Take your jetpack and leave

When I was a kid, watching the same cartoons my mom watched when she was a kid (and probably in the same position: on floor, on stomach, head in hands), she told me that she had thought the world would be like this by now. (The Jetsons really fucked with the minds of impressionable young baby-boomers, giving them false expectations of flying cars and the ability to steal money from the wallet of your dad without repercussions.)

But it's worth pondering, with all the technological advances we've had in computers and music and movies and telephones and the like, why not in other arenas? Like food? Why can't we press a button and out pops a pill that dissolves into the perfect little army of nutrients that our bodies need? Where the hell are you, science?!

But then again, maybe we do have these new forms of non-natural foods; they're just not in the neat little plastic package we expected. Take for example: energy drinks! energy bars! virtually anything energy related that isn't coffee or tea! I also found an article about food pills (and other futuristic follies) that mentioned food for soldiers, namely MRE's (meals-ready-to-eat) and CM's (compressed meals). Seems one of the only ways to partake in futuristic cuisine is to enlist yourself in mano-a-mano combat.

But really, obviously, if you know me or my blog at all, you will know that I am relieved that pill food did not take off, and, thus, worried about the products out there that are inching towards it. My reasons are many, from scientific to social. First of all, there are aspects of food that just can't be manipulated into a compact package. An article I found about "nutraceuticals", another ploy to present healthful aspects of food in a pill form, states:

The problem, it seems, is that food is too complicated to be stripped down to its chemical components, and that the whole is far greater than its parts. Most nutraceutical studies are done in vitro, not in humans, and a free chemical in a Petri dish behaves far differently than when it is bound to food and sent through the body.

Chemistry aside, there are also capitalist pressures that should make one wary about any food product touting  a plethora of health benefits. As this witty writer for the New York Times Magazine says:

Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, “Eat more fruits and vegetables”?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition — much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

 Finally, although the Jetsons are misleadingly posed around a kitchen table, forks in hand, if food really did come in pill form, imagine the loss of the aesthetic pleasures of eating. I mean, what do we all do, whether one is a vegan or lives on a McDiet, when we meet up with friends in the afternoon, a date on Saturday night, extended family on the holidays, Mom or Dad or Son or Daughter or Wife or Husband at home every evening? We eat. Snack. Feast. Nibble. Nosh. Taking a pill makes hunger and nutrition seems like a medical malady, something that needs to be cured. It's not; it needs to be satisfied, with real, whole foods.