Editing Cuisine (section)

=== 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.