Science Fiction Food Pills Were Never Real – 1/3/2024 – Balance
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You’ve probably seen this scene, which is a constant theme of early science fiction: a man or woman from the future puts a pill in their mouth, swallows it, and is fed almost instantly.
The little white capsule is actually a complete three-course meal designed to mimic the meals of the past in a single, convenient and portable serving.
The science fiction musical “Fantasies of 1980” (1930) tells the story of a man who wakes up from a coma after 50 years, in 1980s New York.
He wanders through a dystopian city where people are known only by numbers, and his new friends take him to a “cafe”. There, they order a complete meal, which includes clam chowder, roast beef, asparagus, pie and coffee.
After some insistence from his friends, the man from the 1930s ends up swallowing the pill. He states that “the roast beef was a little tough” and he misses the “good old days.”
But if we are to look back at those “good old days,” the pill meal did not arise in the fertile minds of science fiction writers. It was created by the politicians of the time.
More precisely, this minuscule vision of the future had its roots in late 19th century feminism.
Pills against patriarchy
During preparations for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the American Press Association asked writers from various fields to promote the event by writing essays about what they believed the world would be like in 1993. Their work was published in small local newspapers across the country.
American suffragette Mary Elizabeth Lease (1850-1933) predicted that, by 1993, humans would eat only synthetic foods, freeing women from the arduous work of cooking.
For her, people would “ingest, in condensed form from the rich clay of the earth, the life force or germs now found in the heart of corn, the seed of wheat and delicious fruit juices. A small vial of this life from the fertile breast of Mother Earth will provide men with nutrition for days. And with that, the problems of the cooks and the kitchen will be solved.”
Antifeminist fiction of the time ridiculed the fascination with food pills.
Humorous books such as “The Republic of the Future”, published in 1887 by social conservative Anna Dodd (1858-1929), poked fun at the concept of women who did not want to spend most of their time your day in the kitchen.
The novel is set in New York in the year 2050. Its narrator jokingly announces that “when the last pie was turned into the first pill, true freedom for women began.”
The turn of the 20th century also brought fear that the planet simply could not provide enough food for all people, considering the population growth at the time.
Therefore, in the 1920s and 1930s, the food pill appeared in the popular press as something inevitable, if somewhat frightening. And comedy tried to reduce panic.
In 1926, a newspaper in Utah, in the United States, published a series of drawings playing with the idea.
In one of them, a construction worker goes through his pockets and realizes he forgot his meal pill at home; a grocery store attendant places six pills of turkey dinner on the counter for a lady who is shopping for Thanksgiving; and the women of the house comment on the “old” dirty dishes to be washed, which are only a memory, thanks to the dietary pills.
The ideas were extravagant, even more so because, in the designs of the time, fashion would not have kept up with food technology — people still wore ties at dinner time.
But they were plausible ideas for many people in the postwar years, who saw science and technology create tools that helped them destroy the world they lived in and yet offered the hope of rebuilding it. And in that world, men were just a smaller part of a large industrial machine.
This panorama was summarized by the slogan of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933: “Science discovers, industry applies, man adapts”. The phrase suggests that man must submit to the great advances of the moment, including meals in pills.
Instead of people enjoying food, food would become something controlled and reduced to its components. They would no longer be nourishment for the soul, serving only to sustain life. And men should just swallow the pill when the future of eating arrives.
Science fiction loved this kind of dysfunctional, technocratic vision, which always came up when it came to food pills.
In the book “What Will We Eat Tomorrow? A History of the Future of Food” (Ed. Senac São Paulo, 2001), author Warren Belasco writes: “although most people promise and hope that they will never need pills to eat, they imagine that future generations will adapt to what science finds ‘—pills, seaweed, or other dystopian horrors.”
Tablets gain ground
In the age of space travel, food pills were considered the next logical step in food evolution — the ultimate in efficiency and a triumph of man over nature.
Meanwhile, in space, astronauts in experimental capsules sucked food from the inside of silver bags, far from the planet’s surface. Space powders could be rehydrated into gel form, so they wouldn’t leak into the delicate capsules. They provided nutritionally complete meals that could be eaten through straws.
On Earth, children and adults wanted to be part of these advances. Bars wrapped in aluminum foil and powdered drinks, such as Tang, gained status and popularity. And the emergence of condensed and dehydrated foods has brought food pills back onto the menu of future characters.
All this, combined with the arrival of dinners in front of the TV and fears about food security during the Cold War, meant that illustrations of the food of the future also underwent a renaissance.
One example was the comic strip “Our New Age”, published in more than 110 newspapers around the world between 1958 and 1975.
An edition of the strip, published in 1965, presented the synthetic foods of the future as the answer to the planet’s food crisis. Divided into four frames, the colored strip recorded the changes in the evolution of food.
The first panel explained how humans hunted wild beasts and collected wild plants for food 9,000 years ago. The next panel argues that synthetic foods are just the next step in modern agriculture, allowing science to feed a growing population that is not served by traditional farming methods.
The last panel of the strip triumphantly asserts that chemists could build efficient factories to “meet all food shortages anywhere in the world.”
The impossibility
Just as, in 1928, American President Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) won the election promising “a chicken in every pot”, the promise of the 1960s seemed to be “a food pill in every pocket”.
But as with many visions of the future, the dietary pill has gone from being an object of fascination to one of ridicule. In the 1960s and 1970s, cartoons like “The Jetsons” and films like “The Sleeper” (1973) threw cold water on the idea, ridiculing the dreamers of the past.
The issue, of course, is that producing a food pill is simply not possible. Military programs created increasingly compressed rations and pills that could help satisfy hunger, but the idea of a pill with a three-course meal remains as remote as the depiction of New York in the film “1980 Fantasies.”
But maybe we always knew that. In 1936, the Jefferson City Post-Tribune newspaper published an article with the opinions of a certain Dr. Milton A. Bridges, from Columbia University, in the United States.
The author declared that “human beings will never eat pills as meals… pills can never contain sufficient caloric volume.”
For him, “it’s perfectly plausible to provide all the vitamins and minerals needed for a diet in the form of pills, but you can’t get calories without eating food.”
Apparently, the idea of meal pills has seduced people, but the reality is much harder to swallow. This was certainly what happened in 1944, when the Missouri Women’s Club, in the United States, promoted a “Year 2000” dinner.
Various meal pills were served: tutti-frutti pills, a brown pill for the meat dish and a miniature chocolate ball for dessert. Women, without a doubt, enjoyed “playing the future”, until they were bitten by reality.
Reports from the time say that, after taking the pills, they all gave in to coffee and ate several sandwiches. The pills simply weren’t enough to satisfy them.
Read the original version of this report (in English) on the BBC Future website.
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