Future Food

Want to see a predication fly clean over the mark, veer to the left and auger into a stone wall? Then consider the case for future food. Look at any of the prognostications about what the Dinner of Tomorrow would be like and you'd probably find something on the order of the Soylent Green factory on the left. Whether the raw material was people, soy, or chemicals, the end product was something that looked suspiciously like floppies and tasted about the same.
Granted, there are any number of microwave meals that are indistinguishable from the packaging, but that's the fault of convenience rather than necessity and it's equally possible to get a meal that's more like the dinner above that used to be served aboard Concorde. In fact, if you walk into any supermarket you'll see something that just about everyone missed: overwhelming abundance and staggering choices. Whether the future was going to be one of rationing or full bellies, the one thing that both the optimists and pessimists agreed on in the area of food was that the exploding population of the Earth would mean that even in the wealthiest countries people would be relying on synthetic foods for most of their calories. I mean, once the United States reached a population of 200 million what choice would they have but to make steaks out of coal tar? No one imagined that the 21st century would be a time when obesity would be a major public health issue, food shortages would be more a matter of corrupt governments instead of absolute shortages, or that the average shopper in industrialised nations would be faced with sixteen varieties of apples to select from year 'round.