The Expected WorldEXPIRES: 2000
WRITTEN: 1894-09
The epicure of the future is to dine upon artificial meat, artificial flour, and artificial vegetables. Wheat fields and corn fields are to disappear from the face of the earth, because flour and meal will no longer be grown, but made.
Written: 1894-09
Addressed to: The year 2000
Source: Dam
Author: Marcellin Berthelot
Category: Daily Life
Annotation
Berthelot was the most famous chemist in France — a senator, a minister of public instruction, a man who had synthesized formic acid and methane. In 1894, a reporter from the American magazine McClure's sat down with him and asked what people would eat in the year 2000. His answer: nothing grown. Everything manufactured. Food would arrive as 'a tablet of any color and shape that is desired.' Farms would vanish. The earth's surface would become a garden. A Nobel-adjacent chemist predicting Soylent — in the magazine that would later publish Ida Tarbell's Standard Oil exposé.
What Actually Happened
Agriculture not only survived but intensified. By 2000, global crop yields had roughly tripled since 1894 through the Green Revolution. However, Berthelot's vision echoes eerily in the 2010s–2020s rise of lab-grown meat, protein powders, and meal-replacement products like Soylent and Huel — tablets and powders marketed to 'epicures of the future' who find cooking obsolete.