Future Food Is Artificial: Difference between revisions
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'''Digger''': Drek, I'd be happy to know I was eating every night.|'''''[[Shadowrun]]''''': Shadowtech Sourcebook }}
In the future, things are going to change
Future Food Is Artificial is a staple of [[Cyberpunk]] and other [[Dystopia
The [[Darker and Edgier]] version of [[Food Pills]] (it probably first appeared in fiction as a subversion thereof), and the black sheep cousin to [[Veganopia]]. Assuming it's not recycled, this sort of future food usually comes from a [[Multipurpose Monocultured Crop]].
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If you discover to your horror that '''''[[Soylent Green|the artificial food is people!]]''''', that's [[Human Resources]].
It's also a component of many [[Utopia
{{examples}}
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* Humorously depicted in ''[[Brazil (film)|Brazil]]'', in which meals at a fancy restaurant after an extravagant ordering ritual turned out to be scoops of mush along with a picture of the original meal they were intended to simulate.
* [[Word of God]] states that the only food <s>left</s> affordable to most people on Earth in ''[[Avatar (film)|Avatar]]'' is [[wikipedia:Spirulina (dietary supplement)|spirulina]]. [[Fridge Logic|Waitaminute, then where did they get the coffee and the scrambled eggs from?]]
** That's pretty
*** 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 at the Memory Bank]]''.
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== Literature ==
* In [[William Sleator]]'s ''[[House of Stairs]]'', meat is a luxury.
* In a good many [[Isaac Asimov]] novels, especially the Elijah Baley series, people are vegetarian through no particular choice of their
** His short story ''The Evitable Conflict'' features pleasant yeast-copies of steak, and mentions they can copy anything from meat to crystallized fruit.
** But in the late ''[[Foundation]]'' novels, some of these yeast-based proteins are ''luxury'' foods grown on Trantor in the Mycogen sector. Bland gloop exists, too, for mass consumption. And the Mycogenians keep the very best for themselves.
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** 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.
** This is actually based on a real-life experiment; [[wikipedia:Alexis Carrel|Dr. Alexis Carrel]], an early-20th-century biologist, kept a culture of cells from an embryonic chicken heart alive for over 20 years. Unfortunately, after [[Author Existence Failure|Carrel passed away]], the culture was [[No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup|destroyed]] for [[Paranoia Fuel|unknown reasons]], and [[Lost Technology|nobody has been able to replicate the experiment since.]]
*** Mostly because no one was crazy/dedicated enough. Living tissue cultures are nothing new, and growing the complete organs is a cutting-edge medical
* 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.
* Similarly, Robinette Broadhead from ''[[Heechee Saga|Gateway]]'' was a "food miner" before accepting the [[Call to Adventure]]; specifically, he mined oil shale that would be processed to grow fungi that would be processed into food. Bob wonders at one point about the days when oil flowed out of the ground and people just used it to run cars.
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** 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''.
* In ''[[The Goodness Gene]]'' by Sonia Levitin, synthetic food is part of the [[Government Conspiracy]]; dictator Hayli claims it's supposed to protect people from bacteria found in natural plants & animals {{spoiler|but really it's to protect ''him'' from a deadly allergy to peanuts and his severe germophobia, as well as to keep the populace dependent on the government.}} Still, people living in fringe communities are allowed to eat farmed food, though it's discouraged.
* 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 [[
* 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
* 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!
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** On the other hand, many of the worlds they stop off at are largely occupied by agricultural settlements, so it's not as if real food is difficult to acquire. The protein bars they seem to mainly live off in space are likely chosen because they're cheap, have a high calorie-to-mass ratio and can probably keep for long periods without refrigeration; sort of like the futuristic version of MREs.
** 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 [[
* ''[[Farscape]]'' has food cubes, although Rygel seems not to mind.
* 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.
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* Likewise in the [[Tabletop Games]] ''[[Shadowrun]]'', where the lower classes were limited to artificially flavored soy and fungus products.
** And Nerps, of course!
* Infamous dystopian-black-comedy RPG ''[[Paranoia]]'' offers multiple brands of synthetic foods to the player
** 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.
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* 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: The Apocalypse]]'', which allows its possessor to turn any old trash into mush that is perfectly sustaining but looks and tastes like "warm, wet cardboard." Granted, the Gift belongs to the Bone Gnawers, a tribe composed mostly of homeless and vagrants.
** ''Werewolf's'' Asian supplement, ''Hengeyokai'', includes a variant of that Gift that
* [[Car Wars]] uses processed, flavored algae as its major source of food.
* The ''[[Transhuman Space]]'' setting, with its "fauxflesh" vats, can be either this or [[Veganopia]] depending on how the GM wants to play it, and on what part of the world you're in. Real meat is illegal in the EU, but just expensive (and possibly frowned upon) elsewhere.
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