All views expressed are that of the writer.

I recently watched Frederick Wiseman’s 1976 film, Meat – a documentary that follows the effortful transformation of cattle into beef. The movie starts with cowboys on the plains. They drive the cattle through the livestock auction, then the congested pens of the feedlot, through the abattoir and eventually into stores. Wiseman lets the footage speak for itself. We overhear bids being placed and business being done. “There are 65,000 cattle on this farm,” a feedlot guide explains to a party of visiting Japanese businessmen, “but the capacity is 125,000.” At these scales, the herd flows like water.

Wiseman’s documentaries are about systems, especially those usually hidden from view. Most recently, he explored behind the pass of Les Troisgros, a three Michelin star restaurant in France. He has followed life in the cloisters of a Benedictine abbey and the bureaucratic romance of New York Public Library – the fourth largest in the world. In Meat, the system is industrial meat production, from logistics to economics and labour.

Meat reveals a couple of truths about our food systems. The first is how brutal they can be. The second is how mundane. Numbers flicker across machine displays, cattle are weighed, gates are opened and shut. You see salesmen loosening their shirt collars. “Ernie, let me tell you something,” says a man with a handlebar moustache, and then the cattle pass through the abattoir doors. For me, the most powerful were succinctly physical: a scared cow slipping in mud, like Bambi on ice, while the cattle prod closed in. Still, Meat isn’t an exposé. It just shows a system doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Frederick Wiseman, now 94 and still making films, hasn’t yet got around to looking at British fast food, but if he did we’d probably be confused. We’re fluent in fast food: tower burgers, cheesy chips, the particular chaos of kebab shops at 2am. There are different dialects, too, like Manchester’s spicy chicken dip burgers. But fast food can feel depthless and mundane. In the average chicken shop, you can look over the counter and see straight through to the blue-lit steel kitchen and the hot cabinet piled with drifts of wings. If there’s an epic food system in here, it’s not clear where it could be hiding.

Enter Factory International and Marshmallow Laser Feast, and their show Sweet Dreams – an immersive journey through the behind-the-scenes of our food systems, specifically interrogating a fast food empire in decline. When I was first told about the project, I didn’t know what to expect. Would it be an odyssey of ruthless exactitude, like Wiseman’s visit to Les Troisgros? Or would it be more like the 4D, multisensory fantasia of Disneyland Paris’ unhinged Ratatouille ride? Somehow, the answer is a bit of both.

In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik wrote an essay about the forms and functions of food writing. One line in it stuck with me: “There are two schools of good writing about food: The mock epic and the mystical microcosmic.” The first are Man v. Food style odysseys. The second starts with the single mouthful – maybe a peach, maybe a chicken strip – and zooms in on the meanings and memories it contains. Both are self-centred in a satisfyingly human way. One is ego, the other is emotion. Appetite feels very personal, so this me-myself-and-I mentality makes sense. A smell can be a neural bridge to different times in our lives; cooking can be a way to connect with each other but also to ourselves.

When I started writing about food, this personal side of food was as far as I went. I drew a line between systems (opaque, difficult, vast) and the evocative terrain of appetite (sensual, poignant, fun). It took time for me to realise that these things are one and the same. Instead of thinking about people and systems as at odds, now I think of them joined in a single, vast ecosystem – one shaped by market forces but animated by desire. When I was asked to curate this project, I knew the essays had to connect these different sides of food, and map our desires in a bigger cultural matrix. Wiseman laid the blueprint. Maybe you could call it a mystical epic, both human and remote.

It was important to me, and maybe hypocritical, that the essayists here wouldn’t all be food writers. There are some who have covered politics, culture and art. We have a historian who has written about the tangled social and political forces behind English food. There is an artist who creates virtual realities, navigated like games, to help us make sense of the future. Another writer is a novelist who finds ways to build online cultures into the analogue business of words. These writers, like anyone, have their own idiosyncrasies and appetites, and sometimes knotty relationships with food. They also have a perspective beyond The Scene.

Like Meat, the essays in this series are about our food ecosystems. Unlike Meat, they break away from reality and into the virtual world. In Sweet Dreams as well as in these essays, you’ll see how technology is changing the ways in which we experience food and taste. The writers have explored future food dreams and the weirdly sterile theatrics of cooking video games. They also look at social media, virtual reality and the anti-sensory phantasmagoria of the internet. In some ways it’s an experiment – about whether we can learn about tangible food through the abstract softwares of the Web.

At the centre of this whole project, two words: what if. Each of the writers here has returned to these words in one way or another. What if takes us away from the real and into the more expansive horizons of the counterfactual. What if things in our food system aren’t what they seem? What if we tried something different, or at least looked at things in some other way? What could these systems look and feel like in an imagined food future? What if is the beginning of a different kind of conversation.