It is a constant theme of early science fiction, and one you are
almost certainly familiar with: the man or woman of the future pops a
pill on to their tongue, knocks it back and is almost immediately
satisfied. For inside the little white capsule was a full three course
meal, designed to mimic the meals of the past in a single convenient,
portable dose.
Take the 1930 science fiction musical Just Imagine,
which tells the story of a man who is woken from a fifty year coma to
find himself in 1980s New York. As he tours a dystopian city – where
people are only known by number – he is taken to a “café”, where his new
friends order him up a meal of clam chowder, roast beef, beets,
asparagus, pie and coffee. With a little cajoling, he eventually
swallows the pill, before declaring that “the roast beef was a little
bit tough” and lamenting “the good old days”.
But if you look back
to these “good old days”, the roots of the meal-in-a-pill stem not from
the fertile minds of science fiction writers, but from the politics of
the day.
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