Future Food Is Artificial: Difference between revisions

It's also a component of many [[Utopia|Utopias]] as well; if synthetic food is impossible to distinguish from the real thing, then why would you ''want'' to consume the parasitic organisms that pervade just about all food? It is possible that once ''tasty'' synthetic food is invented, awareness of contaminated food could become comparable to current awareness of sanitation as opposed to [[The Dung Ages]]. The average person might find the idea of ''choosing'' to risk food poisoning to be similar to the notion of choosing to risk [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholera cholera] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysentery dysentery] by drinking [[Cool Clear Water]].

== Anime and Manga ==

* 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.

*** Mostly because no one was crazy/dedicated enough. Living tissue cultures are nothing new, and growing the complete organs is a cutting-edge medical technology -- mostly for transplants, though, not food.

* One of Kilgore Trout's stories in [[Kurt Vonnegut]]'s ''[[Breakfast of Champions]]'' tells of a planet where all food is made from petroleum and coal, because its animal and plant life had been destroyed by pollution. The planet's dirty movies showed [[Food Porn|vivid color footage of people eating fruit, meat, vegetables, and other such foods]] that didn't exist any more.

* 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.

** ''[[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''.

[[Category:We Will Not Use an Index In The Future]]

[[Category:Future Food Is Artificial]]