| rdfs:comment | - In the future, things are going to change drastically -- including our diets. Whether it be from the destruction of arable land, food processing technology becoming cheaper, or just plain ethnocentrism, eventually, real food will become a luxury item, unavailable to all but perhaps an elite few. So, what does the rest eat? Processed foodstuffs, based usually on soy or yeast, loaded up with artificial flavors and engineered to be nutritionally complete -- but not the least bit tasty or satisfying. If you discover to your horror that the artificial food is people!, that's Human Resources.
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| abstract | - In the future, things are going to change drastically -- including our diets. Whether it be from the destruction of arable land, food processing technology becoming cheaper, or just plain ethnocentrism, eventually, real food will become a luxury item, unavailable to all but perhaps an elite few. So, what does the rest eat? Processed foodstuffs, based usually on soy or yeast, loaded up with artificial flavors and engineered to be nutritionally complete -- but not the least bit tasty or satisfying. Future Food Is Artificial is a staple of Cyberpunk and other Dystopias because Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap, and is often first clue that the Utopia we see isn't quite what it seems. However, it is also common in the Harder varieties of science fiction, particularly Space Operas; gardens on spaceships are Truth in Television, but battery farms on board anything less than a Generation Ship strains just about everyone's Willing Suspension of Disbelief. 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. If you discover to your horror that the artificial food is people!, that's Human Resources. It's also a component of many 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 cholera and dysentery by drinking Cool, Clear Water. Examples of Future Food Is Artificial include:
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