Tales of Future Past v2

Straight from the Hall of Shame of Future Past we give you the food pill. As far back as the 1930s the great hope, or desperate fear, of the future was that the tedious business of eating would be reduced to swallowing a pill. Yes, no more of that cutting, chewing, tasting, swallowing, chatting, belching, relaxing, socialising, and generally enjoying your food. Just get that tablet down your gullet and get going!

Despite the obviously revolting notion of downing your sustenance like vitamins, it kept popping up in smug predictions by kill-joy chemists like Marcellin Berthelot, as a lame, over-extended gag in Just Imagine, and as a prediction of what space food would be like in George Pal's Conquest of Space. In any case, the food pill never came off as an enjoyable substitute for roast beef and Yorkshire pud and made living off energy bars seem like a better choice.

Thank heavens the food pill turned out to be a complete bust. True, you could stuff all the nutrition you'd need in a day into pill form, but to do the job you'd either need a pill the size of a small boiled ham or you'd need to munch on heaping bowls of the things ala an excellent gag on the topic in the late lamented MST3K series.

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