FOOD SCIENCE- FACTS AND FICTION

A significant area of applied biology; it is a subdivision of biotechnology in the wider definitions of that term. The technological manipulation of food and its supply was the principal motor of human evolution in prehistoric times, expressed in cooking, agriculture, and animal husbandry, and it remained a key factor in subsequent technological revolutions.

The new technologies that laid the foundations for the Renaissance included windmills and watermills, whose primary function was to make flour for bread, and the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought about dramatic increases in agricultural productivity that were further enhanced by the advent of tractors and combine harvesters. In the meantime, primitive food technologies—especially the use of spices to render bad meat palatable—played a major role in stimulating trade and navigation. The expansion of geographical knowledge and colonisation were both motivated by the demands of food technology, and the discovery of new food crops was a major factor in determining dramatic shifts in population such as those seen in Ireland as potatoes were introduced and then blighted. The term ‘‘food science’’ only came into common usage in the twentieth century, however, when major food producers began to devote considerable budgets to disciplined goal-orientated research.
The theoretical aspect of food science is the study of nutrition, pioneered in the 1880s by Wilbur Olin Atwater, who placed experimental subjects in respiration chambers in order to measure the energy values of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. The dietary recommendations he published—designed to maximise calorie intake at minimum cost—seem absurd today, not so much because he had no knowledge of vitamins as because the modern priorities in developed nations have been reversed, the emphasis being on weight control rather than weight gain.
The same reversal of priority has been the central factor in determining sweeping changes in fictional representations of food. In pre–twentieth-century fiction, bread is a key symbol of life while most other foodstuffs are emblems of luxury; meat is a continual bone of contention between the upper and lower classes, reflected in the abundant literature of hunting and the relatively meagre literature of poaching. In the late twentieth century, by contrast, food becomes a significant bugbear in a great deal of contemporary fiction; in the modern Underworld, the descendants of Tantalus—especially the female ones—are given perfectly free access to their rations, their torment being calculated in corpulence and cellulite.
This inversion was largely unanticipated in early Utopian fiction, which routinely saw improvements in food supply as a fundamental key to the good life, but anxieties began to creep into late nineteenth-century speculative fiction. Synthetic food is the key to liberation from labour in Maurice Spronck’s "An 330 de la Republique" (1894), as it had been in John Macnie’s "The Diothas" (1883; by-lined Ingmar Thiussen), but in the later work it leads to obesity and listlessness rather than "Utopia".

 A similar product has equally unfortunate results in Daniel Hale´vy’s "Histoire de quatre ans, 1997–2001" (1903), while William Caine and John Fairbairn’s satire "The Confectioners" (1906) satirises new food technology in a wholesale manner.
Other writers were content to object to the idea of synthetic food—and technologically processed food in general—on the grounds of taste. In one of the most extravagant of all benign disaster stories, Henri Allorge’s "Le Grand Cataclysme (1922), the hero and heroine—having been raised on synthetic food—are as delighted to rediscover joys of meat and fruit as any true Frenchman and Frenchwoman would be. Robert Barr’s ‘‘Within an Ace of the End of the World’’ (1900)—in which so much nitrogen is removed from the air by the Great Food Corporation Ltd. that the world becomes drunk on oxygen—is a rare example of idea-based ‘‘food science fiction’’.
J. B. S. Haldane’s "Daedalus" (1923) looked forward enthusiastically to the day when the world’s food problems would be solved at a stroke—a sentiment echoed in other futurological projects such as J. P. Lockhart-"Mummery’s After Us"; or, "The World As It Might Be" (1936)—but his sister, Naomi Mitchison, took leave to differ in "Not by Bread Alone" (1983). On the other hand, some satirically inclined writers wondered whether new synthetic foods might be so much more efficient than natural ones as to provide a ticket to superhumanity. Notable examples include Alfred Jarry’s "Le Surmale" (1901; trans. as "The Supermale") and H. G. Wells’ "The Food of the Gods", and "How It Came to Earth" (1904).
The ready-made analogy between such foods and familiar mythical devices, such as the Classical ambrosia and the Biblical manna that fed the Children of Israel in the desert, encouraged the endowment of such improving foods to take on a moral dimension, as in John Gloag’s "Manna" (1940) and Peter Phillips’ "Manna" (1949). In Aubrey Menen’s "The Fig Tree" (1959), biotechnologically originated giant fruits turn out to have aphrodisiac side effects.

Concerns about the adulteration of processed food were a significant early manifestation of the Frankenstein complex. The U.S. Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906 was a belated response to public agitation, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) set up in 1927 to administer it eventually became one of the most fearsome bureaucratic institutions in the United States. The first major concern of the disciplined investigation launched by the 1906 Act was food preservation, whose traditional methods—including the salting of meat, the pickling of vegetables, and the dehydration of grains—had been technologically augmented in the early nineteenth century by bottling and canning.
Nicholas Appert published a guide to food bottling in 1810, although he was unable to explain why heating the food in advance delayed its decomposition. Peter Durand patented the idea of using cans instead of bottles, tin-plated steel containers being pioneered in the United States by William Underwood in 1819. The solder initially used to seal cans was eliminated by a new closure technique in the first decade of the twentieth century, by which time Pasteur’s germ theory of disease had explained that heating food in sealed containers prevented its decomposition by killing bacteria (which became known as pasteurisation in consequence). Microbiological theory also provided the foundations for a better understanding of the fermentation processes involved in pickling and the manner in which salts and acids operated in other kinds of preserves.
Refrigeration was introduced as a preservative technology in the late nineteenth century but was greatly improved by the flash-freezing methods pioneered by Clarence Birdseye in the 1920s and was combined with dehydration with the development of vacuum-assisted freeze-drying techniques in the 1930s. Chemical methods of preservation were continually augmented as organic chemistry progressed and the preservative effects of such compounds as benzoates, propionates, and glycols were explored. Irradiation was first developed as a food preservation technology in the 1960s, although it did not become widespread until the 1980s. Food storage technology also made further improvements with the development of plastic containers and clingfilm wrap.

As with so many other life-transforming technologies, this sequence of development was almost invisible in history and literature, save for suspicious cautionary tales in the tradition launched by mid-nineteenth-century urban legends of street urchins who made a living supplying restaurants with stray cats, and the related tale of the "demon barber" Sweeney Todd—told in Thomas Peckett Prest’s "The String of Pearls" (1846)— who assisted his neighbour Mrs. Lovett to produce "the best pork pies in London".
Another significant range of additives pioneered in the nineteenth century were dyes, whose reckless use in the wake of the advent of organic chemistry increased the necessity of the U.S. regulatory system established in 1906. Anxiety regarding the safety of additive dyes limited their use in the latter part of the century, some countries banning them entirely. Other additives are used to alter the texture of foods, particularly fats and "fat substitutes" derived by the hydrogenation of natural oils. This range of technologies eventually brought about a revolution in preliminary food processing that facilitated the growth of "fast food" restaurants in the latter half of the twentieth century. Foods preprocessed for rapid domestic preparation became increasingly sophisticated and popular in the same period, following the initial marketing of "TV dinners" in the mid-1950s.
Technological alterations of the composition of foodstuffs advanced in step with the development of new devices employed in cooking. The transformation of kitchens was a major evolutionary feature of twentieth-century domestic technology, greatly assisted by the applications of electricity. The electric toaster, introduced in 1909, was followed by a continual stream of gadgets, including increasingly sophisticated food mixers and devices for making tea and coffee, climaxing in the 1970s with the introduction of microwave ovens, sandwich machines, deep fryers, grilling machines, and juicers.

The latter developments were extensively reflected in twentieth-century naturalistic fiction, albeit indirectly; precisely because they are matters of everyday routine, food acquisition and food preparation are inherently undramatic. When food is foregrounded as a fictional topic, the actual foodstuffs tend to be conspicuously exotic, as in the description of Trimalchio’s feast in Petronius’ "Satyricon" (ca. 60 a.d.), or symbolic, as in such works as Isak Dinesen’s "Babette’s Feast" (1950; film, 1987) and T. F. Powys’ "Come and Dine" (written ca. 1930; published 1967). From the viewpoint of writers of action-adventure fiction, the obligation to supply characters with food often becomes a nuisance, discharged in blatantly tokenistic fashion. Diana Wynne Jones’ "Tough Guide to Fantasyland" (1996) comments sarcastically on the ever-presence of anonymous ‘‘stew’’ in the Secondary Worlds of commodified fantasy.
There is, inevitably, greater scope for the literary imagination in starvation than satiation, as evidenced by Knut Hamsun’s "Sult" (1890; trans. as "Hunger'). For similar reasons, speculative fiction paid little attention to developments in food science as they occurred, although the instant preparation of preprocessed food is a common background item in pulp science fiction, routinely extrapolated to the extreme of imagining all nutriment being taken in the form of pills. This notion, blithely neglectful of the aesthetic component of eating, was not so much a symptom of entrenched utilitarian attitudes as an appreciation of an opportunity to do away with the burdensome aspects of the authorial obligation to provide meals for fictional instruments.
Serendipitous discoveries of convenient food sources, like the Heechee food factory in Frederik Pohl’s "Beyond the Blue Event Horizon" (1980), are commonplace in science fiction.Bland synthetic foods are usually consigned to fictional interstices, except in rare cases where an additive produced plot potential, as in Rudy Rucker’s "Spacetime Donuts" (1981). Foodstuffs designed to have the opposite effect—spices—are usually considered primarily in an economic context, as in H. H. Holmes’ "Secret of the House" (1953), or in a quasi-magical one, as in Frank Herbert’s "Dune" (1965).

On the other hand, the inherent difficulty of describing taste sensations in mere words ensures that depictions of exciting new gustatory sensations are rare; John Brunner’s "The Taste of the Dish and the Savour of the Day" (1977) is a notable example. The negative glamour of food science is neatly illustrated by the fact that the pioneer of space opera, E. E. Smith, who turned the galaxy into a science-fictional playground, was seeking escape from his day job as a food chemist, specialising in doughnut mixes, and never used his own scientific expertise as a basis for fictional speculation. Cyberpunk fiction, which did for cyberspace what Smith had done for interstellar space, was bathetically satirised by Marc Laidlaw in "Nutrimancer" (1987).
Paul Anderson’s ingenious "Nicholas van Rijn" is explicitly represented as a dealer in spices and intoxicants and an accomplished trencherman, but there is relatively little food science in the stories in which he stars. The continued automation of farming was given some focused consideration in twentieth-century speculative fiction in such stories as Otfrid von Hanstein’s "Die Farm der Verschollenen" (1924; trans. as "The Hidden Colony"), Fritz Leiber’s satirical "Bread Overhead" (1958), and Anne McCaffrey’s "Daughter" (1971), but the hypothetical food-production technology that attracted most attention in science fiction was hydroponics—growing plants in a liquid substrate instead of soil—because of its possible applications in space travel.
Serious extrapolations of the notion include Hal Clement’s "Raindrop" (1965), in which an orbital water world is used as a testing ground with a view to developing elaborate food farms. The vital importance of food technology to the prospects of extraterrestrial colonisation is emphasised by Grey Rollins’ "The Sweet Smell of Success" (1990). Anxieties about the future of food production in the overexploited and overfertilised soils of Earth often give rise to darker images of future food technology, as in Rob Chilson and William F. Wu’s "The Ungood Earth" (1985).
There has always been a rich vein of horror fiction in which humans serve as food for predatory or parasitic species, most luridly exaggerated in vampire fiction. The advent of aliens in speculative fiction provided an abundant new scope for people-eating monsters, but very little attention was give to matters of alien food science, save for the jocular evocation of alien cookery books in such stories as Damon Knight’s "To Serve Man" (1950) and Ray Nelson’s "Food" (1965).
The rapid growth of the U.S. "dieting industry" and the corollary fashionability of "eating disorders" in the latter half of the twentieth century inevitably called forth a good deal of satirical writing; speculative examples include several stories by Kit Reed, ranging from "The Food Farm" (1967) to "The Last Big Sin" (2002), and Robert Silverberg’s "Chip Runner" (1989). The perverse holy grail of a "nutrition-free" food is sarcastically featured in Gay McDonald’s "The Unfood" (1982), while anti-obesity pills are featured in Elizabeth Moon’s "Sweet Dreams, Sweet Nothings" (1986).

The newfound ambiguity of the notion of "sweetness", reflected in the actual development of artificial sweeteners and consequent economic guerrilla warfare by the embattled sugar industry, is extrapolated in such stories as W. R. Thompson’s "Health Food" (1987). In Ian Stewart’s "The Treacle Well" (1983), a technology for turning unextractable oil into sugar goes awry. The last substantial flare-up of the Frankenstein complex in the twentieth century was a widespread moral panic regarding "Frankenstein foods" produced by genetic modification. Science-fictional reflections of the panic were mostly unsympathetic to its hysteria; notable sarcastic representations include Brian Stableford’s "The Last Supper" (2000), Nancy Kress’ "And No Such Things Grow Here" (2001), and Mike Resnick’s "Old Macdonald Had a Farm" (2001).

By Brian Stableford in the book "Science Fact and Science Fiction", Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group), U.S.A and UK, 2006, excerpts from pages 184-187. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.