Food is What's on the Menu for this Weeks Sci-Friday!
Food looks a little different in the future.
When food is depicted across most genres of media it is usually made to look hyper-palatable and completely irresistible, but that’s not typically the case when it comes to Sci-Fi.
Sci-fi food routinely doesn’t look anything like what we consider food to be at this moment in time here on planet Earth, it usually looks a bit strange, to say the least.
In a previous Sci-Friday, I covered some of the foods of the Star Trek Universe like the Klingon delicacy known as Rokeg Blood Pie and the Bajoran Hasperat but today we are going to expand our horizons and look at how food is represented in Sci-fi.
Speaking of Star Trek, I just happen to be enjoying a cup of Earl Grey Tea as I write this.
Sci-Friday: It's That Time Again!
Welcome back to this week’s edition of Sci-Friday. Each week a few, well more than a few now, brave souls venture to bring you their favorite pieces of Sci-Fi in many various and creative forms. Here are some other writers who have participated in Sci-Friday that you should check out,
One of the reasons for food being so unusual in different forms of Sci-fi could be due to food scarcity. Quite a bit of Sci-fi is set in either a dystopian world or an off-world future, these are both scenarios where food would have to be replicated ideally or at least heavily rationed.
In the dystopian future category, the winner of most disturbing food goes to the classic 1973 film Soylent Green. This wafer-like processed protein ration is made of the crudest protein of all, human flesh.
You can’t blame a dystopian society for trying to feed the people but I think that future space food would be delightful by comparison, but maybe not.
Consider Popplers in the Futurama Universe, these tasty snacks turned out to be undeveloped Omicronian young. They are born in large pits on an unattended, nursing-type-M planet, watched over by nanny cams. These larval Omicronians have an irresistible taste to humans and many alien species.
A lot of this futuristic food looks very similar to oatmeal or gruel that was supposedly served in 19th-century orphanages and reformatory schools.
In The Matrix, if you are plugged in and living your ignorant life to the fullest the food is great, tip-top, but once you unplug from what you think is reality, it gets really real, real quick.
This porridge or mush seems to be nothing more than the fundamental building blocks of life. Consider this for your first unplugged meal, a single-celled protein, vitamin, mineral, and amino acid pile of goo served at room temperature, yummy. I don’t know, if this was my only option I might just stay plugged in.
Hopefully, when humanity advances into the future we can solve the problem of food scarcity and starvation and not have to resort to the dystopian or futuristic weirdness that has been seen in Sci-fi for so long.
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My brain went off on a tangent here, but I was curious whether you know much about the history of oatmeal. I'm thinking people must have had something like gruel (and been very happy with this) like when they built the pyramids. I also know beer was lot more like this, kind of in between porridge and booze... interesting times, to say the least.