine extant foods.

Ask a chef or a foodie about cuisine in 2050 or 2100, and they might delight you with weird tales of molecular gastronomy in the manner of Wylie Dufresne’s WD~50 or René Redzepi’s Noma; dystopian warnings about Soylent, a food-replacement smoothie now in vogue in Silicon Valley; or jokes about Brawndo, the sports drink used to irrigate crops in the 2006 film “Idiocracy.” But they won’t tell you what pedestrian foods such as sandwiches and pizzas will be like in the 22nd century. Mario Batali is too busy serving up his grandmother’s recipes, and Danny Meyer is preoccupied with his Shake Shacks’ homage to 1950s burger joints. Next month, the James Beard Foundation’s annual awards ceremony will anoint an “outstanding restaurant” that fits, rather than breaks, the mold. It will declare what outstanding should be, not what it could be.

Much of our music, fashion and vocabulary — our very culture — would seem alien to our ancestors. So why is our food so familiar? In the same way automobiles were first called “horseless carriages,” we bury the future in the tomb of the past. Yes, George Jetson pops a pill for dinner, but it tastes like chili dogs or old-fashioned pork chops. Just eat what your great-grandma ate, urges Michael Pollan, foodies’ patron saint. The more rigid we are about that, the more we limit what our future can become. We need more of the open-mindedness with which astronomers approach exoplanets. We need exogastronomy.