1 of 5 BBC News Source Photo: The idea of condensing entire meals into a pill was a prediction of the future that didn't come true. BBC News Source Photo: The idea of condensing entire meals into a pill was a prediction of the future that didn't come true, did come true
You've probably seen this scene, which is a constant theme in early science fiction: a man or woman from the future puts a pill in their mouth, swallows it, and is fed almost immediately.
The little white capsule is actually a complete threecourse meal designed to recreate the meals of the past in a single, convenient and portable serving.
The science fiction musical Fantasias de 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 only known by numbers, and his new friends go with him to a “café”. There they order a complete meal that includes clam chowder, roast beef, asparagus, cake and coffee.
After some urging from his friends, the man from the 1930s finally swallows the pill. He states that “the roast beef was a little tough” and he misses the “good old days.”
But when we look back on those “good old days,” the pill meal didn’t make it into the fertile minds of science fiction writers. It was created by the politicians of the time.
More specifically, this tiny vision of the future had its roots in late 19th century feminism.
2 out of 5 BBC News Source Photo: The idea of food in pills grew with fears of food shortages in the world. BBC News Source Photo: The idea of food in pills grew with fears of food shortages in the world
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 thought the world would be like in 1993. Her work has been published in small local newspapers across the country.
American suffragette Mary Elizabeth Lease (18501933) predicted that by 1993 people would eat only synthetic foods, freeing women from the arduous work of cooking.
For them, humans would absorb “in condensed form from the rich clay of the earth the life force or germs that now reside at the heart of corn, wheat seed, and delicious fruit juices. A small bottle of this life from the fertile.” Mother Earth's breast will provide people with food for days. And that will solve the problems of the chefs and the kitchen.”
The antifeminist literature of the time mocked the fascination with food pills.
Humorous books like The Republic of the Future, published in 1887 by social conservative Anna Dodd (18581929), satirized the concept of women not wanting to spend most of their day in the kitchen.
The novel is set in New York in the year 2050. The narrator jokingly proclaims: “When the last cake became the first pill, true freedom for women began.”
The turn of the 20th century also brought with it fears that, given the population growth at the time, the planet simply might not provide enough food for everyone.
Therefore, in the 1920s and 1930s, the food pill appeared in the popular press as something inevitable, if somewhat frightening. And the comedy tried to reduce the panic.
3 out of 5 BBC News Source Photo: The future of food in pills was once seen as something inevitable. BBC News Source Photo: The future of food in pills was once seen as something inevitable
In 1926, a newspaper in Utah, USA, published a series of drawings that played with this idea.
In one of them, a construction worker searches his bags and realizes that he has forgotten his meal tablet at home; A grocery store clerk places six trays of turkey dinner on the counter for a lady shopping for Thanksgiving. and the women of the house comment on the “old” dirty dishes that are now just a memory thanks to the diet pills.
The ideas were extravagant, all the more so because fashion designs at the time couldn't keep up with food technology people still wore ties at dinner.
But for many people in the postwar years, they were plausible ideas that saw science and technology creating tools that helped them destroy the world they lived in while offering them the hope of rebuilding it. And in this world, men were only a smaller part of a large industrial machine.
This panorama was summed up with the slogan of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair: “Science discovers, industry applies, man adapts.” The phrase suggests that man must submit to the great advances of the present, including meals in pills.
Instead of people enjoying food, food would become something controlled and reduced to its components. They would no longer be food for the soul, but would only serve to sustain life. And men should just swallow the pill when the future of food comes.
Science fiction loved this kind of dysfunctional, technocratic vision that always cropped 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, “Imagine that future generations will adapt whatever ‘science’ discovers”—pills, algae, or other dystopian horrors.”
Tablets are on the rise
4 out of 5 BBC News Source Photo: In the age of space travel, food pills were considered the next logical step in the evolution of food. BBC News Source Photo: In the age of space travel, food pills were seen as the next logical step in food evolution
But this submissive behavior disappeared in the 1960s and was replaced by technoutopia, fueled by the glamor and excitement of the space race.
In the age of space travel, food pills were seen as the next logical step in food evolution the ultimate in efficiency and man's triumph over nature.
Meanwhile, in space, astronauts in experimental capsules sucked food from inside silver bags far from the planet's surface. Space powders could be rehydrated into gel form so they don't end up in the delicate capsules. They provided nutritious meals that could be eaten through straws.
On Earth, children and adults wanted to be part of these advances. Aluminum foilwrapped bars and powdered drinks like Tang gained status and popularity. And the advent of condensed and dehydrated foods has led to food pills making their way back into the diets of future characters.
All of this, coupled with the introduction of dinner in front of the television and fears about food security during the Cold War, meant that illustrations about the food of the future also experienced a renaissance.
One example was the comic strip “Our New Age,” which was published in more than 110 newspapers in different parts of the world between 1958 and 1975.
A 1965 edition of the strip presented the synthetic foods of the future as an answer to our planet's food crisis. The color strip, divided into four frames, recorded the changes in the development of the food.
The first panel explained how humans hunted wild animals 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 not supported by traditional farming methods.
The strip's final panel triumphantly claims that chemists could build efficient factories to “address all food shortages around the world.”
5 out of 5 BBC News Source Photo: The ability to condense food into pills proved more difficult than expected. BBC News Source Photo: The ability to condense food into pills proved more difficult than expected
The impossibility
Just as American President Herbert Hoover (18741964) won the 1928 election with the promise of “a chicken in every pot,” the promise of the 1960s seemed to be “a food pill in every pocket.”
But like many visions of the future, the diet pill has evolved from an object of fascination to an object of ridicule. In the 1960s and 1970s, cartoons like The Jetsons and films like The Sleeper (1973) challenged the idea and mocked the dreamers of the past.
The problem, of course, is that making a nutritional pill is simply not possible. Military programs increasingly created compressed rations and pills that could help stave off hunger, but the idea of a pill with a threecourse meal remains as distant as the depiction of New York in the 1980 film Fantasies.
But maybe we always knew that. In 1936, the Jefferson City PostTribune newspaper published an article with the opinion of one Dr. Milton A. Bridges from Columbia University in the United States.
The author stated that “people will never take pills as meals… pills can never contain enough calories.”
For him, “it is entirely plausible to provide all the vitamins and minerals necessary for a diet in the form of pills, but you cannot absorb calories without eating.”
Apparently the idea of meal pills has enticed people, but the reality is much harder to swallow. This certainly happened in 1944 when the Missouri Women's Club in the United States held a “Year 2000” dinner.
Different meal pills were served: tutti frutti pills, a brown pill for the meat dish, and a miniature chocolate ball for dessert. Women undoubtedly had fun “playing the future” until reality bit them.
According to reports at the time, after taking the pills, they all gave in to coffee and ate several sandwiches. The pills just weren't enough to satisfy her.
Read the original version of this report (in English) on the BBC Future website.