Food pill.

Yesterday I suggested that we might eventually wind up with food pills rather than food, especially if our overlords of the Great Reset have their way. I guess it would be one way for them to realize their dream of getting the peasants to eat bugs. Bugs can be ground up and made into pills, but the ingredients list would not have to say CONTAINS: COCKROACHES -- just the list of proteins and whatnot that go into making cockroaches. 

There was a time when food pills seemed to be the goal of nutritionists, a cure for starvation. If all we needed were X nutrients to survive, why not make a capsule full of X and just swallow that? The Jetsons had a machine that could produce food pills, presumably for when the family was on the go. The Kelvans who took over the Enterprise subsisted on food pills. So it's going to happen one day, right?

NOT SO FAST! says Daniel H. Wilson, Ph.D., in his book Where's My Jetpack?, which I profiled on this site a couple of years ago. He notes that there are useful applications for a minuscule, super-portable source of nutrition, but we're not close to an actual food pill. 

The idea was first seriously proposed in 1893 by suffragette Mary Elizabeth Leese (according to Paleofuture and other sources). No one would have to do the drudgery of cooking in Leese's imagined future of 1993! Pills and potions will handle the lot with fake foods! Huzzah for the freedom of the woman! 

Sounds pretty boring to me. But also, as it turns out, the human body is made to eat actual food. It wants fiber and cells and a balance of solids and liquids to keep running happily. The ideal food pill would still likely leave people as clogged up as toilet full of top soil. I imagine it would have to turn into a bolus of shredded wheat or something in the stomach, like one of those Magic Grow sponge capsules, to give us our daily fiber. 

As usual, this science fiction idea might work fine for some imagined species, but not the human ones. 

So actual food pills look like a pipette dream, so to speak. On the other end of the scale is eating too much, and there we find myself. I have the physique of an athlete. Unfortunately, that athlete is Haystacks Calhoun. 

Maybe some of us could use some food pills instead of eating at Olive Garden, is all I'm saying. But they contain cockroaches, the deal is off. 

Come back Saturday for another take on food intake!