Looking back at looking ahead 2

[xoxoxoBruce]

As I said in Home Base, I'm posting the section of a 1943 Mechanix Illustrated article called, "How Your Daily Life Will Be Changed After the War". This is the section on how they saw the future of food.

Let’s take a look at the great food revolution that is already beginning to give our eating habits such a shaking-up as they have never dreamed of.
Just to show what can be done, we’ll help you prepare breakfast without, once opening your cold storage refrigerator. You like to start the day with orange juice? There are 2-1/2 cases of oranges concentrated in that gallon jar on the shelf. Pour a little into a glass and dilute with water—all the vitamins are there and the stuff keeps for weeks without refrigeration.

Toast is made from a loaf of bread that has no crust. It is baked from inside out by electric currents. Bacon strips come from a package that has been on an open shelf for two months. There’s no trace of rancidity. Laminated plastic wrappings keep the flavor in and prevent spoilage. If you prefer ham and eggs, you can dip them out of a can, plop into a frying pan and you have an appetizing omelet. Or you can take a spoonful of yellow powder out of a can marked “Eggs,” mix with water and milk and serve as scrambled eggs. A container about the size of an ordinary can of peaches contains the equivalent of three dozen eggs.

Perhaps you like cereal for breakfast. Lift down a compressed cake the size of a candy bar, add hot or cold water as you choose, and your cereal is ready. Never mind the cream and sugar—they’re included in the cake. Cream comes from a bottle on that same unrefrigerated shelf. It doesn’t go sour, being a stabilized product that holds up indefinitely. Butter comes off the warm shelf too. It isn’t melted and it’s not rancid, for it’s “Army Spread” that remains solid at 120 degrees. Jam and preserves for your toast are poured out of a package in the shape of dark bone-dry pellets. Add water and they’re ready to spread.

You’ll want a breakfast drink too. Drop a lozenge reminiscent of a cough drop into a cup of hot water and you have tea. Coffee may not be coffee at all, but roasted wheat, rye, barley or other cereal. But it tastes exactly like coffee because a chemical known as furfuryl mercaptan has been added. Chemists have discovered that this is what gives coffee its characteristic flavor and aroma. If you want a stimulating jolt, it’s no trick to incorporate caffeine in the beverage.

Many of these foods are already here, but the Army gets most of them right now. The Army Quartermasters Department at Chicago has developed scores of new food forms for military use. There is chili con carne in a roll like sausage. There are boneless frozen meats that require only one-third the storage space required by ordinary meat—a feature which will certainly appeal to the housewife after the war. There is a dark, flaky product which, twenty minutes after you add water and turn on the heat, can be served as hamburger, meat loaf or stew. Half a pound of it equals six pounds of lean steak. Hams can be preserved indefinitely regardless of temperature by spraying them with an impervious coating.

As for dehydrated foods of other varieties, you’ll soon be using them if you aren’t already. Your own grocer undoubtedly has the new dehydrated soup mixes on his shelves right now. Add water and heat and you’ll have a fresh soup that came to you in a transparent envelope. Dehydrated carrots, white potatoes, cabbage, peppers, spinach, string beans, sweet potatoes and beets will soon be available. Let them soak in water for an hour and they’re garden fresh.

Baked beans require long hours of preparation—but not if you use precooked ones in dehydrated form. Add water, heat, and serve. Milk dehydrates into a flour-like powder and so does cheese.

Naturally these foods will not replace the fresh forms to which you are accustomed. You will use them for their special advantages which have been accented by military necessity. These advantages are compactness, speed of preparation, low cost, and freedom from spoilage. Compactness is a tremendous virtue that is helping to cook Hitler’s goose. One ship carrying dried milk, further compressed into cakes, has the carrying capacity of twenty ships loaded with liquid milk.
In your own kitchen this means that a modest shelf will hold food that would fill a dozen family-size refrigerators in its original form, or, in a basement space no larger than is occupied by your furnace, you have food-storage capacity equal to that of a five-ton truck.

As long as moisture is kept away from dehydrated foods they will not spoil. You can prepare a complete meal in a matter of minutes. Mass processing brings down costs: a quart of milk without butter-fat, reconstituted by adding water, costs less than 5 cents. Heavy tin cans will be sparingly used, for dried foods are preserved in moisture-proof packages or plastic containers that are light and easy to stack. The household refrigerator can be much smaller or used for other purposes, for most of these new products keep perfectly without refrigeration. They will, moreover, be crammed with nutritional value, thanks to such watchdogs as electronic tubes that “taste” the vitamin content of foods in an instant.

A little further over the horizon are even more startling developments. The Germans are making sugar out of sawdust, twigs, and other forms of wood waste through a process devised by the chemist, Bergius, who invented the method of making gasoline from coal. Frozen foods will be stored in a quick-freeze kitchen unit (See Mechanix Illustrated, December, 1942) so that peaches picked in August can be served fresh in January. A novel quick-freezing method that has been suggested makes use of the surplus of transport planes anticipated after the war.

In a California spinach or pea field a plane sits down and is loaded with packages filled fresh from the field. The plane wings up into the stratosphere where temperatures are 45 to 60 degrees below zero. When the plane glides down in New York the load of spinach, peas or other product has been quick-frozen without any refrigeration equipment other than the subzero temperatures provided by nature. Natural processes of creation are being violently disrupted by treatments that promise to produce new plants whose characteristics we cannot even imagine. It is done by bombarding seeds with X-rays. The genes, infinitesimal units of heredity contained in the seeds, are explosively altered. Strange plant forms result from these changes or “mutations,” as the geneticists call them. New varieties of flowers have been thus produced and no one knows what extraordinary new food plants may emerge from such experiments. Luther Burbank merely combined existing units of heredity to benefit mankind with dozens of new food forms. The X-ray method alters those existing units into something vastly different.

More immediately useful because they have already produced new fruits, such as a tomato with fewer seeds and more meat, are the hormones and growth-promoting substances that have excited scientists in a score of laboratories. There are many such substances; one of the most potent is colchicine, a powder derived from roots of the autumn crocus which transforms ordinary plants into giants. Home gardeners can easily conduct their own experiments by having a druggist or supply house dissolve 1/2 gram of colchicine in a pint of water at a cost of about 50 cents. All that is necessary is to soak seeds in the solution before planting. Care must be taken not to get the chemical on the skin or in the eyes, but tomatoes the size of cantaloupes are worth the trouble.

Watermelons, squash, eggplant and peppers without seeds are envisioned by experts of the U. S. Department of Agriculture. Growth regulators can be applied to plants in the form of vapor, spray, paste, emulsion, or water solution sprinkled on the soil. Scientists of the Boyce Thompson Institute of Yonkers, New York, have extracted one powerful regulator from the organic acids of milk. It took man uncounted generations, unrecorded centuries of history stretching far back into the mists of time, to develop wheat, as we know it, from wild grasses. Now we have the means of giving nature a “shot in the arm,” unlocking forces close to the secret of life itself and stimulating evolutionary processes to the speed of a fast-motion movie.

Wow, that's scary shit.
It shows a time when the population trusted science. Throughout the depression from the late 20s through the beginning of WWII, inventors and scientists were coming up with millions of ways to make life easier, and longer.
They were changing things so fast, people thought they could solve any problem if they tried hard enough and the people trusted the government to make sure everything was cool.
Of course we now know that faith in science and government was misplaced.

[SteveDallas]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

It shows a time when the population trusted science.

I'm not sure... maybe the readers of Mechanix Illustrated did!

[BigV]

Maybe that's what makes me an old fart--I do still trust science. Government plus science can be a troublesome mix, as can capitalism and science, or marketing and science. But science is neutral, and can be used [triumphant strings] as a force--for good![/strings].

There's a lot of good stuff in the article, and obviously much of what's listed did already exist at publication time. But please, can I have the Army Spread that melts in at a slightly lower temperature, please?

I forgot to add that the writer was quite on target with much of his article, but one point that was "just around the corner" remains "just around the corner", tantalizingly so: sugar from cellulose. That's the new holy grail of renewable fuels. Brazil is energy independent because they're refining sugar cane into ethanol. We're pressing hard for corn, because we can get the sugar from that plant the easiest in the volumes that can be practical for fuel consumption.

When the woody parts of the plants can be converted into sugar, the biofuel production will really really take off. And it will likely not be corn or sugar cane, but grass.

[monster]

It talks about meals in minutes and yet describes how you rehydrate the vegetables by soaking in water for an hour. Make your mind up! Or do you envisage dehydrating the hours so they only take up a couple of minutes?

It is strange that they envisaged these things to be desirable traits for food -I suspect there's very much a war mentality thing going on there, along with this still being in a era where people who weren't housewives felt they knew what housewives would find useful without actually asking them.

[BigV]

It talks about meals in minutes and yet describes how you rehydrate the vegetables by soaking in water for an hour. Make your mind up! Or do you envisage dehydrating the hours so they only take up a couple of minutes?

The article said the way baked beans are made "today", at the time of publication, was to soak the beans for hours. But that this new way would be way faster...

Preparing dried (not freeze dried, not astronaut food) beans does take a long time to soak and rehydrate the beans. Have you never made chili or baked beans?

[SteveDallas]

I sure have... can opener.. .microwave.. what's the big deal??

[monster]

Um no, baked beans come in a can and are made by Heinz (no can opener required). I guess I should have added one of those tongue-in-cheek smileys

[BigV]

Not your fault--I have a tongue in cheek blind spot. Ask Flint. Ask anybody.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Mom soaks the beans overnight.

[Beestie]

I still remember back in 1969 when my fourth grade teacher told us of the coming wonders in food. I don't recall her exact words but she was describing a wonderful new food. It could be molded to taste and look like just about anything! And you wouldn't know the difference! It would change everything!!

Only decades later on an otherwise non-descript day as I had to swallow extra hard on a dry cafeteria hamburger to get it down did I recall that day. And realized she was talking about soy.

In a single instant, all that childlike wonder, hope and amazement of a utopian food for a utopian future that I subconciously stored away for decades came rushing back to me just in time to be shattered like a cheap mirror as I reached for my high-fructose-corn-syrup enhanced beverage of the future to wash down my all-everything food of the future.

[Sundae]

Weirdly, reading it has made me appreciate how much easier things are for me than for my Grandmother.

I'm 34 and divorced, and while that's nothing to be proud of at least the choice is there. It's not a case of being unhappy in a relationship or being ostracised.

I live alone and can choose to have my dinner from the freezer, from a can or from a take-away. I can still make healthy choices while doing this, although of course it has made it easier to abuse my body... But that's my weakness, not science & technology's.

I can live on my own, and work, and not be thought of as wrong in any way for not having children. I remember going to get a contraceptive injection just before I got married. The nurse said to me, "I suppose this is the last time we'll be seeing you then!" This was only 10 years ago But at least even then she was in the minority in expecting all women to want children.

I can choose to eat foods from around the world. When I think about what we used to eat even back in the 70s I feel blessed that I live in the 21st century. In the cupboard for lunch tomorrow I have boil in the bag rice (lazy, but I'm at work), wasabi, a tin of tuna and some sheets of sushi nori. Guess what I'm having for lunch? Yup, faggots. No, sorry, sushi of course.

I know I'll have to look at my consumption of overseas fruit at some point in the future (in order to save the planet for your children ) but for the time being I glory in the fact that I have a choice of cherries, figs or lychees for my morning snack tomorrow, all a couple of hundred yards away on my local market. The standards are also on sale, but winter used to be a no-go for me, being a picky fruit eater.

And yes, I love tinned beans. I've soaked and boiled my own on many occasions (kidney, haricot, borlotti, etc etc) but how much nicer to scarf down beans on toast after 5 mins preparation.

I know some of the above isn't specific to food, but hey - I'm happy to be alive this afternoon and I thought I'd share it

[glatt]

Originally Posted by Sundae Girl

but hey - I'm happy to be alive this afternoon and I thought I'd share it

Cool!

[xoxoxoBruce]

If it's about life, it's about food and vis versa.