Many Americans celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow will have a meal centered aroundBen Franklin ’s favorite bird — the turkey . But if this sketch from the September 19 , 1926 Ogden Standard - Examiner had test prescient , the Thanksgiving repast of the 21st century would ’ve been alone pill - based .
The turn of the 20th century wreak a whole host of predictions about the future tense of meat intake and solid food interpersonal chemistry in the United States . Whether borne of aMalthusianfear that the earth plainly could not support a growing universe , or a repulsion at the conditions of both butchery and the mean American kitchen , the future tense of food was figure by many prognosticators as solely meatless and often man-made .
In an 1894 McClure ’s magazine piece called “ Foods in the Year 2000″ ProfessorMarcelin Berthelotpredicted that chemistry would completely supervene upon factory farm in providing humans the sustenance they involve :
pale yellow fields and corn fields are to go away from the brass of the earthly concern , because flour and meal will no longer be grown , but made . Herds of cattle , flock of sheep , and droves of swine will cease to be bred , because beef and mutton and pork will be make up direct from their elements . Fruit and prime will doubtless go forward to be grow as gimcrack ornamental luxuries , but no longer as necessities of food or ornament . There will be in the great air trains of the future no grain or cattle or ember cars , because the rudimentary food elements will survive everywhere and require no transportation . Coal will no longer be dig , except perhaps with the target of transforming it into bread or meat . The engines of the great food factories will be driven , not by artificial combustion , but by the underlying heating of the world .
Likewise , the March 29 , 1895 newspaper Homestead ( Des Moines , IA ) pen that , “ a so purely practical man as Edison has indulged in prophesies of a clock time to come when Department of Agriculture shall be no more , and when the beefsteak of the future shall be the ware of the chemist alternatively of that of the feeder and live - stock grower . ”
Synthetic solid food was also seen as a possible liberator of woman from the kitchen . In 1893 feministMary E. Lease , a vegetarian , advocated that food for thought be synthesized in science laboratory for both the benefit of cleaning lady and fauna . She predicted that by 1993 the slaughterhouses would be converted into “ hothouse and beds of bloom of youth . ”
A January 11 , 1914 article in the Anaconda Standard ( Anaconda , Montana ) was titled “ How thing Will Be in the Twenty - First Century ” and take that the era would be entirely meat - free .
Cooking , perhaps , will not be done at any large exfoliation at household … and cookery will be a much less disgusting appendage than it is now . We shall not do most of our cooking by such a wasteful and unwholesome method as boiling , whereby the important soluble salts of nearly all food are shake off away . As animal nutrient will have been wholly abandon before the goal of this 100 , the debris of the kitchen will be much more manageable than at present .
Interestingly , that last cable come out to have been plagiarized from Baron Russell . The March 17 , 1907 Washington Post put out an article from the Chicago Tribune titled “ How Our Progeny Will Live One Hundred Years Hence . ” The piece get hold of prevision from Russell , who wrote a book in 1905 titledA Hundred Years Hence . Russell imagines a worldly concern of melodic phrase purifier , automatic dishwasher , zero crime , and vegetarians .
While envisioning the kitchens of the future , Russell also note that metropolis construction will be so eminent that there wo n’t be sufficient sunshine for people and vegetation below . The solution ? hokey electric light which is capable of get life story .
Cooking perhaps will not be done at all on any large scale at home . At any rate it will be a much less disgusting operation than it is to - daylight . In no casing will the domestic servant of a hundred years hence be called upon to put up by a roar fire laid by herself and to be cleaned up by herself when done with so as to wangle the fellowship dinner party . Every measure of heat will be furnished in electrically fitted receptacle with or without water jackets or steam crownwork , and unquestionably all cookery will be done in hermetically unsympathetic watercraft .
sensual food will have been wholly desolate before the end of the century , the debris of the kitchen will be much more doable than at present , and the kitchen cesspit will cease to be a place of unreachable loathsomeness . Dishes and utensils will be dropped into an machinelike receptacle for cleanup , twirl by fresh water give birth with force and charged with nascent oxygen , dry out by electric heat , and down by electrical violence . And all that has come off the plate will overlook through the scullery floor into the destructor beneath to be aerate and made away with .
All apartment in metropolis houses will contain an oxygenator , which will render purer air than the air of the wise countryside . And in bedrooms at least there will be a chemic apparatus which will suck carbon dioxide and at the same time slow give off a certain amount of atomic number 8 — just enough to raise the oxygenation of the airwave to the standard of the best country places . like appliances will be at study in the streets , so that townsfolk air will be just as wholesome , just as tonic and quicken as country air .
Since the high buildings of the future wil keep out the sun , electric light source , carrying an all the electron beam activity of the sunshine and just as adequate to of foster life and vegetation , will serve the street . Thus so far as hygiene run short , town aliveness will be on a equation with land living .
The absolutely captivating 2006 bookMeals to descend : A History of the Future of Foodby Warren Belasco elaborates further on the hope and fears of the era :
Similarly , in 1893 the first U.S. Secretary of Agriculture , Jeremiah Rusk , forecast that improvements in conventional land could increase yield six times — perhaps enough to feed even a billion Americans by 1990 .
Rusk ’s assessment was part of a serial of across the country syndicate newspaper newspaper column designed to transmit the largely cornucopian spirit of the 1893 World ’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago . Most of the series ’ seventy - four experts confidently assumed that modern technologies — ranging from schematic come survival of the fittest to that science fiction favorite , the repast - in - a - oral contraceptive pill — could easily tip the 150 million Americans ask in 1993 ( literal : 256 million ) .
This military post in the beginning appear atSmithsonian.com
paleofuture
Daily Newsletter
Get the best tech , science , and culture intelligence in your inbox daily .
tidings from the time to come , delivered to your present tense .
Please take your desired newssheet and submit your email to upgrade your inbox .
You May Also Like
