stories : The Ten
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What sci-fi movies say about future food
What will we eat many years from now? Let’s hope it’s nothing like the movie Demolition Man, in which the only place to eat is Taco Bell. Here are 10 sci-fi flicks set in the future, and their takes on what food and drink will become. (Note: Some of these “future” scenarios have already passed. Did the predictions come true? Read on!)
1. A Clockwork Orange
Made in: 1971
Set in: The future
A gang of sadomasochistic juveniles enjoys a milk-based elixir laced with uppers at the Korova Milk Bar. Beyond T-shirts, “milk plus” a.k.a. “moloko” has inspired three bars (in Portland, New York, and Tokyo), record labels, bands—the most prominent being Moloko—and even a website, DrinkMoloko, which lists upcoming events. Someone also created a recipe (without the drugs).
2. THX 1138
Made in: 1971
Set in: The 25th century
George Lucas made this stylized film before Star Wars. Robert Duvall is THX 1138, just another gear in the dystopian machine, until his female flatmate, LUH 3417, tampers with his meal (beige, chalky food blocks plus sedative pills). Off the drugs, he falls in love with her, only to be caught and sent to jail; he then escapes in a memorable car chase. The film also depicts a trash can of the future, which is merely a black hole that sucks up anything put in front of it.
3. Soylent Green
Made in: 1973
Set in: 2022
The few cows and vegetables still poking around in this overpopulated, hyperpolluted tomorrow-land are only for the wealthy. Everyone else is fed a synthetic tofulike substance manufactured by the Soylent Corporation. The shocking ending: It ain’t tofu—it’s humans who take part in the state euthanasia program.
4. Sleeper
Made in: 1973
Set in: 2174
Miles Monroe (Woody Allen) is the owner of a natural foods market who, after going into the hospital for a routine ulcer, is for some reason cryogenically frozen. He wakes up hundreds of years later to find out that fried, fatty foods are considered good for you. Produce, apparently, is also quite large. At one point Monroe stumbles into a field of giant hydroponically grown fruits and veggies while trying to elude a security guard, slips on a six-foot-long banana peel, and ultimately knocks the guard out with a gigantic strawberry. Monroe also battles an unruly ever-growing blob of instant pudding.
5. The Apple
Made in: 1980
Set in: 1994
A rock musical that follows the degradation of a wholesome folk duo trying to make it in the future’s sleazy music business, dominated by glam band BIM. Following a concert in which one song repeats the chorus “Hey, hey, hey, BIM’s on its way” 25 times in a row, we see people drinking from what appear to be triangular flower vases, 10-inch-wide champagne flutes, and gilded chalices.
6. Back to the Future Part II
Made in: 1989
Set in: 2015
Not only will Black & Decker still be going strong, according to this film, but it will also have developed a rehydrator that takes three-inch Pizza Hut pizzas (it’s never specified if the appliance works with other pizza companies) and in three seconds transforms them into piping-hot 16-inch pizzas. The McFlys also have a voice-activated fruit basket that descends from the ceiling and a Master-Cook console, a spruced-up ’80s PC with added metal “helper” arms.
7. The Fifth Element
Made in: 1997
Set in: The 23rd century
Earth is too polluted, so Manhattan exists 200 feet in the sky. Soldier-turned-flying-taxi-driver Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) is being served Chinese food through his apartment window by a man in a flying boat when he finds out he has to get back in uniform to help save Earth. One notable advancement (very similar to the Star Trek replicator) is a microwavelike device that magically creates a roasted turkey.
8. The Matrix
Made in: 1999
Set in: Unknown
Spoons don’t exist, and the only nondigital food is gruel. Humans live underground, zipping around in dank flying ships. I don’t know about you, but I’d be fine eating gruel every day if I could learn kung fu in two minutes.
9. The 6th Day
Made in: 2000
Set in: The near future
Though it’s more focused on cloning than on food, The 6th Day features an endearing moment between Adam Gibson (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his daughter. She brings two bananas, one orange and one yellow, to the table and asks if he wants “nacho” or “regular” flavor. The scene also hints at technology that might not be far off: Gibson puts milk back into the fridge, which tells him that he’s running out and asks if he wants to buy more.
10. Idiocracy
Made in: 2006
Set in: 2505
Joe, an average soldier, is frozen for what’s supposed to be a one-year experiment. But when his pod is misplaced, he wakes up 500 years later to find that everybody’s dumb. There are Carl’s Jr.’s on every corner, the most popular show on TV is Ow My Balls, and a Gatorade-like drink, Brawndo, has all but replaced water. When Joe is hired by the president to fix the food-shortage problem, he discovers that farmers have been using Brawndo to hydrate the crops; after Joe gets the farmers to switch to water, the crops miraculously grow back.
The antithesis of Soylent Green is the vegetarian future depicted by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
A vegetarian future, like alternative fuels and/or electric cars is a very real possibility.
According to author John Robbins, in his Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet for a New America:
Half the water consumed in the U. S. goes to irrigate land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water are also used to wash away their excrement.
U. S. livestock produce twenty times as much excrement as does the entire human population, creating sewage which is ten to several hundred times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage.
Animal wastes cause ten times more water pollution than does the U. S. human population; the meat industry causes three times as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined.
Meat producers, the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contribute to half the water pollution in the United States. The water that goes into a thousand-pound steer could float a destroyer.
It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, but 2,500 gallons to produce a pound of meat. If these costs weren't subsidized by the American taxpayers, the cheapest hamburger meat would be $35 per pound!
The burden of subsidizing the California meat industry costs taxpayers $24 billion annually. Livestock producers are California's biggest consumers of water. Every tax dollar the state doles out to livestock producers costs taxpayers over seven dollars in lost wages, higher living costs and reduced business income. Seventeen western states have enough water supplies to support economies and populations twice as large as the present.
Overgrazing of cattle leads to topsoil erosion, turning once-arable land into desert. We lose four million acres of topsoil each year and eighty-five percent of this loss is directly caused by raising livestock. To replace the soil we've lost, we're destroying our forests. Since 1967, the rate of deforestation in the U. S. has been one acre every five seconds. For each acre cleared in urbanization, seven are cleared for grazing or growing livestock feed.
One-third of all raw materials in the U. S. are consumed by the livestock industry and it takes three times as much fossil fuel energy to produce meat than it does to produce plant foods. A report on the energy crisis in Scientific American warned: "The trends in meat consumption and energy consumption are on a collision course."
Nor can fish provide any help here, notes author Keith Akers, in A Vegetarian Sourcebook. There are signs that the fishing industry (which is quite energy-intensive) has already overfished the oceans in several areas. And fish could never play a major role in the worlds diet anyway: the entire global fish catch of the world, if divided among all the world's inhabitants would amount to only a few ounces of fish per person per week.
The American Dietetic Association reports that throughout history, the human race has lived on "vegetarian or near vegetarian diets," and meat has traditionally been a luxury.
Studies show the healthiest human populations on the globe (the Hunzas of Pakistan, the Vilacambans of Ecuador, and the Abhikasians of the former USSR) live almost entirely on plant foods--useful data, given our skyrocketing healthcare costs.
Nathan Pritikin, author of The Pritikin Plan, recommended not more than three ounces of meat per day; three ounces per week for his patients who had already suffered a heart attack.
Obviously, then, the idea of providing the entire world with a Western diet is quite absurd. But what about satisfying today's demand for meat--which provides only a fraction of the population with a Western-style diet?
If the world population triples in the next 100 years, and meat consumption continues, then meat production would have to triple as well. Instead of 3.7 billion acres of cropland and 7.5 billion acres of grazing land, we would require 11.1 billion acres of cropland and 22.5 billion acres of grazing land.
But this is slightly larger than the total land area of the six inhabited continents! We are desperately short of forests, water and energy already. Even if we resort to extreme methods of population control: abortion, infanticide, genocide, etc...modest increases in the world population would make it impossible to maintain current levels of meat consumption. On a vegetarian diet, however, the world could easily support a population several times its present size.
Again, Gene Roddenberry's depiction of a vegetarian future in Star Trek: The Next Generation, is the antithesis of Soylent Green.
What about 'Defending Yous Life'? I know it's not in the future, but in the afterlife, you can eat all you want and never get full! Or, if you are on a higher intellectual plane, you can eat a brown nasty looking substance and be completely satisfied.
Whenever I hear "Soylent Green," I think of one of the Simpsons Halloween Specials. They're pouring out a cereal box of Solyent Green, which is labeled "Now With More Girls!"
Speaking of #10, it looks like Brawndo is actually coming out. This year. It does have what plants crave, after all.
( via http://www.brawndo.com )
Idiocracy's a revised version of Kormbluth's short story The Marching Morons. Favorite TV show? "Take it and Stick it".