Nom Nom

Hundreds of thousands of science fiction stories and novels have been published over the past century, so it is inevitable that a few of them would have gotten a few things right about the future. Still, it's a fun game to play, and today's entry is The Space Merchants, by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, published in 1952, the year I was born. The Space Merchants is set in the not-too-distant future, in New York, in a world where corporations run the government and advertising has saturated the collective consciousness. Some of it holds up, and some of it doesn't, but what made me think of it today is this article from the BBC.

In the novel, the vat-grown protein is an enormous chicken breast called Chicken Little, from which slabs are carved to supply protein for a vastly overpopulated city. The product grown by researchers at Maastricht University is cow-based. Maybe the research was funded by McDonald's and not KFC.