This feature first appeared in May 2024 on Londonist: Time Machine, our much-praised history newsletter. It's part of our series on how the Londoners of the past imagined the city's future. To be the first to read new history features like this, sign up for free here.
What’ll you be eating tonight? The similitude of mutton? A turtle lozenge? The Victorians and Edwardians had some entertaining ideas about dining in the 21st century.
The future of food is always a hot topic. What will we be eating in 50 years? Plant protein and nutrient shakes? Will artificial meat be so good that no one will want the real thing? Who knows. Our Victorian and Edwardian predecessors had a similar obsession with predicting future trends. Join me, as I dip the tortilla of curiosity into the archival sauces, to uncover how Londoners of yesteryear thought we’d be dining in the 21st century.
Cubic luncheons
Dining out in future London seems like a dismal prospect. Almost anyone who chewed over the matter foresaw a culinary age in which all sustenance could be gained from a pill. “The refrigerator for a large hotel will be amply provided for in a biscuit box,” thought one academic in 1895. “In the year 2000 A.D. we shall waste no time on meals,” declared another prophet of the same time. “Nitrogenous foodstuff in tabloids, fatty substances in pills, tiny crumbs of starch and sugar: these will be our methods of sustaining existence.”
This yearning for miniaturised meals was first sparked, I suspect, by the German chemist Justus von Liebig. From the 1840s, Liebig perfected methods for condensing meat into liquid extracts and stock cubes. The products were marketed from the 1860s by Leibig’s Extract of Meat Company. Londoners will be most familiar with the company’s OXO stock cubes, and the prominent tower (and restaurant) along the South Bank that bears the name.
Even a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth looked forward to a time when he might exchange it for a small pill. In 1913, the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Vansittart Bowater, predicted that the banquets of his 21st century successors would consist of “turtle tablets and roast beef lozenges”. I’ve yet to be invited to a Lord Mayor’s banquet, but I dare say that lozenges are not a feature.
One sketch doing the rounds in the newspapers of 1915 imagines the following dialogue between a waiter and customer in a fancy restaurant:
Waiter: "Yes, Sir. Evening, Sir. What can I serve you, Sir?“
Diner (after looking over card): “I’ll take Saline Lactative Dinner No. 6.”
Waiter (taking little tin box out of pocket): “Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir. Here it is, Sir. All ready for you, Sir. A concentrated chicken soup capsule, a roast beef tablet, two drops of triple vegetable essence and a pill of the amalgamated juices of pie. Anything to drink, Sir?”
Diner: Yes a Whisko-Nutrine cocktail and later a bottle of Radium Pneumatic Getajagg.”
The meal-in-a-pill was a popular prediction right through the 20th century, and became as much a staple of science fiction as the flying car, even inspiring a famous Bowie lyric. Nobody seemed to grasp the crucial point that eating ‘real’ food is among life’s most pleasurable experiences. While vitamin pills and other supplements have become a multi-billion dollar industry, the joys of a well-cooked meal, shared in the company of friends or family, will probably always be with us.
Molecular gastronomy
Pill popping might be the commonest guess at the future of food, but other scenarios can be found in the archives. In April 1842 a series of advertisements appeared in various newspapers purporting to be from the year 2000. They’re all satirical in nature, but offer insights into the times. One appears to predict molecular gastronomy, the scientifically informed cuisine popularised by the likes of Heston Blumenthal (in the UK).
“[Cook’s position wanted] — An upper graduate in the chemicoculinar university wishes for a situation. He has a most intimate acquaintance with the chemical affinities of all edible substances, and all potable fluidities, and is well skilled in the preparation of the gaseous dessert. His gas desserts have obtained considerable celebrity from the gratefulness of their perfumes, their exquisite savour and their exhilarating and sub-intoxicating properties.”
Our would-be Heston can also perform carno-alchemical miracles, “turning a piece of beef into the similitude of mutton, pork, veal, turkey, or partridge at pleasure”.
Dining out in the 21st century
Not only the nature of the food, but also its preparation and serving were explored by futurologists. Regular readers may remember the journalist Joseph Darby who, in 1900, imagined a journey to London 100 years in his future. While there, he took the trouble to visit a dawn-of-the-21st century restaurant:
“At the banquet halls of… restaurants the buffet receiving the foods and viands by a lift was at one end, the tables leading all down the room therefrom, each of which had an endless band to carry the plates with the foods within easy reach of those seated at the tables.”
Basically, he’s describing the set-up of a modern sushi restaurant, way ahead of his time. The first such venue was opened in Osaka in 1958, almost six decades after Darby’s prediction. Such contraptions did not reach London until the 1990s, with Yo! Sushi opening its first branch in 1997. From where, then, did Darby gain his foresight?
He might have been inspired by the ‘automatic restaurants’, or automats, that had recently been demonstrated in Europe. These were bereft of waiters. Diners had to fiddle with coin-operated machines along the wall. The first was opened at the Berlin industrial exposition of 1896, with another following at the Brussels World Fair the following year. Both used simple conveyor systems to restock the coin-op cupboards.
The novelty came to London in 1901, with a demonstration at Earls Court, followed the next year by a full Automatic Buffet in Embankment Gardens. The cafe served up sandwiches, cakes, pastries, teas and “temperance drinks without number”. It was immensely popular, recording over 10,000 visitors on one summer’s day (perhaps Darby was among their number).
The novelty soon wore off, however, and the automatic buffet became an historical curiosity. By the time the idea was revived in the 1930s, with a machine-buffet on Strand, everyone had forgotten the Embankment predecessor, and it was marketed as the first automatic restaurant in London.
Other visions can be found in old newspaper columns. In 1911, the Daily Mirror printed a cartoon showing the “Restaurant of the future” in which the waiting staff are replaced by a team of dieticians. The caption reads like something from our own times: “Now that everyone has some sort of special diet and “views” on the subject of food, there ought surely to be started a Hotel Dietetic or a Diet Restaurant wherein everybody’s foibles and fads should be faithfully watched.”
So, next time you hear someone order a triple-skinny soya milk latte, served in a reusable container, you’ll know that it’s all part of a century-old tradition.
Farewell to meat
Vegetarianism has a long and fascinating history in London, which I’ve explored in more depth elsewhere. For present purposes, I’d like to serve it up as a futuristic side dish, as seen by Londoners more than 100 years ago.
One 1913 satire, titled A Skit on Modern Radical Tendencies, published in 1913, projected the then-current fad for vegetarianism 80 years into the future, where sinking your teeth into animal parts had become a crime.
“By an Act of Parliament passed in 1995, the buying, the selling, or the eating of meat, fish, game, and poultry were made penal offences. The food of the people was ordered by the wording of the statute, “to be wholly vegetarian, fruitarian, nutarian or farinaceaous,” heavy penalties being inflicted on those “who cooked or ate, or caused to be cooked or be eaten, any fish, bird or beast, or any creature that had life.”
The Act of this imagined future has a rough passage through the House of Commons. One wag queries: “What about the eggs?”. The Chancellor of the day, a Mr David Goyd-Llorge, orders an inquiry, and the issue is eventually resolved after much wordy satire. The skit came at a similar time to a cartoon in The Sphere, which showed a “Glimpse of the future in a compulsory vegetarian age”. Here, the police raid a silent meat-eating den, as though it were a Prohibition-era speakeasy.
All this was playing on the trends of the time. In the years just prior to the First World War, vegetarianism was firmly on the ascendency. The Vegetarian Society (still going strong today) had recently celebrated its 65th anniversary, and The Lancet medical journal was extolling the virtues of soya milk. At the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, the dedicated vegetarian Hannes Kolehmainen had won three gold medals for long-distance running. Abstaining from meat, it seemed, was not only more economical and humane, but might also be beneficial to health.
The notion that society might one day become universally vegetarian continues throughout the 20th century and on to our own times. In 1928 a journalist imagines talking to a young farmer in the year 2000. Automaton cows, kept in a basement factory, convert grass bricks into 3,000 gallons of milk a day. Eggs are also produced by some artificial means, not elaborated on. The crops are harvested by robots (a recently coined term). Animals, he tells us, “although they have been good servants in the past, are rapidly becoming extinct, in spite of the efforts of his father, who is rather old-fashioned, to organise a society for their preservation”.
Former Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Birkenhead, also thought that the killing of animals for meat would decline, along with all forms of farming. Instead, we’d furnish our supper tables with artificially grown substances. Writing in 1930, he believed that:
“The perfection of the synthetic diet cannot be delayed far into the 21st-century; and when the first synthetic food factory begins to undercut the prices of naturally-grown food the doom of agriculture will be sealed. By the year 2030 synthetic bread, sugar and vegetable substitutes may be cheaper than water is today.”
Birkenhead’s views were received with some interest, but also criticised. Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral William Inge sounded a cautionary note. On the one hand, “Synthetic food manufactured out of earth and air would solve forever the problem of overpopulation”. On the other:
“Humans would multiply like Egypt's locusts and the earth would be covered with bungalows and inhabited by machine-minders working about two hours a day. I would be most sorry to live among people whose working week was only 12 hours. They would be driven to every variety of crime from sheer boredom.”
From our vantage point in 2023, Birkenhead’s predictions for 2030 seem at least partly to have borne out. Synthetic sugar in the form of artificial sweeteners has been around for decades. Meat substitutes, based on plant and fungal protein, are now abundant in supermarkets. Artificial steaks, grown in vats from animal cells but never truly “alive”, are often in the headlines (though yet to be fully marketed).
London’s future food trends: my own predictions
I can’t end without adding my own prophecy on the future of food, for some holographic news-bot to chance across and regurgitate, 100 years hence. Here goes…
The first artificial meats, grown in vats from cell cultures rather than sliced from carcasses, became commercially available in the mid-2020s. The industry rapidly boomed, but for reasons few foresaw. If you could grow a beef burger from a handful of cells, then why not a panda burger, or a dolphin burger, or a tiger burger? Suddenly, the whole animal kingdom was open for consumption, with not the slightest harm to living animals. From the 2030s, creativity blossomed. Dodo burgers were on the menu, then mammoth burgers. (But never sausages — everyone assumed they’d always been full of random animal scrapings.)
The industry truly lit up when it was realised that meats could be blended. Suddenly, synthetic flesh became an art form, practiced by biotech-trained chefs known as ‘carnists’, who played with meats as baristas once innovated with cocktails and coffees. London, as a world centre of both biotechnology and experimental dining, led the way. First came blends of familiar meat, such as pork and beef. Before long, carnists were crafting complex fusions. The famous Triple-R Meatcube (raccoon, rhino and rabbit), and the Paddington Nugget (bear, pigeon and chicken) had foodies queueing. The Tower of London marketed a raven-and-beef twizzler.
If you could artificially grow and meld animal meats, then why not human? This final taboo was broken in 2041 when a relaxation of laws allowed human meats to be vat-grown and sold. The public were cautious at first, and initial products were only 10% human (Minotaur patties proved particularly popular). It was a London PR firm who finally marketed the first fully human meat product. They persuaded world-famous West Ham striker Ahsokana Das to offer up her cells for culturing (for a 12-figure fee, of course). Das Burgers were immediately popular. Soon, every other celebrity was serving themselves up on bespoke charcuterie boards. The cup-winning LDR (Leyton, Dagenham and Redbridge) squad of 2046 even blended a team hotdog from all 11 first-choice players.
O brave new meal, that has such people in't!
