There’s a pop-sci-fi trope that the food of the future is a nutritional sludge that is tasteless or unpleasant but meets or your health needs. The truth is likely to be somewhat opposite. Nutritional sludge could be made somewhat tasty, with inexpensive flavor science — like processed foods today. But it would probably not be healthy, because making healthy foods from elementary ingredients turns out to be a much harder problem than previously believed. You could have a sludge that was rich in the macronutrients believed to be essential, but that doesn’t and may never measure up to “real food.”
People subsisting on nutritional sludge might survive but find themselves feeling out of it in various ways etc. I don’t know if there’s any real science on this. . . .
Yeah, this seems obvious to me. The trope is surely related to visions of the future as sleek and clean. But in the same way that people will always like “dirty” (to some extent) sex, we will always like “dirty” actual food.
We may get the nutritional component down some day (i.e., the sludge would be “good enough” that one could subsist solely on it and not have any real health issues as a result), but I can’t imagine it could be more satisfying than a correspondingly healthy meal of real food. And therein lies the kicker — I’m inclined to believe that there would be such a meal, because I doubt most fruits, grains, and vegetables inherently contain nutritionally undesirable elements if consumed in moderation (i.e., are there any material downsides to eating an apple a day?). And if they do, we could probably genetically engineer them out if we’re technologically advanced enough to make the sludge. So why would anyone make the sludge their staple meal (setting aside cost issues and the like)? It (or specifically optimized variants) would probably be used to make futuristic Clif Bars and the like.
If you’re a gastronomer, then I’m a fucking gustatator.
Is that a foul breeze I smell, or is someone just being a blowhard?
Fancy _you_ leveling the charge of blowhardiness, Bunghole.
Grobstein, since when did your blog become such a wretched hive of scum and villainy?