Social satire, nonfiction, who can really tell the difference?
Thief that I am, I have stolen the_wanlorn's copy of The Omnivore's Dilemma. If she manages to recover it, she is likely to find a deposit of astonishment bookmarking page 97, for it is there there I read the following:
The food industry has gazed upon nature and found it wanting--and has gotten to work improving it.
Back in the seventies, a New York food additive manufacturer called International Flavors & Fragrances used its annual report to defend itself against the rising threat of "natural foods" and explain why we were better off eating synthetics. Natural ingredients, the company pointed out rather scarily, are a "wild mixture of substances created by plants and animals for completely non-food purposes--their survival and reproduction." These dubious substances "came to be consumed by humans at their own risk."
...
The meal of the future would be fabricated "in the laboratory out of a wide variety of materials," as one food historian wrote in 1973, including not only algae and fungi but also petrochemicals. Protein would be extracted directly from petroleum and then "spun and woven into 'animal' muscle--long, wrist-thick tubes of 'filet steak'."
Now, it is not entirely surprising that people who make their living from manufacturing entire meals from corn and fossil fuels would find some way to justify doing so to both themselves and their customers. Nor was I unaware that synthetic foodstuffs were forming an increasingly large proportion of the western diet. No, what made me choke on my fume blanc was the resemblance of the above to the below:
CHOW^TM contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly, the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman.
[...]
MEALS^TM was CHOW^TM with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS^TM you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition.
You may recognize it from the description of Apocalyptic Horseman Famine's strategy in Good Omens. I feel like I should be donning a cardboard sign that reads, "THE END IS NIGH".
The food industry has gazed upon nature and found it wanting--and has gotten to work improving it.
Back in the seventies, a New York food additive manufacturer called International Flavors & Fragrances used its annual report to defend itself against the rising threat of "natural foods" and explain why we were better off eating synthetics. Natural ingredients, the company pointed out rather scarily, are a "wild mixture of substances created by plants and animals for completely non-food purposes--their survival and reproduction." These dubious substances "came to be consumed by humans at their own risk."
...
The meal of the future would be fabricated "in the laboratory out of a wide variety of materials," as one food historian wrote in 1973, including not only algae and fungi but also petrochemicals. Protein would be extracted directly from petroleum and then "spun and woven into 'animal' muscle--long, wrist-thick tubes of 'filet steak'."
Now, it is not entirely surprising that people who make their living from manufacturing entire meals from corn and fossil fuels would find some way to justify doing so to both themselves and their customers. Nor was I unaware that synthetic foodstuffs were forming an increasingly large proportion of the western diet. No, what made me choke on my fume blanc was the resemblance of the above to the below:
CHOW^TM contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly, the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman.
[...]
MEALS^TM was CHOW^TM with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS^TM you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition.
You may recognize it from the description of Apocalyptic Horseman Famine's strategy in Good Omens. I feel like I should be donning a cardboard sign that reads, "THE END IS NIGH".