Concentrated High-Calorie Goo

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


While the idea of the Food Pills has been banished to Zeerust, the idea of ultra-compact food lives on in more recent science fiction. Since writers have woken up to the fact that humans are biologically conditioned to like eating (and in fact need a certain amount of "bulk" to their food), the "all in one" meal is no longer treated as a luxury of modern technology, but as an unpleasant necessity. Now the "food" of the future takes the form of a goo or gel that's either colored a dull grey or disgustingly artificial bright primary or secondary color, and its taste is either non-existent or poor. Whether Concentrated High-Calorie Goo fulfills the need for water as well depends on the work, though it generally will not.

In Dystopian settings, this bland gruel may be the only thing humans (or, at least, those of lower status) have ever eaten in their lives. In less dystopian settings, such goo can still show up, but it will be as emergency rations, for situations with minimal storage space, or part of the diet of aliens with minimal, different, or no sense of taste.

The unholy spawn of Future Food Is Artificial and If It Tastes Bad, It Must Be Good for You.

Despite the name, it need not be a goo or paste; it can be found as drinkable liquids or solid blocks of processed food product.

Examples of Concentrated High-Calorie Goo include:

Anime and Manga

  • The Super Gel Dero Doro Drink from Needless is an energy drink that contains 5000 kilocalories. Eve often drinks this beverage due to how her Fragment uses a massive amount of calories as a drawback.
  • Crayon Shin-chan Gaiden: Alien vs. Shinnosuke has a delicious goo dispensed in a specific chamber for the prisoners. It's a form of feed to fatten humans up to be prepared as a dish for aliens.
  • Cyborgs in Ghost in the Shell acquire the nutrition for their biological parts from a 90% gluten substance. To normal humans, this tastes gross, but is ultimately harmless. For cyborgs, however, their sense input is overwritten to read it as delicious.

Comic Books

  • The Kymellians of Power Pack (which later issues reveal live in a self-created dystopia of spiritual and empathetic decadence) eat a rainbow-colored dust as their primary substance, and their sapient ships can provide it in ample quantity. While all Kymellians insist it's fine, humans can only describe eating it as comparable to trying to consume "sawdust".[1]

Fan Works

  • For most parts on Astral Journey: It's Complicated, Emma was fed some kind of goo via feeding tube connected to her stomach. This is justified as she wasn't able to eat while she was in a coma and after waking up, because her jaw was wired shut as it healed.

Film

  • The various varieties of Soylent in the film Soylent Green are basically this, ostensibly made from soybeans and lentils (hence the name).[2] In the original Harry Harrison novel Make Room! Make Room!, on the other hand, soylent was just a variety of textured plant protein used to make mock meat products (like "tofurkey" and "chikken" to cite two real-world examples), instead of a paste-like ration.
  • There are two different goos within The Matrix series that have different sources. The first would be how the people in pods are fed recycled biomatter made from human corpses. The second is rations that the resistance consumes that's a white and semi-translucent slime made of a single cell of protein, vitamin, and mineral.

Live-Action TV

  • In Travelers, the future has people survive on some chunky goo for sustenance because Earth's depleted environment couldn't properly sustain life because of unspecified past disasters.
  • Occasionally on Star Trek: The Original Series, the USS Enterprise‍'‍s food slots would dispense brightly-colored cubes of food. Captain Kirk didn't seem to mind eating them.

Tabletop Games

  • The various Star Wars RPGs have at least one type of rations described this way.
  • Starfinder has future MREs in its core book, but also has "field rations" that weigh a seventh as much, cost a seventh the price, and take up a seventh the space, but are described as unpleasant to survive on.
  • Among Warhammer 40,000‍'‍s dystopian hive cities and the Imperial Guard, the prominent sources of nutrition (and sources of fan jokes) include "Soylens Viridians" and plain "Corpse Starch", which are, indeed, made of dead people and whatever other random biomass they have. Space Marines primarily eat Triglyceride Gel and Amino-Porridge.

Web Comics

  • Schlock Mercenary introduced an apt term for concentrates best defined as technically digestible: “meatfuel”. As in, meat bags can run on this if necessary, but it ain't pretty. As opposed to the food manufactured from these via proper equipment, which in this example is designated “people-grade meal”. Note that it's a purely logistical issue: they do have tasty and "classy" food of bacterial origin.

Real Life

  • Fameal is a ground mixture of grain, bean, sugar, oil, vitamins and salt that is used for food aid and animal feed. It is edible raw and typically looks like a finely ground grain, but it can be made into a porridge, which is a perfect match for the goo description, or a bread with relatively little work.
  • "Ensure" and other over-the-counter nutritional drinks and meal replacements are essentially this -- a lot of calories plus vitamins and other nutrients in a faux "milkshake" form -- except unlike the usual example of this trope they're designed to taste good.
  1. Then again, the Kymellians are an entirely alien species; it's only reasonable that food that appeals to them is unpalatable to humans.
  2. Although We all know now that Soylent Green Is People.