Faux meat in science fiction.
Meat made through cellular agriculture. Proteins fabricated from fermented yeast. Transforming food waste into food sources. Culinary formulas that, like iPhone software, improve with every passing iteration.
The craziest thing about these current advancements in the Bay Area’s booming faux meat industry isn’t that they are happening. No, it’s that science fiction predicted all these developments decades ago, even centuries ago — some to a startlingly accurate degree.
From the replicator-generated food in “Star Trek” to the hauntingly infamous man-made chickens in David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” to the 3D-printed humans of “Westworld,” fake meat has always seemed to hold a place in the imaginations of sci-fi authors and filmmakers. Here are some of the most memorable fake meat moments in pop culture.
— Paolo Lucchesi, plucchesi@sfchronicle.com
“Man who is ceasing to be an agricultural animal becomes more and more a builder, a traveller, and a maker. How much he ceases to be a cultivator of the soil the returns of the Redistribution Committee showed. Every year the work of our scientific laboratories increases the productivity and simplifies the labour of those who work upon the soil, and the food now of the whole world is produced by less than one per cent of its population, a percentage which still tends to decrease ... And the chemists’ triumphs of synthesis, which could now give us an entirely artificial food, remain largely in abeyance because it is so much more pleasant and interesting to eat natural produce and to grow such things upon the soil.”
— H.G. Wells, “The World Set Free” (1914)
Mouse: “That makes you wonder about a lot of things. You take chicken for example. Maybe they couldn’t figure out what to make chicken taste like, which is why chicken tastes like everything! And maybe they couldn’t figure out —” Apoc: “Shut up, Mouse.” Dozer: “It’s a single-celled protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins and minerals. Everything the body needs.”
— “The Matrix” (1999)
“The breakfast began with three bowls of excellent soup, thanks to the liquefaction in hot water of those precious cakes of Liebig, prepared from the best parts of the ruminants of the Pampas. To the soup succeeded some beefsteaks, compressed by an hydraulic press, as tender and succulent as if brought straight from the kitchen of an English eating-house. Michel, who was imaginative, maintained that they were even “red.”
Preserved vegetables (“fresher than nature,” said the amiable Michel) succeeded the dish of meat; and was followed by some cups of tea with bread and butter, after the American fashion.”
— Jules Verne, “From the Earth to the Moon” (1867) “But I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.”
— Sir Andrew, William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” (1601)
“...The beefsteak you thought you ate today was yeast. The frozen fruit confection you had for dessert was iced yeast. We have filtered yeast juice with the taste, appearance, and all the food value of milk.
It is flavor, more than anything else, you see, that makes yeast feeding popular and for the sake of flavor we have developed artificial, domesticated strains that can no longer support themselves on a basic diet of salts and sugar. One needs biotin; another needs pteroylglutamic acid; still others need seventeen different amino acids supplied them as well as all the Vitamins B ...”
— Isaac Asimov, “I, Robot” (1950) Astronaut #1: “Anybody hungry? Astronaut #2: “Ah great! What’ve we got?” Astronaut #1: “You name it.” Astronaut #2: “What’s that, chicken? Astronaut #1: “Something like that. Tastes the same anyway.” Astronaut #3: “Got any ham?” Astronaut #1: “Ham, ham, ham, ham.” Astronaut #3: “There we are, there. Look pretty good.” Astronaut #1: “Well, they’re getting better at it all the time.”
— Characters discuss their “meat” sandwiches in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) “Eat recycled food, for a happier, healthier life. Recycled food: It’s good for the environment and OK for you.”
— Robot PSA in Mega-City One, the dystopian metropolis of “Judge Dredd” (1995)
“This laboratory keeps New York Yeast going. There isn’t one day, not one damned hour, that we haven’t got cultures of every strain of yeast in the company growing in our kettles. We check and adjust the food factor requirements. We make sure it’s breeding true. We twist the genetics, start the new strains and weed them out, sort out their properties and mold them again.
“When New Yorkers started getting strawberries out of season a couple of years back, those weren’t strawberries, fella. Those were a special high-sugar yeast culture with true-bred color and just a dash of flavor additive.”
— Isaac Asimov, “The Caves of Steel” (1953)