2001: A Food Odyssey

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Flashback: Astronauts head into space to investigate a strange monolith, with the help of trusty computer HAL. What could possibly go wrong? It’s a long journey, and on the way, the spacemen chow down on rectangles of brightly-coloured goo, apparently designed to stay put in zero gravity. It’s never specified what this astro-food actually is, but one thing’s for sure: it doesn’t look like it would qualify for an “organic” label.

Flashforward to today: There’s a lot of technology in Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking sci-fi opus 2001: A Space Odyssey, most famously the sinister artificial intelligence HAL. But the film (and novel) are also filled with more little fictional details forming a plausible vision of everyday life in humanity’s future. And what could be more fundamental to everyday life than eating?

Alternatives to traditional food have come in and out of mainstream consciousness over the years, with the 1960s space race cooking up a fad for TV dinners. Today, food is a pressing concern. The climate crisis, a global population predicted to reach 10 billion by 2050 and concern over the sustainability of our food supply systems has accelerated a search for different ways of doing things. 

2001 takes place in space, which has technical limitations. Food eaten in spacecraft has to be something that won’t float away, cause a mess, or, worse, spill somewhere dangerous. Early astronauts mostly squeezed dehydrated food out of tubes. Today’s astronauts have a few more options but still have to make compromises like substituting tortillas for bread to cut down on escaping crumbs. They’ve even managed to grow crops of tomatoes and kale on the International Space Station, a painstaking process which involved pollinating pak choi with a small paintbrush. Totally worth it, though, as the effects of micro-gravity upon the body mean astronauts need to consume more calories than the rest of us down on Earth. 

But even for those of us with ready access to plants, animals and supermarkets, novel foods are still a subject of much investment and interest. For Western diners, this is linked to the dual trends of wellness and environmental awareness. On a wider scale, the climate crisis is already putting a strain on the world’s food supply and sustainability is ever more pressing.

Sci-fi movies have presented a few options, like tiny pills containing entire meals as seen on screen in the 1930 silent comedy “Just Imagine” to the 1960s cartoon “The Jetsons”. The problem with pills is that while you could get the vitamins and minerals you need in such a tiny package, a pill just isn’t can’t squeeze in the roughly 2000 calories an adult human needs each day.

Sci-fi’s worst-case scenarios include the post-apocalyptic gruel of The Matrix. And we won’t get into what Soylent Green is made from (it’s people). That film inspired the name of Soylent, a powdered drink dreamed up by an engineer named Rob Rhinehart in 2013. He was sick of the expense and time required to cook and eat food, so he identified the nutrients needed to survive and put them into a shake-like meal-replacement powder. The ironically-named product struck a chord with hard-charging Silicon Valley types and dedicated life hackers, but it isn’t to most people’s taste.

Nor are snack bars made of cockroaches, a sign of the post-apocalyptic dystopia in the 2013 film Snowpiercer. Plenty of cultures around the world know that insects make protein-packed superfoods. In 2023, house crickets and mealworm larvae were added to the list of insects the European Union judges safe to be sold as food. Grub made from grubs even has reported health benefits. 

On the more high-tech end of the innovative food menu is cultivated meat. This is meat that’s grown from animal stem cells in bioreactors rather than cut from actual chickens, pigs and cows. It’s even been grown on the International Space Station. 

Cultivated meat is currently being evaluated by the UK’s Food Standards Agency and already approved for sale in the US, but critics argue we simply don’t even have enough data yet to evaluate its safety. There’s also the issue of whether this high-tech food could rob farmers of their livelihoods in developing countries. However the rearing and slaughter of livestock is a huge contributor to the climate crisis, so lab-grown meat could be an environmental game-changer.

Will it sell?

Being a picky eater is one thing – being asked to tuck into insects or lab-cultured meat is another. It’s telling that even after decades of genetically modified crops, a third of Americans are still wary of GMOs. The trend for meat alternatives shows people can change their thinking: hats off to the marketing genius who recognised the hippie connotations of a vegetarian/vegan diet and re-booted the concept as “plant-based”, or the folks at Impossible Foods who made their plant-based faux-burgers “bleed” red juice, just like the real thing. Mintel estimates the plant-based market could be worth $160 billion by 2030, which is a lot of dough.

Fun fact

Food is so fundamental to human existence that it sparks strong reactions, and even has a political dimension. One of the earliest people to imagine a food pill was American suffragette Mary Elizabeth Lease in 1893, who predicted synthetic food would liberate women from the domestic burden of cooking.

The HAL 9000 Award for Fine Dining

There’s a theory that 2001 is all about food. The movie spans all of human history, and people in each era are depicted eating. The apes in the opening scene make an evolutionary leap when one of them figures out how to use a tool (more specifically, a weapon), which allows them to go from grazing on grass to eating meat. After a few futuristic astronaut meals, the trippy climax sees astronaut Dave sit down to an extremely elegant old-fashioned culinary experience. It’s up to you if you swallow the theory that the Monolith is some kind of intergalactic food god, but it’s interesting that Kubrick connected this most fundamental, everyday, biological human need with a technological future. 

Verdict

Since 2001 (both the film and the actual year), the climate crisis and concern over the sustainability of our food systems have accelerated a search for different ways of eating. Veganuary and the plant-based trend are already shifting our thinking, but we may have to go further and start eating like astronauts. Chowing down on 3D-printed food, lab-grown burgers and good old-fashioned bugs could save the planet.

What are you linking about, HAL?

Astronaut Chris Hadfield makes a meal in space

Can the world feed 8 billion people sustainably?

Meal-in-a-pill : A staple of science fiction since the 1890s

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