Finnish scientists are working on an innovative protein source. (In case you don’t want to click on the link: scientists are making protein flour from CO2, other common elements, electricity [which could come from solar], and bacteria) This process, if successful and scalable, promises some degree of protection against agricultural disruption due to climate change—perhaps even the end of famine.1
I hope this, or something like this, can eventually replace much of modern agriculture, since, according to my math, I think that we are currently doing it all wrong.2 Food being the primary need that it is, it is no surprise that science fiction authors have based plots on new forms of nutrition. Want to guess how many examples follow?
The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H. G. Wells (1904)
Visionary chemist Mr. Bensington, in concert with equally visionary Professor Redwood, gifts a long-suffering world with herakleophorbia IV, a chemical additive that greatly amplifies animal growth. The pair had very specific applications in mind for their creation—British children shall be as gods, towering over their elders!—but thanks to slovenly containment procedures, the benefits of herakleophorbia IV have spread up and down entire food chains. Welcome to a brave new world of behemoth chickens and foot-long wasps.
Unintended vermin issues aside, Wells takes a curiously pessimistic view of the gap between glorious vision and actual implementation. A society of youth giants sounds like a great idea3 but accommodating forty-foot-tall people in a community designed for six-footers will be challenging, to say the least.
The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth (1953)
While Pohl and Kornbluth’s satire is primarily focused on a world in which exuberant advertising-driven capitalism has freed itself from any sort of caution or reason, food production features in one memorable sequence. While in hiding, fugitive star-class copywriter Mitch Courtenay finds himself tending Chicken Little, “a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere (of chicken flesh) some fifteen yards in diameter.” Chicken Little is a vital source of protein for “people from Baffinland to Little America.” Huzzah for progress!
Chicken Little was inspired by Dr. Alexis Carrol’s famous chicken heart experiment, in which Carrol sustained said heart in a flask of his own design for over twenty years. Or at least he said he did. No one has been able to replicate his experiment. Sad news for all of us craving a slice from a VW Beetle-sized hunk of chicken tumor.
“The Food of the Gods” by Arthur C. Clarke (1964)
Synthetic food freed humans from dependence on agriculture. Scientists were able to replicate traditional foods, even to invent tasty new ones. But if there are moral reasons not to eat certain foods (take foie gras as an example), is it moral to eat synthetic foie gras? Are there foods that are even more taboo? Should there be laws against synthetic taboo foods? (I’m doing my best not to give away any spoilers.)
Clarke’s case for synthetic food may seem unconvincing at first glance but the math is quite compelling.4 In contrast to Bensington and Redwood’s invention (and really, quite a lot of SF, where the correct reaction to any innovation is to run screaming), the synthesizers work precisely as intended. The sole hitch with this particular implementation is a simple marketing issue.
Delicious in Dungeon by Ryōko Kui (2014)
While exploring one of the labyrinthine dungeons that dot his world, Laios and his friends are attacked by a red dragon. They are saved by Laios’ sister Falin. Even as she herself was being consumed, Falin teleported her brother and friends to safety. Falin can still be saved… if the group can track down the dragon, kill it, and resurrect Falin before she is completely digested. The sticking point is food, of which the group has little. Or perhaps they are surrounded by an abundance food, if they can bring themselves to consider the monsters of the dungeon as food.
No matter how catastrophic the events in each volume of this ongoing manga, the author always finds time to detail how precisely the party cooks their latest repast. To read this fantasy adventure manga is to be perpetually peckish.
NoFood by Sarah Tolmie (2015)
Total Gastric Bypass liberated the wealthy from the demands of their digestive systems. They are fed by alternate means and no longer need to consume real food. Is this the end of high-end restaurants? Not if you believe the visionaries behind the exclusive eatery known as NoFood.
This collection of satirical pieces explores a world in the rich get what they want even if it isn’t a good idea. Isn’t that the world towards which we should all be working?
I’m sure there are other works that mention alternative nutrition. If you know of any noteworthy examples, please mention them in comments… which are, as ever, below.
- Now, some will assert passionately that there’s more to food than simple utilitarian nutritional and ecological goals. Fair enough. But if the manner in which you tackle the problem doesn’t tackle first order concerns, secondary issues won’t matter. ↩︎
- This will require some easy grade-school math: Each human requires about 100 watts in suitable chemical bonds to function. 8 billion people at 100 watts each works out to 800,000,000,000 watts. On average, each square meter of the Earth receives about 240 watts from the sun. We can get the necessary 800,000,000,000 watts from a mere 3,000,000,000 square meters, or a square plot of land, 55 × 55 kilometers. That’s assuming 100 percent efficiency. If we posit a mere ten percent efficiency, we would only need a plot of land 175 × 175 kilometers. Yet our current agricultural methods are so incredibly inefficient that we have had to reshape vast swaths of whole continents simply to feed ourselves. Glass half-full assessment: we have lots of room for improvement. Go team human! ↩︎
- I can’t really think of any good reason to supersize humans, but then I’m not an entrepreneur. Presumably there would be new markets for supersized clothing, houses, etc. ↩︎
- Or would be if there was any math. For some reason, Clarke opted not to bring his story to a complete halt with a page of equations. Which reminds me, have I mentioned any Fred Hoyle novels recently? ↩︎
I am truly surprised not to see at least one of these mentioned:
* Donald Kingsbury, Courtship Rite
* T. J. Bass, Half Past Human
* Damon Knight, “To Serve Man”
Probably less well known but memorable to me, not the least because of its title:
* D. C. Poyer, “The Report of the All-Union Committee on Recent Rumours Concerning the Moldavian SSR”
H Beam Piper had vats full of cultured meat (“carniculture”)supplying his spaceships and similar habitats with protein.
Soylent Green is delicious!
Of course! It’s made from soy and lentils.
The link for Clarke’s “Food of the Gods” went to a book called “The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke,” but the picture is of a book called “The Wind From the Sun”? Is that correct?
@@.-@: The story in question appears in both The Wind From the Sun and the complete Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (but IndieBound only has a link for the latter)–you can take your pick!
@3. I’d be very disappointed if no one mentioned soylant green
Though to be honest, I prefer the fantasy side of SFF. Give me a hobbit hole with a well-stocked larder any day and I’ll be a happy dope😂 😎
Protein source from Co2? or CO2?
The difference between a capital or lower case “O” is cobalt (Co) or carbon and oxygen (CO).
I am assuming it is supposed to be CO2, carbon dioxide., since cobalt would not generate something edible for people.
@Rickkard David: Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!!
I’m faintly astonished that no one’s brought up the butterbugs from Bujold’s A Civil Campaign yet. I’ve maintained since I first read that book that the butterbugs as described violate the traditional rules regarding conservation of energy, though I’m very much in the minority on that point. This essay’s interest in doing the actual math makes me curious as to what said math (not remotely one of my expertises) might have to say about said butterbugs….
I dunno, their need to eat a lot of Earth-descended organic matter is a (minor) plot point. They just have a bacterial synthesis suite that converts a great deal of what they eat into something they don’t themselves use.
(And… look out, not all our food may come from solid objects: it seems plausible that middle-age spread may at least partially be explained by the Krebs cycle running partly in reverse as complex I of the electron-transport chain gums up with age, leading to us converting carbon dioxide more or less directly into (excess) lipids, just like plants: at least it seems to work that way in mice. Source: Nick Lane’s Transformer, so as usual with his stuff it’s right out of the lab and may well be obsolete by the time I write this.)
@8 MissAnna: And? But? So? Therefore?
@8 – I heard from the government they are just nutritious crackers. Don’t be so alarmist!
LOL
This discussion also calls to mind the bars used in the lower class sections in the Snowpiercer movie. Ew.
Surely one must eat stew or roast an aurochs
@9 I’m not certain butterbugs are any less implausible than, say, honeybees; but then, I am not a entomologist
Since Bujold has been mentioned, I’d also point out that in many of the worlds of the Nexus, most meat is vat-grown rather than live (Barrayar and possibly Athos being the notable exceptions). This was probably for practical reasons for space-based societies like Kline Station and Quaddiespace, as well as planets that don’t have much in the way of farmland, like Beta Colony, but also seemed to be the rule for planets with plentiful farmland as well. Which implies perhaps different (better?) ethical and health standards.
Food from bacteria (modified for flavour and texture) was also a major source in Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, in order to feed Earth’s billions.
Going back to Fred Pohl, the Gateway novels had Earth getting food from hydrocarbon processing, leading to Robinette Broadhead’s early “career” as a food shale miner.
The Clarke conundrum also appears in John Varley’s Eight Worlds, under the trade name bananameat.
In Jack Vance’s Wyst: Alastor 1716, everyone takes turns working a few hours a week in the factories which produce enough nutritious gruff, deedle, and wobbly to keep everyone alive but not particularly happy. People spend most of their time off dreaming of more interesting food, or scheming of ways to obtain it.
In Amazon Prime’s Upload food is 3d printed for the masses and only the wealthy can afford “non printed” food.
If we go back a bit, there’s always the Shmoo, featured many times in the Li’l Abner comic strip. A beast that existed, and desired, only to be eaten, with every part of it either edible or useful. It only required air for life.
Your opening sentence about the Finnish research reminds me of a book I read decades ago, which took the view that some of the ancient Jewish texts about the Ark of the Covenant were actually a pre-industrial attempt to describe an alien-supplied food machine powered by a micro-reactor.
I think that it might have been called ‘The Manna Machine’, and I’ve wondered to this day whether it was written as pure fiction or as speculation. (And HAH, Wikipedia confirms the title and in fact implies the latter.)
The Warhammer 40,000 version of Soylent Green is called “corpse starch”, which annoys me because starch only comes from plants.
Isaac Asimov’s “Good Taste”
Larry Niven’s “Assimilating Our Culture, That’s What They’re Doing!”
…oh, and then there’s Douglas Adams Dish of the Day…
I’d love to throw in Roald Dahl’s “Pig” as well, but it isn’t SF
Geoff Ryman’ ‘The Child Garden’ has humans genetically engineered to top up their nutritional needs via photosynthesis (but using a rhodopsin variant rather than chlorophyll so they are purple, not green)
Wiredog @2 mentioned Piper’s carniculture vats. A. Bertram Chandler had something similar in his John Grimes stories, though they rarely come up.
Lakesidey @20 beat me to the Niven story. I couldn’t remember the title anyway, just that it was a Draco Tavern story.
Harry Turtledove’s “The R Strain” asks whether certain edge cases might be kosher. There’s also a fairly disturbing Mike Resnick story about genetically modified meat animals, though the title escapes me.
The video game The Outer Worlds features cystypigs, which grow large tumors on their skin that are then lopped off and used in processed foods.
@9 Technically the citizens of the Caves of Steel got their nutrition from yeast, not bacteria.
Asimov goes into more detail in his earlier novel Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus.
@22 I think the Resnick story you’re thinking of is “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”
@23: Ah, yeast! It’s been some years since I read *The Caves of Steel* and I misremembered. Thanks for the correction! (Though my comment number was 14, not 9.)
There was a short story about an opportunity to join a galactic federation. There’s just one catch– even though we’ll have access to wonderful advanced tech (possibly including immortality), we’ll have to live completely on artificial food (possibly on light) because anything we’d usually eat resembles an alien enough to be upsetting. I think a loaf of bread resembled the young of some species.
Diplomats turned the offer down.
For Soylent Green, I think the true end of the story was all too accurately shown in the comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal in https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-10-03
Especially the “People are asking” press conference near the end.
There was a story I’m blanking on, in which a space colony had an artificial “cow” named Bossie which generated unlimited amounts of milk and liver. People appreciated the milk but were sick and tired of liver being served in the commissary.
@28
Robert Silverberg (as by Calvin M. Knox) wrote that, the title is”Hi Diddle Diddle!” (Feb 1959 ASF). There was a sequel (“The Calibrated Alligator”), but Bossie wasn’t featured.
There is also The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress where inmates in the Moon are mining water and growing wheat to be shipped to Earth.
I think there’s an alien dinner party in “The War of the Worlds”, or maybe only in the “Marvel Classics Comics” version. Anyway, you had that author already.
There’s the scene in E. E. Smith’s “Skylark Three” where the planet Norlamin gives the visitors from Earth a new super spaceship. “Many compartments were for the storage of food-supplies, and these were even then being filled by forces under the able direction of the first of Chemistry. ‘All the comforts of home, even to the labels,’ Seaton grinned, as he read ‘Dole No. 1’ upon cans of pineapple which had never been within thousands of light-years of the Hawaiian Islands, and saw quarter after quarter of fresh meat going into the freezer room from a planet upon which no animal other than man had existed for many thousands of years.” Like they read his mind… which as I recall, they did. And no! They aren’t putting people into the larder! (But it’s a while since I read all of it.)
And… what else was I going to mention…
@29 Thank you for pinning that down. I found that issue of ASF in the Internet Archive. They don’t have the issue with “The Calibrated Alligator”, though. Doing a bit of digging turns up a cover image of The Calibrated Alligator and Other Stories, which looks distinctively familiar; I’m sure I’ve read it. But I could have sworn that the story I remember included the lunar base people being sick and tired of eating liver, which isn’t in the original story.
I don’t see why butterbugs would violate conservation laws. They eat high-energy biomass and excrete a somewhat lower-energy biomass.
For creative food endeavors there’s Clarke’s _The Deep Range_. Whale farming!
I think Babylon-5’s spoo deserve a mention, from https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Spoo
‘They travel in herds, usually moving approximately 15cm in a given direction during the course of the year, and are noted for emitting a sound rather like a collective sigh, which has been known to induce unparalleled bouts of depression in spoo ranchers. Uniquely, the Interstellar Animal Rights Protection League’s official policy towards the treatment and well being of spoo is simply “Kill ’em.”‘
A seriously unbalanced diet.
There is, in fact, a B5 cookbook, Dining On Babylon-5. Some of the recipes are actually quite good though, sadly, we must substitute scallops for the delectable spoo.
@22 – One of Harlan Ellison’s stories – I think the title was Spacebird – had a giant bird crash and die in New York, immediately attracting the attention of the sanitation department, the Mob, tourists, etc. etc. One of the groups that turns up is a bunch of rabbis, who immediately start debating if it’s kosher or not.
Heinlein has a scene in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where a Jewish character, the hero’s philosophical and political mentor, pretends to believe that ham is salmon so that he can eat it without guilt. This proves to me that the character is a habitual liar, which probably wasn’t what Heinlein intended.
There are presumably similar stories for Catholics and meat v fish on alien worlds, Moslems and halal, etc.
One of the game settings I wrote for Forgotten Futures was based on Stanley Weinbaum’s SF, which had edible alien life including things that seemed to be plant-animal hybrids on several worlds. I did actually think to mention the possible religious implications in some sidebar text under the heading It’s Life, Jim… But Is It Kosher? I managed to get three religions into a fairly short passage, which amused me a bit.
https://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff11/html/ffxi.htm#152
One of James White’s Sector General novels is Galactic Gourmet wherein the aforementioned gourmet takes on the Herculean task of making hospital food palatable for multiple species. It being a James white story, he eventually succeeds in spite of himself.
@36: ‘”Prof is semi-vegetarian”‘ but then asks for ‘”That pink salmon,” […] pointing at ham.’
In one episode of Babylon 5, a visiting rabbi is concerned about whether some alien meat is kosher. He decided to eat it since it wasn’t mentioned in the Torah.
Is the Space Merchants where the cultured chicken is called Henrietta (presumably after Henrietta Lacks)?
I remember reading a story where occasional slices are carved off Henrietta (and do I remember right that each starship has their own?) but I haven’t been able to find it again.
On a slightly different note, if Qorn is actually tasty, that seems like a more interesting solution to me, personally. I’ve never visited a country where it is sold though, so that’s just speculation on my part.
Quorn is a little like tofu/bean curd in that it doesn’t taste of that much, but will absorb flavours readily. It has a far firmer texture than the firmest tofu, with enough resistance to require chewing.
Chicken Little is now a thing. It’s always nice when reality finally catches up with SF. https://www.the-scientist.com/bio-business/cultured-meat-advances-toward-the-market-69616#.Y4AZxANDg3Z.mailto
Douglas Adams’ Mostly Harmless had the Perfectly Normal Beast. It was Perfectly Normal. Arthur Dent made sandwiches from the Perfectly Normal Beasts’ flesh.
Nancy Kress’ Beggars Trilogy had people absorbing nutrients from soil(?) I think. EDIT before posting: resulting from Bio-Augmentation through Change syringes. End EDIT.
I think i last read either years ago so i might have gotten some bits wrong. EDIT before posting: except for edited parts. End EDIT.
Adam Roberts’ By Light Alone is an obvious candidate, set in a near future where a genetic modification enables humans to photosynthesis nutrition via their hair, enabling them to live without food indefinitely… so long as they have long hair and access to sunshine. Rather than leading to a world of peace and plenty this results in a vast population living in absolute poverty while a rich minority flaunt their wealth by shaving their heads and eating ‘real’ food. The photosynthesis provides only just enough to live on and fails to provide enough nutrients for mothers to bring a baby to full term without at least some physical food. A young girl is kidnapped from a rich New York family and is eventually tracked down – or is she? It’s a challenging read filled with bleak scenes and characters who are hard to empathise with, but it is fascinating.
By coincidence I read a piece this morning in The Guardian about “precision fermentation” where microbes bred on hydrogen or methanol can be used to produce nutritious, protein-rich foodstuffs.(Mmm, yummy.) It has very low water requirements compared to conventional food production and the hydrogen feedstock can be produced in a climate-neutral way if you have large amounts of solar power available – so it’s well suited to areas of the world where water is in short supply, soil quality is poor, and sunlight is plentiful.
It’s being touted as a solution to food shortages and food security issues and a way to tackle the environmental and climate change impact of big agriculture. What could possibly go wrong? Sounds like a starting point for another SF novel…
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/24/green-technology-precision-fermentation-farming
38: I don’t have any reason to think Prof in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is Jewish. Did I miss something? Also note that many Jews don’t keep kosher.
I think the joke about the pink salmon/ham is just about being a vegetarian/pescitarian.
I don’t think Prof would have inhibitions about lying, especially about things that aren’t important, and was still a pretty ethical person.
The Sol Majestic by Ferrett Steinmetz is a fine sf novel about a gourmet restaurant in space.
@44 – I agree with you re: Prof not being Jewish, and being loose about his vegetarianism.
@36: the story is “Street Scene” (collaboration with Keith Laumer); it was called “Dunderbird” when it first appeared, but odds are that was the editor overruling the authors.
Vinsentient @@@@@ 39: I don’t think Henrietta Lacks was known then. Presumably Henrietta as an elaboration of Hen. (Or am I missing a joke? It would not be the first time, alas.)
One of John Sladek’s “Fifteen Utopias” features a society which has solved the problems of both food shortage and excessive waste, by re-engineering human gut bacteria so that the lucky recipients can digest garbage. “White sidewall? Or dark?”
I believe that a chunk of the chicken heart went along for the ride in Methuselah’s Children.
Re Footnote No. 2: Solitude by Ursula Le Guin examines the aftermath of a planetary culture choosing to do pretty much that (among other choices they make). It works wonderfully, enabling the culture to pack every suitable square meter of land with dwelling places while the super-efficient farms feed the planet.
Some generations later, their sparse descendants live in the overgrown remnants of these super-efficient farms and tell their children cautionary stories about centralization, regimentation, and other bad ideas that lead a group to (among other choices) voluntarily reduce their entire food production system to a few load-bearing points of failure.