Last week, American magazine Popular Science released its entire 137-year back catalogue onto the Internet, for free. Since discovering this, I've been obsessed about mining the back catalogue for bad (and at times, oddly prescient) predictions about the future of food.  As with any good prediction, they’re equal parts portents of doom and Jetson’s-like techno-cornucopia. On doom end of the spectrum, JF Lyman surveys the state of American food production in 1912 and finds it lacking. Fish populations are falling, there are less tasty buffalo and pigeon, wild berries, fruits and nuts are no longer important to Americans. While corn production in America could feed the populace at a very basic standard of living, Americans didn’t like it.

The American, however, in general has never appeared to relish corn as a direct article of food. A prejudice has prevailed that corn was unfit for human food and useful only in the barn and stable for their less discriminating occupants...But we shall learn to eat more corn, not because of its nourishing qualities but because it will be prepared in an attractive form and because it will be cheap.

It may have taken a hundred years to come to pass, but corn is now the basis for the entire American diet, completely because corn is now prepared in an attractive form that is possibly cheaper than the cost of its production. As food writer Michael Pollan explains the current state of American fast food:

Take a typical fast food meal. Corn is the sweetener in the soda. It's in the corn-fed beef Big Mac patty, and in the high-fructose syrup in the bun, and in the secret sauce. Slim Jims are full of corn syrup, dextrose, cornstarch, and a great many additives. The “four different fuels” in a Lunchables meal, are all essentially corn-based. The chicken nugget—including feed for the chicken, fillers, binders, coating, and dipping sauce—is all corn. The french fries are made from potatoes, but odds are they're fried in corn oil, the source of 50 percent of their calories. Even the salads at McDonald's are full of high-fructose corn syrup and thickeners made from corn.

But a corn-packed diet is not really the common vision of where the future would be. Edwin Teale’s “New Foods from the Test Tube”  from the July 1934 edition is probably closer – envisioning scientists as the “crack army that fights in the laboratory is producing new foods, pure foods, foods with increasing nutrition”. It runs through the  fantastic advances in reducing foods to their component parts with breathless hyperbole – dried coffee as good as the real thing and convenient as tea; milk that won’t curdle;  a new food that may “increase the stature of undersized children or even, in the realm of the fantastic, produce giants”.

So when did the utopian view of the future of food fail, and become less like The Jetsons and more like The Road? Why no more desire to grow gigantic children?

Although I’m only up to the mid-Fifties in the PopSci archive, the future of food predictions post-WW2 are less utopian and far-reaching. While previously I would have put the more dystopian elements in future food prediction down to the rise in environmentalism in the 70s, my theory now is that two events happened in the 50s that influenced Popular Science's view of future food.

Firstly, the mythical “meal in a tablet” was delivered with the launch of dehydrated army rations. Rations weren’t exactly in pill form, but they were in a smaller format than fresh food and both modern and unappetising. Secondly, people went into space and the experience of food there was not so positive.