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Future Food Is Artificial: Difference between revisions
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== Comic Books ==
* "Munce" is the staple diet of Mega-City One citizens in ''[[Judge Dredd]]'' comics. It's a kind of high-protein plant, usually highly processed by the time it gets to the consumers because it happens to look like a human head. Sometimes munce is even made out of dead humans.
** Another example is the Gunge product line, consisting of delicacies like the Slime Sauce, Bacteria Soup, Maggot Steaks, Black Widow Spider Wine matured for a week in an old boot, and Mould Jam. When the initial release sparks huge protests, the Justice Department outlaws Gunge, buys the factories and re-releases the products under a artificial brand.
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*** 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.
* Implied in ''[[Trancers]]''. Jack Deth has been sent to the past from the future and is given beef Chinese food, prompting him to say "Beef? Like from a ''cow''?"
* A subject of dissent among the Tomanian people in ''[[The Great Dictator]]''.
{{quote|'''Hynkel:''' "What are they dissenting about?"
'''Garbitsch:''' "The working hours, the cut in wages; chiefly the synthetic food, the quality of the sawdust in the bread."
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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 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.
** 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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== Live Action TV ==
* In ''[[Star Trek: The
** 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...
** And the valuable cargo looted from a derelict ship in the pilot? Nutrition bars, of the sort issued as rations to brand-new colonies; thanks to the central Alliance government's utter disinterest in doing anything to support any brand-new colony which can't survive entirely on its own, these ration bars are much more valuable as loot than the ingots of precious metal they're initially portrayed to be. Especially as each one can feed a family of four for a ''month''.
** 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 [[dystopia]]n 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.
* ''[[Farscape]]'' has food cubes, although Rygel seems not to mind.
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** 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 ''[[Feng Shui]]'', one of the ''many'' unpleasant things about the dystopia of 2056 (equal parts capitalism gone berserk and Stalinist repression) is the awful vatfood. Side note: protein-based bio-plastics have replaced the petroleum version, and almost everything a person living under the Buro uses is disposable. Meaning the bowl and sporky-thing-that-can't-be-weaponized you eat with might just be better nutrition and flavor than the actual food.
* In many of the ''[[Warhammer
* The ''[[Dungeons
* 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 creates—what else—rice.
* [[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.
* ''Cyberpunk2020'' features the ''Kibble'' that's described to have the same aspect, smell, and flavor of the dog food from which it takes its name.
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* 'Soy Food' in [[Deus Ex]]. Apparently advanced nanotechnology lets the user pick a flavour. The Chocolent bars may fall into this category as well, as might the soft drink labelled 'Insert Product Placement Here'. "It is unclear whether this is a name or an invitation."
* In ''[[Dystopia (video game)|Dystopia]]'', the menu at an abandoned coffee shop sells three different kinds of soy products and no other food.
* 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.
{{quote|"It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all the people." -- '''Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Ethics for Tomorrow" '''}}
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* In the bizarre 90's PC CD-ROM game [[Total Distortion]], you have a high-tech kitchen that can produce many kinds of custom sandwiches and drinks... that are made from a light-brown substance called Food Goo, sold by the rectangular prism by Taft Foods. As the game reverently sings after every meal, ''yummm-yummm!''
** There's a bit of irony to this: the game takes place in a bizarre alternate dimension, but the kitchen and Food Goo come from good, weird old Earth.
** It's a cheap but effective way to handle shipping costs, the sandwich and drink maker is a state of the art machine which can turn the base nutrients of the food go to something edible.
* In ''Reprobates'', each character on the island awakens each day with a full flask of water and a pack of crackers. The latter are evidently enough to nourish a person for the day, although some also gather edible items from the island itself.
* [[Space Colony]]: Your colonists main food source is a green 'soup' created from a bamboo like plant or the local trees. Thankfully it can also be turned into alcohol. Colonists who are feeling really fancy can eat genetically modified chickens, which increases their happiness level.
* In ''[[City of Villains]]'' the most common food for normal citizens in the supervillain-ruled Rogue Islands is something called NutriPaste.
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[[Category:Cyberpunk Tropes]]
[[Category:We Will Use An Index In The Future]]
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