Magazine
Desk
| May 4, 2003, Sunday
STYLE; The
Futures of Food
By Michael Pollan (NYT) 1988 words
Late Edition - Final , Section 6 ,
Page 63 , Column 1
LEAD PARAGRAPH
- When I was a kid growing up in the early
60's, anybody could have told you exactly
what the future of food was going to look
like. We'd seen ''The Jetsons,'' toured the
1964 World's Fair, tasted the culinary
fruits (or at least fruit flavors) of the
space program, and all signs pointed to a
single outcome: the meal in a pill, washed
down, perhaps, with next-generation Tang.
The general consensus seemed to be that
''food'' -- a word that was already
beginning to sound old-fashioned -- was
destined to break its surly bonds to Nature,
float free of agriculture and hitch its
future to Technology. If not literally
served in a pill, the meal of the future
would be fabricated ''in the laboratory out
of a wide variety of materials,'' as one
contemporary food historian predicted,
including not only algae and soybeans but
also petrochemicals. Protein would be
extracted directly from fuel oil and then
''spun and woven into 'animal' muscle --
long wrist-thick tubes of 'fillet steak.' ''
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