Be Thankful for Thanksgiving Because in the Future It Is Going to Suck

Excuse me while I brush aside Christmas decorations, football and Black Friday for a moment. What Thanksgiving is really about is remembering just how lucky we are to be able to fill a table with food and spread our family and friends around it. It’s something that gets lost in the stress of burning turkeys and drunken uncles: We are at a time in human history where good food is cheaper and more available than ever, and the health of us and those we care about is better than ever.

Of course, many will argue that we’ve recently experienced a decline in both of those aspects, especially in the U.S. Others will point out that the United States now produces so much food that Americans waste 40 percent of it, worth about $100 billion a year. But let’s not talk about recent history! What about the future? To quote from an excellent article on the future of a planet with an exploding human population, "Indefinite growth on a finite planet is impossible." Now, that’s specifically in reference to economics, but it also applies to our farmland and food supply.

So to really help us all be thankful for what we have, let’s imagine that we keep messing up big time and, in a few hundred years, we’re living on a barren, dessicated landscape with no land for traditional farming. And what if our desperate escape into deep space lands us on a planet without the kind of ecosystem we know and love? How will we give thanks then? We don’t really know, but here are some educated guesses.

Producing meat these days includes the production of costly ancillaries: the bones, hooves, brains and poops of living creatures. While all those byproducts are currently put to use in hot dogs and marshmallows, one day raising farm animals will simply be too land-, energy- and even grain-intensive for the average person to be able to afford to pick up a cheap turkey. What’s the answer? Growing meat in a lab.

This isn’t science fiction. As Michael Spector wrote in the New Yorker last May, the idea ultimately may face more ethical issues than engineering challenges. Then again, it’s not hard to argue that the impact of our current food consumption on the environment is unethical. According to Reuters, "annual meat production is projected to increase from 218 million tonnes in 1997-1999 to 376 million tonnes by 2030." Currently, more than 50 percent of agricultural land is used for livestock. To Mark Post, the vascular biologist in the Netherlands leading the test tube meat charge, that’s precisely why we need to create Petri dish hamburgers. To do that, Post is already using "stem cells harvested from leftover animal material from slaughterhouses, [then] nurtures them with a feed concocted of sugars, amino acids, lipids, minerals and all other nutrients they need to grow in the right way." Put that into a turkey mold and you’ve got the centerpiece of a future feast.

When the apocalypse hits, even our lovely underground tubers like potatoes will be fried in the scorched earth by solar flares, angry gods or nuclear devices. That’s the future depicted in Cormack McCarthy’s The Road, in which the future Earth has no working ecosystem. The plants and animals and ground and air and sea and everything is dead. Those processes are so complicated, yet so effortlessly carried out in every day life, that once the cycle falls apart we likely won’t have the organizational skills and willpower to fix things. How do you grow potatoes when you first need to fertilize the soil, clean water for irrigation and clear the air so sunlight can get through?

Unfortunately, you’ll be stuck foraging. Thankfully, we’ve already perfected the bomb-proof potato. Well, not perfected per se because they taste like buttered cardboard, but you can find a box of mashed potatoes on your local grocer’s shelf. HuffPo broke down the wonderfully nuke-resistant qualities of boxed potatoes, but let’s just look at the ingredient list quickly: "Potato Flakes, Sodium Bisulfite, BHA and Citric Acid (Added to Protect Color and Flavor), Contains 2% or Less of Each of the Following: Monoglycerides, Partially Hydrogenated Cottonseed Oil, Natural Flavor, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Butteroil." So that’s dried, shredded potatoes (probably the ugly ones) mixed with four separate preservatives, two oils and an emulsifier. Mix it with some fetid water and you’ve got a killer Thanksgiving gruel. Just be sure not to look at the word “potato flakes” for too long.

Bread is the key ingredient to stuffing. Well, stale bread, really. And I know what you’re thinking: bread’s always been around! It’s so easy to make! And you’re wrong, at least as far as stuffing is concerned. Stuffing requires nice fluffy bread, not the dense flat bread that’s been made by simply mixing flour and water together for ages. Fluffy bread requires yeast.

Flour is relatively easy to produce, and is already stored in mass quantities, so let’s not worry about finding it. Instead, let’s imagine a future where the world is overrun by some killer superbug. It’s really not that crazy of a proposition. Under this scenario, presumably the CDC or some global government coalition would start a crackdown on citizen ownership of microbes, includes fluffy bread-producing yeast. What’s the guerrilla baker to do?

A hardware hacker in Canada drew up some plans for the Doughduino, an incredibly simple and cheap temperature-controlling circuit that will help you guarantee that the contraband yeasts leavening your dough are kept warm and toasty even during a nuclear winter.

Any of the Thanksgiving dishes requiring vegetables, lovely green bean casserole included, are going to be difficult to replicate in the future. Vegetables are at the bottom of the food chain, easily produced and plentiful, and as such we as humans haven’t spent much time trying to create synthetic options. But one day, when garden space reaches astronomical prices and everyone’s nutrition comes in the form of government-sponsored vitamins, we’ll have to.

When we run out of farming space, we’ll likely also have run out of petroleum. We’ll still need lubricants and other oil-replacements, but where will they come from? I’m guessing from algae. Algae, like pond scum and seaweed, grows in even the foulest, brackish water imaginable. So even when the whole world is polluted and wrecked, we’ll probably still have algae. Algae also has some nutritious value.

Thus, one day, we’ll use algae to create fake vegetables like how we use soy to create fake meat today. Entire industries will be based around skimming leftover pond sludge from the production of petroleum substitutes and processing it into a vegetable base that can be molded, flavored, colored and texturized into whatever you dream. Asparagus? You got it. Squash-based pumpkin pie substitute? You’re on. It’s like Soylent Green, but, you know, not people.

This may seem like just a cursory list, but let’s be honest, what else can we synthesize easily? (If you’ve got answers, I’d like to hear them). The things we hold dear simply aren’t easily replicable. In the space-challenged, dead-Earth future, apples for apple pie won’t exist, and how do you really create a fake apple? You can’t. Instead, we’ll all be forced to rely on substitutes and processed nutrition. It’s the reality of a Jetsons dinner pill or chewing gum, except that gum that tastes like Thanksgiving isn’t a substitute for actually sitting down for a wonderful meal. So this Thanksgiving, while your surrounded by good food and friends, enjoy it. It won’t be the same experience forever.

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