Who ordered the meal in a pill?

There's an anime, but I forget the name, where around the time humans went into space, they were separated by males and females so that they're practically two separate species. When they meet again during the time of the anime, they call each other aliens. Anyway, in the anime, the men took in all their food and nutrients in the form of a pill, or I think they showed some of the guys getting a tray full of pills. But a couple of the men were taken prisoner aboard the women's ship, they were amazed at all the prep work the women went through to make all these delicious meals. I think some of the men liked the homecooking and wondered why they even bothered with the pills, but I think some of the other men were a little distrusting of the women and so they only ate their pills. (I'm not too certain on this last part since it's been well over a year since I saw the anime.)

Ooh, I think I might have just remembered the name too. I think it's called Vandred.

In a way, if you could put all the nutritional things that people need into a single pill, people would probably be eating a lot healthier than we are now. But, at the same time, would a single pill really someone fill full? Or would some people OD on food pills just so they could fill full?

Yttar

MadScientistMatt said:

I've always wondered where authors thought the consumer demand was for such a thing.

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Before space travel was a serious possibility, one of the problems writers imagined would be a problem was food. How would they take sufficient quantities of fish and chips (if they were English) or sphagetti (if Italians)? So the best way to get over the problem seemed to be a pill. The only demand would be in the space situation where it was thought there would be no choice.

Another problem is that, as urban sprawl increases the area of land available for the production of food will decrease. Pills might not be satisfying but the alternative isn't appealing either. It's not the only solution to the problem of course but it's a solution.

Consider the background.

It was just a lot harder to get fed in the 1930s (even without the Great Depression). Gas stoves had only been widespread for about twenty years. Microwaves, electric ranges, and packaged foods didn't really exist in any wide-scale consumer form. Canned goods were canned by individual home-makers to preserve their own fruits and vegetables.

In fact, "boarding houses" existed for single folks precisely because they included group meals - preparing food for a lot of people all at once made economic sense in terms of the time and effort involved.

So, if instead of going to a restaurant or boardinghouse, or being a member of a family where you sat down together to eat, you could just take a pill...well, that represented a kind of independence, didn't it?

Major constipation problems!

I have seen it, and my thought was, 'never happen.' Reason? We have a deep psychological connection with food. For humans, it's not just nutrition; we have a deep connection to flavors, textures, the social aspects, and the experience of eating in general. Replacing food with a pill would have an marked psychological impact on us. For soldiers, spacemen, hikers, etc. it may be something, but as an every person every day type of thing? I don't think it is very realistic.

1) The anime is Vandread; cool anime on a lot of levels. (I was debating Gallforce, except the males weren't even human.)

2) The idea actually predates space travel, and even most of the sci-fi that uses it, but not by much. There were a number of cartoons making fun of houses of the future, and extreme dehydrated foods (ie, meals in a pill). I just wish I could remember which cartoon I saw the food pills in first....

FR

yttar said:

There's an anime, but I forget the name, where around the time humans went into space, they were separated by males and females so that they're practically two separate species. When they meet again during the time of the anime, they call each other aliens. Anyway, in the anime, the men took in all their food and nutrients in the form of a pill, or I think they showed some of the guys getting a tray full of pills. But a couple of the men were taken prisoner aboard the women's ship, they were amazed at all the prep work the women went through to make all these delicious meals. I think some of the men liked the homecooking and wondered why they even bothered with the pills, but I think some of the other men were a little distrusting of the women and so they only ate their pills. (I'm not too certain on this last part since it's been well over a year since I saw the anime.)

Ooh, I think I might have just remembered the name too. I think it's called Vandred.

In a way, if you could put all the nutritional things that people need into a single pill, people would probably be eating a lot healthier than we are now. But, at the same time, would a single pill really someone fill full? Or would some people OD on food pills just so they could fill full?

Yttar

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Vandread yes, good anime btw.

Sometimes I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to have meal-in-a-pill. Sometimes you just don't feel like cooking but need to eat something and end up having junk. A pill could contain all the necessary nutrients and such. Besides, who says they can't be tasty? You could have steak flavored pills or creme brulee pills... I always think of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory when the subject comes up. You know those bubblegums that contain a full meal?

I love cooking and eating but often, I'd much rather not have to bother with all the rituals of a meal. But as has been stated, proper meals are important too. We just don't need to have them all the time. Say, dinner is a proper meal but breakfast and lunch are pills? Every household could have its own rules, there's plenty of space for individuality.

MadScientistMatt said:

It's something I have seen in older SF works on occasion - the entire meal condensed into an itsy bitsy tablet. This one always puzzled me - while it seems a lot of the writers somehow thought it was a good thing, the idea always struck me as rather dystophian, some sort of horrible intrusion into the age-old pleasure of eating a nicely prepared meal. As if some of the processed snack foods we have that taste like Nerf balls weren't bad enough.

I've always wondered where authors thought the consumer demand was for such a thing. To be fair, I have seen a few cases where they made sense (an astronaut, or a hiker, or a soldier, for example, all might have a use for this). But some writers depicted these as everyday fare.

Anyone else seen this and thought it was as weird as I thought it was? What other things have you seen in SF that sound like answers to questions nobody asked?

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I think I've seen this thing once, but can't quite remember where. But it was the typical sterile uptight future, I think, you know the ones where everyone wears the same outfit. Even astronauts don't have to put up with the meal in a pill, in today's reality they get to eat better food than that. It could come in handy as part of the astronaut's survival kit though, where the nutritients are important than the overall meal experience. Or perhaps in a dystopian future where the nature itself can't provide with enough food so some large corporation invents a revolutionary meal in a pill.

When I was little, I longed for the meal-in-a-pill, and I still do. I think it's a fantastic idea because of all the time it would save - I could just throw a pill into my mouth and carry on writing / playing / working without interruption. I remember one of the characters in The Lone Gunmen saying it too, in a flashback to when he was a teenager. It was done humorously there, but I think it appeals to people who aren't attached to the rituals and experience of preparing and sitting down to a meal. I do like good food, but if I was given the option of taking a pill-per-meal for the rest of my life, with no real meals ever, I'd jump at it without hesitation.

Asimov also had a pill that would give you a full night's sleep. I was impressed by that way back when I read "Fantastic Voyage".

MadScientistMatt said:

What other things have you seen in SF that sound like answers to questions nobody asked?

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Identical dress for everyone on the planet.

"I Gopher You" (1954)

By 1954, we were already making fun of the dehydrated meal-in-a-box. You can find the cartoon on YouTube.

Ah, Merrie Melodies....

SOLYENT GREEN IS--

Ah, forget it. Pass me the salt.

-Derek

I couldn't think of anything to suggest here, but Willowmound's post reminded me! How come future people always seem to be wearing silver or gray (some sort of muted colorless thing) bodysuits?? Seriously.

I never put much thought into it, but for the meal-in-a-pill, I never assumed it had no flavor or wasn't filling. Maybe there's something in it that stimulates the tastebuds to simulate the taste of a meal, and once it hits the stomach it expands like those little foam toys that come packaged in capsules and expand once you get them wet...?

One thing that always had me puzzled was the "Capsules" from the animes Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. These are basically various objects, including entire vehicles and houses, contained within little capsules that explode and expand when you activate and throw them. Throw the right make of capsule, poof, you have a motorcycle, or a house, fully furnished and everything. I always found myself wondering, what would happen if somebody happened to be in one of those houses when the capsule was deactivated and put back into its tiny container...?

In my head I came up with scenes for a live-action movie based on DBZ and the way Bulma defeats one bad guy on Planet Namek is by trapping him in a capsule house and deactivating it while he's still inside. Smoosh. Maybe one of his arms would be left lying on the ground detached from his body or something. But now I wonder what would happen when the house is reactivated? Would she need to do some cleaning? Or would the bad guy still be alive inside, just without an arm?

Obviously physics don't apply the same way inside the capsules because everything within the house is still intact when it's reactivated. So...oooh my head aches.

I first heard of this in some movie I saw on TV in the 1960's, perhaps an Outer Limits episode, in which people were captured by aliens. The prisoners were instructed "Take one of these pills each. It contains all the nutrients your body needs." The next morning they executed their jailbreak. An alien said "But how did you..." The pills were actually sleeping pills or poison, and the prisoners faked taking them.

Mumut said:

Before space travel was a serious possibility, one of the problems writers imagined would be a problem was food. How would they take sufficient quantities of fish and chips (if they were English) or sphagetti (if Italians)? So the best way to get over the problem seemed to be a pill. The only demand would be in the space situation where it was thought there would be no choice.

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The problem is you can't put enough macronutrients (carbohydrates, protien, fat - the stuff that food mostly consists of) into a pill. You might get enough "micronutrients", vitamins and minerals, into such a pill, but you need more calories than can be put into such a small package. You'll lose weight as if you were fasting, because that would essentially be what you're doing..

You can definitely live on fewer calories that virtually all Western people take in (see CRON, it actually EXTENDS one's lifetime), I think the lower limit is around 1000 to 1200 calories per day. I recall that early travelers to the North Pole lived on things such as butter fat because it's a dense food as far as food calories per weight or volume and they could carry enough with them for the trip, but of course it's far from a "balanced diet."

No doubt NASA has studied this (how to provide good long-term nutrition with the least mass of food) out the wazoo for a trip to Mars which may take months each way. The current residents of the International Space Station may well be on a diet developed for this, as they only receive shipments of food and water every few months or so.

That's another aspect of the ISS that I hadn't thought of before - people HAVE experienced being "locked in a tin can" in space for as long as it would take to go to Mars and back.

Neurotic said:

Another problem is that, as urban sprawl increases the area of land available for the production of food will decrease. Pills might not be satisfying but the alternative isn't appealing either. It's not the only solution to the problem of course but it's a solution.

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This is a quite dystopian setting. I can see where that's the trend (and admittedly that's one aspect of SF, to take things to their "logical conclusion"), but things will have to change big-time for enough urban sprawl to take over substantial land used for food production. Even people starving on Earth today do so usually because their governments divert food shipments (and use free food as an incentive to join the government's army), and in spite of others in the world having enough food for them and having the desire and ability (except when it comes to having to fight a war with their government) to give it to them.

Forget the meal in a pill. I'd love to have the flying car in a suitcase!!

(Thanks, Plot Device, for reminding me of the Jetsons...)

kct webber said:

I have seen it, and my thought was, 'never happen.' Reason? We have a deep psychological connection with food. For humans, it's not just nutrition; we have a deep connection to flavors, textures, the social aspects, and the experience of eating in general. Replacing food with a pill would have an marked psychological impact on us.

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Yeah, but the way psychology is going these days ... they'd have a pill for that.

All medical procedures are non-invasive, and all maladies are curable in tablet/ray form.

I remember this was also parodied with The Observer on Mystery Science Theater 3000. He takes food pills, but needs to consume about 6 bowls of it a la cereal breakfast to get all required vitamins.

Something that bugs me from classic Sci-Fi is the fact that cities doesn't have to actually have history or different ages of fashion and architecture. All shiny buildings and skycrapers, while I considred this quite unrealistic.

maxmordon said:

Something that bugs me from classic Sci-Fi is the fact that cities doesn't have to actually have history or different ages of fashion and architecture. All shiny buildings and skycrapers, while I considred this quite unrealistic.

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Another good observation! Like city planners in the future just razed everything one day and started anew. Now that's a dark history for a "utopian" society.

I've been fascinated with the concept of growing meat for a while now. About four years ago I saw that they started to actually have success.

I can imagine how one day the meat will be grown in space--maybe for the cleanliness of the vacuum, or for the superior growth rate in zero-G--and then shot back down to earth in meat-missiles which will then slam into meat-nets which will capture the meat-pods as well as the kinetic energy from their descent.