A History of Food Substitutes, from Saccharin to Soylent
Let’s hear it for mankind: We’ve been trying to replace food nearly as long as we’ve been preparing it. Soylent, a “powdered food alternative” currently grabbing headlines and investors, is the latest and most ambitious in a long line of edible things trying to be other edible things.
Food substitutes are often accompanied by controversy. Over the last century, synthetic food has been touted as a solution to world hunger and an unethical aberration; it’s augured utopia and dystopia. Mostly, though, it’s provided an excuse for people to try absurd new things. We’ve catalogued some of the more memorable creations for your enjoyment; accept no substitutes.
1/121867: Baby Formula
Time was, if you didn’t want to breastfeed your kids, you’d just hire someone else to do it. This arrangement held together nicely for many centuries; then Elijah Pratt invented the rubber nipple in 1845 and people got to thinking. By 1867, a German chemist named Justus von Liebig had created what he called “Liebig’s Soluble Food for Babies,” a powdered formula of potassium bicarbonate, wheat flour, and malt flour, intended to be mixed with warm cow’s milk. An immediate hit, it gave rise to a slew of competitors, including Nestlé’s Food, created by a certain fledgling company that now happens to the largest producer of packaged food in the world. Baby formula alone is a multibillion-dollar industry.
2/121869: Whale Oil
Whale blubber was once used to make just about everything: it was found in detergents and dyes, in transmission fluids and aircraft engine lubricants, in candles and lamps. It was only a matter of time, then, until someone decided to cook with it. Early margarines, cooking oils, and butter substitutes relied on baleen whale oil as the primary raw material—in 1916, fueled by the austerity of the first World War, British consumption of margarine surpassed butter for the first time, and whale-oil sales soared.
3/121878: Saccharin
Forget aspartame and sucralose: saccharin is the fake sugar that started it all. Say it’s 1878 and you’re a chemist working with the derivatives of coal tar—fun, right? So fun that after a long day’s work, you’ll want to lick your hand. That’s something like what Constantin Fahlberg did when he discovered benzoic sulfimide at Johns Hopkins University. As names go, “benzoic sulfimide” doesn’t exactly scream “artificial sweetener,” so Fahlberg rechristened it saccharin, after the Latin for “sweet”; production began posthaste. Saccharin had a rocky start—the USDA flirted with the idea of making sugar substitutes illegal—but its popularity climbed thanks to a World War I sugar shortage. The diet crazes of the ‘60s and ‘70s helped sales, too, most notably of Sweet ‘N Low, which remains the bestselling saccharin-based sweetener.
4/121895: Postum
C. W. Post, of Post Cereal fame, invented this coffee substitute in 1895. Made from wheat bran, wheat, molasses, and the maltodextrin from corn, it’s missing a pretty critical ingredient—caffeine. But what strikes us as a major deterrent was actually a marketing point in the early 20th century. Ads for Postum sometimes featured “Mr. Coffee Nerves,” a demonic, ghostly archvillain who stood for all that is evil about caffeine: anxiety, irritability, the jitters. Postum sold briskly during World War II, when coffee was rationed and the deprived, uncaffeinated populace had no choice but to pursue alternative stimulation.
Jitze Couperus/Flickr5/121920: Nonalcoholic Beer
Poor O'Doul's. Of the many nonalcoholic beers out there, it sits at the butt end of the most jokes, a token object of frat-boy malice; Urban Dictionary defines it as "the most pointless beverage in the world." Really, there's a low-alcohol culture dating back to medieval times, when people needed a drink that was cleaner than water (which was often contaminated) but didn't get you too buzzed to work. More recently, making nonalcoholic beer allowed American breweries to stay open during Prohibition, which began in 1920. Removing the alcohol from beer isn’t too hard; alcohol has a lower boiling point than water, so if you heat the brew, it’s the first thing to go. Be sure to trot out these factoids next time you encounter a sneering frat boy. (We hope it's not in this lifetime.) (Photo: Jitze Couperus)
Retroland U.S.A./Flickr6/121959: Tang
Legend has it that NASA invented Tang, but legend is wrong. In fact, the food scientist William A. Mitchell is responsible for this “aromatic, orangy-tasting powder,” as it was first marketed in 1959. Brimming with sugar, citric acid, artificial coloring, and a full day’s serving of Vitamin C, Tang was intended as a hip alternative to orange juice—an easy way to signify, at the breakfast table, that you were in step with the march of American progress. But only when John Glenn drank it in space did Tang begin to fly off grocery shelves. (Photo: Retroland U.S.A.)
7/121960: Surimi
Problem one: Crab meat is expensive. Problem two: The modern, industrialized fish business has plenty of unused fish parts on its hands. If you can imagine one elegant, if suspicious, solution to this problem, you’re probably thinking of surimi, a processed purée of gelatinous fish paste and additives (think salt, egg whites, MSG, starches, etc.) invented in the 1960s. Surimi, which means “ground meat” in Japanese, is used to imitate crab, lobster, and other expensive seafood; if you’ve ever had a California roll from the sushi place on the corner, you’ve almost certainly had surimi. Japan and the U.S. produce most of it; it’s estimated that 2 to 3 percent of the world’s annual fish catch is used in production. (Photo: Natto/Wikimedia Commons)
8/121970: Space Food Sticks
NASA did have a hand in these, as their rather clinical name suggests. Howard Bauman, Pillsbury’s “chief food technologist,” developed them after having helped NASA prepare the first solid food cubes consumed by an astronaut. (That would be Aurora 7’s Scott Carpenter, in 1962; if you have cause to use this at a trivia night, please forward us a small percentage of your earnings.) Regular, non-astronaut people got to eat the sticks in 1970, when Pillsbury registered the trademark for what they called a “non-frozen balance energy snack in rod form”; think of them as a chewy, Tootsie Roll-esque, wholly innutritious precursor to energy bars. By the ‘80s, though, the space craze had died, and the snacks were discontinued.
9/121996: Olestra
The FDA approved this controversial fat substitute in 1996. It’s synthesized from sucrose, and because the enzymes in our bodies can’t break it down for digestion, it’s the only oil to claim that nutritional holy trinity: zero fat, zero cholesterol, and zero calories. It passes through your gastrointestinal tract like a ship in the night, but not, unfortunately, without side effects—an infamous disclaimer on bags of chips warned of, uh, a need to use the nearest lavatory, apparently with good reason. In 2010, TIME ranked it the 38th worst invention of all time. For what should be obvious reasons, Olestra has fallen out of fashion, but Wikipedia notes that it’s found a second life “as a base for deck stains and a lubricant for small power tools.” Yum!
Jlastras/Wikimedia Commons10/122008: "Note-by-Note" Synthetic Gourmet Cuisine
Back in 2008, the chefs Hervé This and Pierre Gagnaire, who has three Michelin stars, made headlines by preparing the first gourmet dish composed entirely of chemical compounds; they called it “note-by-note cuisine,” a reference to its careful molecular construction, more the province of the laboratory than the kitchen. Served in Hong Kong, the dishes included jelly pearls made to taste like apple; a faux lemon sorbet; and a thin strip of “glucose caramel.” Making the meal required ingredients like amylose and polyphenol, extracted from grapes by reverse osmosis. Good luck even beginning to try this at home. (Photo: Jlastras/Wikimedia Commons)
11/122013: Lab-Grown Beef
Food substitutes often bring out the philosophers in us: like, what is real, man? Ethicists are still debating lab-grown meat, which debuted earlier this year at a much-publicized press conference where the world’s first in-vitro burger was served. It was “real” beef—grown from stem cells extracted from a cow—and its creator, Dr. Mark Post of the Netherlands, hopes that it will free us from an inefficient dependency on livestock. But you want to know how it tastes: “like an animal-protein cake,” reports the New York Times.
Soylent.me12/122013: Soylent
At last we come to Soylent, which really goes whole hog, so to speak: rather than replacing merely one part of your diet, this thick, milkshake-ish liquid becomes your diet. That’s right: no more meals. Presently the toast of Silicon Valley, where it’s raised more than a million in funds, Soylent is the creation of Rob Rhinehart, a software engineer who believes that “food is a hassle.” (We’re biting our tongues on this one.) Rhinehart and his cohort are keeping the final recipe (version 1.0) under lock until December, but “v.8 alpha” contains maltodextrin, oat powder, rice protein, medium chain triglycerides, potassium gluconate, sodium, and more. The Soylent team promises that the final version will be adaptable to different genders and body types. (Photo: Soylent.me)
