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Where Has All The Good Bread Gone, Where Are All The Gods



When preparing for the apocalypse, the first thing people worry about, after water and shelter, is food. This makes sense, as food is one of the items listed right at the base of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Most sci-fi films are at least somewhat apocalyptic in nature, whether it’s post-apocalyptic or preventing an oncoming apocalypse. Most of the time, sci-fi movies are about survival. What's one of the few things humans need to survive? Food.
Another important theme in sci-fi is technology, and Forester explains that “technology and the body” are two elements that are important to the study of both food and science fiction. Food is created through the means of technology, and is used to fuel the body. Science fiction often focuses on how technology affects the body. Through these two facts we can determine that food is one of the many ways to make the connection between technology and the body in science fiction.
In many films in the sci-fi genre, food is shown to have been distilled down to just a means of survival, i.e. fuel. In Soylent Green, the main food source available to the public is “soylent” a bland but nutritious cracker, supposedly made of soy and lentils, or green algae in the case of the titular “soylent green”. In a more modern example, the star wars film, The Force Awakens, the main character, Rey, is shown to eat mostly “polystarch”, which appears to be some type of cheap instant bread. In The Matrix, the rag-tag group of survivors that have escaped the Matrix seem to subsist mostly on a gross-looking mush. While some sci-fi films have more focus on food than others, tall three of these films show that the food of the unwashed masses has become bland and flavorless, purely functional, not necessarily enjoyable.
Of course in these sci-fi worlds, the bland food-substitutes are not the only food available. In soylent green, real food like alcohol, fruit, vegetables, and meat are incredibly rare, but still available in small supply to the very wealthy. Sci-fi is often meant to analyse or critique modern society, and a major problem in the world today is dwindling resources. However, it has been learned through research that earth actually does have enough food to feed everyone, at least for now, and that the real problem is unequal distribution of the food resources. Those who are wealthy can afford more food than they could ever need, while the poorest people starve. Many science films show the natural conclusion of this concept: when the earth's food supplies dry up, what little is left will be kept by the wealthy and by those in power. While a meal of apples, onion, celery, skirt steak, and booze may not seem like much, the value of it in the eyes of the character Sol, shows us just how unattainable it seems to the common people in the world of Soylent Green.


As we’ve been discussing heavily in class, food is a representation of culture, and culture is something that is very important in science fiction movies. For the viewer to understand the world of a sci-fi film, the culture of that world needs to be established early on. When we see Sol moved to tears by his meager meal, we understand the world he must live in that gives that food so much value. When we see those who escaped the matrix eating slop, we understand how different the real world is from the world inside the matrix. This helps us to understand why a person would turn on his friends and return to a life of ignorance, just to enjoy the comfort of a steak, whether or not that steak is real. Survival and comfort are the needs that food can fulfil, and sci-fi examines what happens when those basic needs are inaccessible to people. Food is just one of the many ways that the discrepancy between what we need and what we have can manifest.


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