A nut was a nutrition-unit, creation of the Ministry of Synthetic Food. –Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed (1962) If you should ever plan a trip to utopia, you’ll want the pack your loosest clothes. The food there is fantastic — and there’s plenty of it. The land of Cockaigne, the subject of legend in Europe going back to the Middle Ages, greets visitors with streets paved with buttery pastries in place of cobblestones. In the New World, the fabled city of El Dorado, said to lie hidden in the jungles of Colombia, offers paradise for gourmands and treasure hunters alike. There fountains, if they don’t spray jets of rose water, issue great gouts of sugarcane liquor. Further north, the Big Rock Candy Mountain, which fueled the dreams of hobos throughout a depression-plagued United States, is home to lemonade springs and hens that lay hard-boiled eggs.
Fascinating journey! One thing that struck me is how reflective dystopian literature is of the joyless, industrial, nutritionism so prominent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One in particular struck me: "cotton waste flour substitute" was actually a real, quasi-food: cottonseed. Cottonseed oil was (and perhaps still is?) the main ingredient in Crisco (whose predecessor was the less-appetizingly-named Cottolene, made entirely from cottonseed oil) and other "vegetable oil" concoctions of the industrial food system. Cottonseed is a by-product of the cotton industry, and cottonseed meal is still a popular ingredient in cattle feed, due to its high fat and protein content. It has since been overtaken by soy, in both the "vegetable" oil and cattle feed categories, but you still find it from time to time listed on ingredients lists - usually in foods from other countries who don't feel the need to obscure ingredients.
Anyway - it just struck me enough to comment about it!
Fascinating journey! One thing that struck me is how reflective dystopian literature is of the joyless, industrial, nutritionism so prominent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One in particular struck me: "cotton waste flour substitute" was actually a real, quasi-food: cottonseed. Cottonseed oil was (and perhaps still is?) the main ingredient in Crisco (whose predecessor was the less-appetizingly-named Cottolene, made entirely from cottonseed oil) and other "vegetable oil" concoctions of the industrial food system. Cottonseed is a by-product of the cotton industry, and cottonseed meal is still a popular ingredient in cattle feed, due to its high fat and protein content. It has since been overtaken by soy, in both the "vegetable" oil and cattle feed categories, but you still find it from time to time listed on ingredients lists - usually in foods from other countries who don't feel the need to obscure ingredients.
Anyway - it just struck me enough to comment about it!