Paleo-futurist Matt has uncovered a strange cartoon about synthetic food from a 1926 issue of the Ogden City Examiner, a Utah paper. The idea that food would one day come in pill form became a popular notion around the turn of last century, and apparently the author of this cartoon thought the idea was still slap-your-knee hilarious. I wonder when people stopped thinking that it would be really cool to eat food pills? I'm pretty sure the movie Soylent Green was some kind of early protest against what one 1890s commentator called "chemical food." These days, when people imagine futuristic foods, they don't really mention pills – they talk mostly about genetically-engineered crops and factory farms. I guess the GMO tomato is the "synthetic food" of our time.
