High Modernism and the Development Decade

This chapter concerns the period of high modernism, when expansive ambitions of scientific progress promised new foods from a variety of fantastical sources, including algae grown on sewage, fungi grown on oil, and inedible leaves that could be boiled into protein curd. These projects encapsulated the vision of a cheap, efficient, mass-produced famine treatment that could finally end starvation. Beginning with Leaf Protein Concentrate, which emerged from postwar investigations into food shortage, high modernist hopes soon moved to less appetizing foods made from algae and junk fish, driven by an even more futuristic and top-down vision of life emerging from primordial sources. After this initial burst of enthusiasm came a different high modernist concept: the complete nutritional wonder-product, which was meant to offer a balanced meal in a simple powder or sachet. After generating great interest in aid agencies, this ideology began to go into decline by the early 1970s, limited by expense, complexity, and fundamental impracticality.