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== Film ==
* In ''[[
** In the novel the movie was based on, [[Harry Harrison]]'s ''Make Room! Make Room!'' soylent steaks made of soy and lentils were an expensive item. Otherwise, they were just a minor detail of the dystopian future.
* The disgusting tapioca-like goop that the Neo and his fellow rebels eat in ''[[The Matrix]]''. When Cypher makes the deal to rebel, he notes that he'd rather be eating virtual steak than that real protein... stuff. In an early draft of the script, the meal of choice is giant cockroach; whether that'd be better or worse than the runny synthetic gruel it ended up being is debatable at best.
* In ''[[Alien]]'' the crew eats synthetic "food" which resembles spagetti or cabbage. In the movie, there is not much talk of what it is actually made of. In the novelization however, Parker says something to the effect of "Why would you care what it's made of? It's food now." - and it's strongly implied that the "robochef" actually uses [[Squick|the crew's waste]] to produce the meals.
* Humorously depicted in ''[[Brazil (
* [[Word of God]] states that the only food <s>left</s> affordable to most people on Earth in ''[[Avatar (
** That's pretty obvious -- they grow it there on Pandora. After all, in a setting where the uncurable-on-Pandora medical cases are euthanized in place, they surely won't ship the food from the Earth. And having an automated chicken farm and a couple of greenhouses isn't all that expensive.
*** Possibly, but the trope still applies on Pandora. In the extended version, there is a scene in which Grace is forcing Jake to eat some food they have at the mobile station, and Jake mentions how at least he knows what he is eating when he is with the Na'vi.
* Flavo Fibes from ''[[Overdrawn
* Apparently Luke's ration bars are this in ''[[The Empire Strikes Back]]''. Yoda actually asks him "How you get so big eating food like this?"
* ''[[Judge Dredd (
** [[Sylvester Stallone|Sly]] also eats a hamburger made from a rat in [[Demolition Man]]. Curiously, he seems to dig it...
*** Probably because it's the best food '''''period''''' he's had in years. Being in suspended aniimation for a few decades tends to do that for you.
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== Literature ==
* In [[William Sleator]]'s ''[[
* In a good many [[Isaac Asimov]] novels, especially the Elijah Baley series, people are vegetarian through no particular choice of their own -- the Earth is so overcrowded that real meat is a luxury most people can't afford, and artificial yeast-based proteins grown in vats ("zymoveal") are the food of choice for the working class.
** His short story ''The Evitable Conflict'' features pleasant yeast-copies of steak, and mentions they can copy anything from meat to crystallized fruit.
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** Another short story, 'Good Taste,' focuses on the orbiting colony Gammer, where fungus/yeast based cuisine is [[Serious Business]] and all recipes are based on standard extracts. The protagonist enters the annual cooking contest tries to reintroduce the subtly different flavour of real garlic and other seasonings, but the judges are disgusted by the idea of eating 'growths from the ground.'
** In his [[Lucky Starr]] juvenile novels the yeast farms feature again and are often a plot point.
* The Lost Boys in ''[[
* In the novel ''The Space Merchants'' (by [[Frederik Pohl]] and C.M. Kornbluth), there's a giant growing fleshy lump called "Chicken Little" (it was originally a piece of chicken heart tissue) that they carve slices off: the working man's "meat".
** Even better yet, it's fed by hundreds of tubes carrying raw yeast in from a multi-story yeast farm above it, tended by hordes of perpetually abused sweatshop workers.
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* Minor subversion in the [[Vorkosigan Saga]]. Cordelia, the protagonist, is from a [[Utopia|utopia-ish]] planet, and has recently moved to the more primitive former-[[Lost Colony]] Barrayar. She's used to eating carniculture (real meat, raised in a vat instead of a killed animal), and the fact that what she's eating used to be alive gives her a moment of pause. She still eats it, and enjoys it, but puts it down to her pregnancy making her have strange cravings. (Maybe she's right; in a later book her son says she "never eats anything but vat-protein if she can help it," and carniculture is common on Barrayar as well. But Cordelia ate the fish her son caught, because she loves him.)
** Later in the series, we're introduced to butter bugs, which are being designed to eat the [[Bizarre Alien Biology]] of Barrayar's ecology and produce human-edible food.
* Surprisingly, this makes an appearance in the ''[[
* Used in ''[[The War Against the Chtorr]]'' novel "A Day for Damnation" to feed a herd (victims of a plague that affects intelligence) in San Francisco.
{{quote| We pushed up near one of the bales. It looked like it was made of big pieces of yellow farfel. It smelled yeasty and buttery.<br />
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* In [[Piers Anthony]]'s ''[[Apprentice Adept]]'' series, the Serfs are fed "nutri-food", processed goo that can be shaped to various textures, while the Citizens can get anything up to and including bear steaks.
** This is a minor plot point after Stile goes into hiding-he asks Sheen to go get him some food, preferably some pudding or something else that won't change much since the only way to smuggle it to Stile is by eating it. When she gets back, she activates whatever passes for a gag reflex in [[Robot Girl|gynoids]] and vomits up a double handful of pudding that does look distressingly used. Stile manages to eat it by telling himself that in the games, the standard nurti-hork can and usually is shaped into various disgusting things like puke and engine oil, and he just has to pretend this is what's happening now.
* In a short story, by [[Arthur C. Clarke
** ''[[Transmetropolitan]]'' has human meat come from "bastards," cloned humans grown without neural tissue, here the central product of a growing restaurant chain.
** Another Clark story, ''The Deep Range'', has a weird version of this: there's no suggestion the Earth is particularly overcrowded or polluted, but land-based agriculture has apparently been phased out, replaced by plankton and farmed ''whale steaks''.
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* Averted in ''The Parafaith War'' by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. The main character eats a lot of algae crackers and drinks a lot of Sustain (like a cross between an energy drink and a protein shake), and a breakfast with real eggs, real juice, and real bread for toast costs him about a month's salary. But that's just because shipping foodstuffs between solar systems is incredibly expensive and he's posted on a planet undergoing [[Terraform|terraforming]], so it can't support its own food production yet. When he visits home, on the capitol world of his society, he has plenty of real food available. The problems in Utopia are a bit deeper than what's in the fridge.
* In David Zindell's ''[[Requiem For Homo Sapiens]]'', the people of Icefall eat foods from the 'food factories', as their world makes the north pole seem warm and arable. This massively [[Freak-Out|freaks out]] the adopted cave boy, Danlo, who has been raised to pray for the soul of every animal that he eats.
* Subverted in [[Peter F. Hamilton]]'s ''Fallen Dragon'' - most food is created artificially, but there is plenty of room for farmland. It's just that synthetic foodstuffs are indistinguishable from the real thing and natural food [[Squick|Squicks]] the hell out of most people. The protagonist innocently eats a non-vat steak and vomits when he is told it came from a cow.
* Larry Niven's short story ''Vandervecken'' makes reference to a substance called "Dole Yeast"
{{quote| '''Roy:''' ''(in reference to the price of food in the asteroid belt)'' Ye Gods, The Prices!<br />
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'''Roy:''' Free?<br />
'''Alice:''' --And barely worth it. If you're down and out it'll keep you fed, and it practically grows itself. }}
* In ''[[
{{quote| MEALS<sup>TM</sup> was Sable's latest brainwave. MEALS<sup>TM</sup> was CHOW<sup>TM</sup> with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS<sup>TM</sup> you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition. The paradox delighted Sable.}}
* ''[[Space Captain Smith]]'' plays this for laughs with Synthetic Ham (Sham), Sham Lite (Shite), Synthetic Curry (Slurry) Sham sausages (Homage) and synthetic bacon (Facon)
* Most animals in ''[[Neuromancer]]'' have been killed by a pandemic, and "meats" are grown in vats. When protagonist Case refuses to partake a steak in a posh restaurant on the Moon, his partner Molly replies "gimme that. You know what this costs? They've gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't vat stuff."
* In the section of [[Sheri S. Tepper]]'s ''Beauty'' set in the future, the population produces only one type of food. It is small, squarish, and cracker-like. The artificial colours indicate what vitamins each cracker provides. They are tasteless and textureless (although one of the blues has a slight flavour).
* Played for laughs in Harry Harrison's ''[[
** And then there's dehydrated water, a necessary staple when deployed on an alien planet. You just add water and you get... water! Though it doesn't taste as good as regular water.
* ''Small Minded Giants'' by Oisin McGann, set in an enclosed city in which the population is waiting out an ice age, includes several references to this trope. Foodstuffs eaten by the working class main characters include spirulina, and the rather mysterious sounding Promeat and Veggie-soy. Fruit and meat are strictly for the wealthy. It is also mentioned that most people's staple diet is based on genetically modified soya beans and that the cheapest food available is [[Squick|made from processed waste]].
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== Live Action TV ==
* In ''[[Star Trek:
** Not exactly pure energy. The replicator uses transporter technology to rearrange the molecular structure of some kind of raw material (basically any sort of solid matter) into the molecular structure of edible food. This process can also be used to fabricate tools and spare parts. A line from an episode of Enterprise suggests that the crew's "waste" products are also used for the "raw materials" that are fed into early versions of the replicator....
* ''[[Firefly]]'': in "Out of Gas", the gang makes an entire birthday cake for Simon out of protein. And, of course, there's Kaylee's reaction to Book's strawberries in the pilot, to say nothing of [[Erotic Eating|the way she eats them later]]... mmmmm...
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** Possibly a bit of [[Fridge Brilliance]], as that agriculture is probably sold to central Federation worlds or on the Black Market, and therefore cannot be consumed by the people farming it. There were several instances of the crew smuggling cows and horses between planets for profit.
* In the [[Dystopia|dystopian]] Alt!world discovered by Wendy Watson in the course of her duties as [[Sidekick]] to ''[[The Middleman]]'' the only food available to the masses is aerosolized soup. This is listed as among the main complaints of the mad scientist trying to escape this dimension.
* ''[[
* In ''[[Lexx]]'', the eponymous spaceship/dragonfly dispenses food for his/her crew as a green, orange or blue slime through an organic-looking tube. It's stated several times during the show that the food consists of processed "organic material" Lexx him/herself ate before. Considering Lexx often consumes parts of inhabited planets or passing starships, this leads to slightly disconcerting implications.
* ''[[Terra Nova]]'', in the 22nd century AD real food is rare, when colonists arrive in Terra Nova they need to drink an enzyme solution to help their systems adjust to the plethora of 850,000th century BC fruits and vegetables.
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** And of course, Friend Computer is happy to report that no one has ''ever'' [[Suspiciously Specific Denial|accidentally fallen into Food Vat #4589B]] and gotten processed with the yeast strains, nor do recycled cadavers ''ever'' supply the protein content for Vita-Yum Meal Substitute Bars.
** In the more recent editions, it's not just the High Programmers who get to escape this; one of the perks of Red clearance is that you get to eat a ''real apple'' once a month or so, with the promise of more if you continue to be promoted.
* In ''[[
* In many of the ''[[Warhammer 40000]]'' novels, particularly the ones involving Forge Worlds and Hive Worlds, 'food' is very easy to come by... as you can find public food paste dispensers dotted everywhere that seem to be described akin to soap dispensers in bathrooms.
<!-- %%If you put a Soylent Green/Human Resources/I'm A Humanitarian example here, a ghost will punch you in the face. -->
* The ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]'' magic item Murlynd's Spoon is a serving utensil that once a day magically provides enough bland (though a 0th level spell can explicitly alter taste...) gruel of unspecified nature to keep a party of four Medium-sized creatures (or eight Small creatures) fed. The "create food and water" spell does the same thing, with a note that characters who have put skill ranks into cooking can conjure slightly more appetizing dishes. Very few Dungeon Masters require players to keep track of food, though.
* Similar to the above is the Gift: Cooking in ''[[
** ''Werewolf's'' Asian supplement, ''Hengeyokai'', includes a variant of that Gift that creates--what else--rice.
* [[Car Wars]] uses processed, flavored algae as its major source of food.
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* The Synth Food Paste in the videogame ''[[Freelancer]]'' plays this trope in a different way: since its production is mostly artificial, it dealt such a massive hit to the household incomes of farmers from all over the Sirius system that there are several farmer rebellions fighting for their right to grow their own organic crops, whose main target is anything that has to do with Synth Foods, Inc. However, nobody says it's nasty or disgusting, and the closest the game ever gets to real example of this trope is an article on the in-game news about factory workers from Leeds being fed with livestock-grade Synth Food, supposedly because the pollution ends up destroying their sense of taste.
** Supplementing the reason why Synth Food Paste is so popular is due to the fact the plant used to grow it can sustain very harsh weather.
* 'Soy Food' in [[
* In ''[[Dystopia (
* In ''[[Space Quest]] 6'', the food dispenser in the crew lounge is named "Mr. Soylent," and even comes with a cheeky advertising jingle, ending with "Soylent Clear: Clearly less people, clearly better taste."
* Guess where does the major source of Nutrients come from in ''[[Alpha Centauri]]''? Kelp and people once you got recycling tanks.
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== [[Visual Novels]] ==
* In the world of ''[[
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* In the webcomic ''[[Alien Dice]]'', the various alien species subsist on foods developed in labs. Their reaction to foods derived from plants and animals are mixed. Lexx vomits upon discovering the source of milk, saying that only animals should consume it. Riley, however, rather enjoys beer, though due to his [[Bizarre Alien Biology]] he can't get drunk.
* In ''[[Terinu]]'' avoiding "food cube" starship rations is a minor luxury for the crew of the ''Terona''.
* Animal products in ''[[
|