In 1931, Winston Churchill predicted the rise of animal-free food. Then an opposition MP in his wilderness years, Churchill wrote an essay that imagined life in 50 years’ time. “Synthetic food will, of course, be used in the future,” he wrote.
The artificial stuff would “be practically indistinguishable from the natural products, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation,” Churchill wrote. “Microbes, which at present convert the nitrogen of the air into proteins by which animals live, will be fostered and made to work under controlled conditions just as yeast is now.”
