Editing Cuisine (section)

==Sci-Fi Cuisine==
So far, this has all been about fantasy cuisine. All well and good, but let's not limit ourselves here. Sci-Fi writers like to speculate on what people might eat in the future.

=== A Flavor Blast from Futures' Past ===
Steampunk food is typically Victorian food. Probably because it was made by people looking back.

You want to do a [[Dieselpunk]] on an [[Atompunk]] setting, well they had ideas about food. A general idea was very industrial and synthetic with terms like "Pre-Digested" being thrown around as unironic positives. If you want a microcosm of this of this mindset and how it played out, it's Wonderbread.

It used to be that poor people ate whole wheat bread and rich people ate white bread. White flour is sieved, which removes the bran and germ of the grain as well as (back in the old days when storage was not so good) things like dirt, bug bits and rat shit. Sieving flour was originally done by hand, but could be mechanized making what was a luxury food a staple for the masses. This happened with the development of automatic baking machines in which loaves of bread could be made in the millions easily without humans ever touching the product before it's sold. Only problem was that the brain and germ contain a lot of important nutrients and white bread is pretty much junkfood. So in WWII the US began enriching flour with various vitamins, calcium and other additives so GI Joe would be in good shape to kick Hitler's butt. After the war, you got Wonder-Bread which was seen as modern and futuristic in the 1950s. Since then, there's been a shift back to whole wheat flour and artisan bread as the prestige food.

==== Dehydration ====
A lot of food is by volume water. This can be removed by freeze drying, which reduces weight and volume and makes it shelf stable for a long period until it's rehydrated. For some things a fair bit of quality can be preserved this way. This got the US army's interest for some time and captured the imagination of sci-fi writers and cartoonists for some time.

==== Food Pills ====
The holy grail of 50s food futurism: A full meal in something the size of a throat lozenge. From the Jetsons to Space Adventures, food pills were a staple of the pulp era of Science Fiction.

Needless to say, there were some snags. In particular density. A human needs about 2,000 to 2,500 kilocalories a day and 100 grams of butter has 717 kcals, leaving aside all the other nutrients. You're not getting a three course meal as a 1cm long pill. But even if you forgo the meal in the palm of your hand ideal and instead settle for eating bowls of them, most people would not find a diet of jellybeans to be super appetizing.

=== Self Heating Meals ===
In [[Isaac Asimov]]'s Foundation (1953), the Foundationers have food packages that have one-use heating units. Select one you like from the pantry, turn it on and soon it will open up and unfurl into a disposable bowl with eating utensils and a nice hot meal. This prediction fared better than most.

In the 1980s the US military introduced Flameless Ration Heaters for their MREs. Several other militaries have introduced similar systems. Civilian versions have also come up, in particular for hikers and campers.

=== Space Food ===
On April 12, 1961 the USSR launched Vostok-1, the first manned spacecraft. Over the span of 108 minutes it completed a single orbit of the Earth. A big part of the mission was to find out how people handled Zero Gravity and part of that was that in flight Yuri Gagarin ate a few toothpaste tubes of beef and liver paste without problems. 

Despite some worries it turns out the Human Body is pretty adaptable and can adjust to weightlessness fairly well. Our traditional eating arrangements not so much. Pour yourself a bowl of cornflakes on the ISS and you have a 3D mess which could jam up instruments. Space food should not be something that easily break apart into crumbs. Open cups just won't do.

So far, humans have not travelled far from earth. A journey from the earth to the moon took 3 days and the ISS is only a few hours away from resupply on a return journey. A journey to Mars in the near future will likely take months either way even at an optimal orbital window. Combine that with a need to keep the mass down and keeping the air breathable over the long voyage and it becomes clear that instead of just packing up a load of rations you'd want to grow at least some food along the way. A lot of experiments have been made for hydroponic farming in space.

=== Microbial Meals ===
Growing algae, yeast and other such microbes on an industrial scale to provide foodstuffs. Asimov was keen on this for feeding his future megacities.

To an extent this has happened. As an example Spirulina is grown both as animal feed and a dietary supplement for human consumption. Of course it also needs a lot of mechanical processing to become edible.

Single Celled Organism Paste, or Scop, is a common food in the [[Cyberpunk]] setting by R. Talsorian Games.

=== Chemical Cookery ===
When you get down to it, food is just chemicals like everything else. It is in principle possible to feed carbon, water and various other chemicals into a machine and have it assemble them into nutrients.

The complications are not with simple things such as sugars, which have molecules with a couple dozen atoms. It's with the more complex chemicals like proteins, which are hideously complex and require molecular machinery to build.

=== Cultured Meat ===
{{topquote|We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.|[[The World Wars|Winston Churchill]] being oddly prophetic}}

The basic idea is simple: take a few Stem Cells from a (for example) a cow, put them in a growth chamber, pump in nutrients and chemicals made in a bioreactor, pump out waste and have them grow into muscle tissue and then harvest it and grill it. Badda bing badda bomb, you have a Lab-Grown steak. Not a facimile made from processed plant matter, but real bovine flesh. Potentially this could revolutionize the meat industry as it would need less inputs, produce less cow-farts and vegetarians who avoid meat for ethical reasons can enjoy the real deal guilt free and there is a lot of people looking into doing this on an industrial scale.

In general, there has been considerable progress on this front over the last decade and a lot of effort into developing it. It is possible to grow meat cultures and they pass the taste test. The initial runs were very expensive, though costs are steadily going down.

=== Post Scarcity Spreads ===
We live in a time of abundance that our medieval ancestors could only dream of. In a first-world country even the poor can have meat every day, luxuries like pepper are given away for free in restaurants, fresh fruit and green vegetables are available year round and we have various aides to make food prep easier from computer controlled ovens to mix-masters so that preparing elaborate meals is quick and easy.

In a world with vast supplies of clean energy, huge robot workforces, 3D printers and other forms of automated fabrication it is conceivable that we could eliminate hunger and see to it that everyone eats well. In Utopian societies like the [[Star Trek|United Federation of Planets]] or [[The Culture]] this is the case.

=== Dystopian Dining ===
Of course, [[Grimdark|many worlds in science fiction are not sunny and welcoming]] and this is often reflected in the menu. On worlds ravaged by pollution, nuclear war and overpopulation the gulf between rich and poor becomes increasingly pronounced. For the majority of people, there's hydroponic rice noodles, tofu and questionable meat cultures if your lucky and yeast-paste and synthetic carb pellets if your not, supplemented with the odd barbecued rat. While [[Megacorporation|megacorporate elites]] can chow down on what we'd consider real food. 

If things are really bad, well "[[Cannibalism|Soylens Viridians homini est]]".