Driverless cars, human-like robots, 3D printers, Google Glass are some of the inventions that were mere fictions few moons back. With the fast-paced technology advancements, ‘food in a pill’, a fiction so far, also seems perfectly attainable. In line with that prediction and to my horror, our food is overly processed and continues to shrink in size. (Perfect examples are cereals and granola bars.)
What would happen to our world if and when ‘food in a pill’ became true?

• It would mean leaving our lifeline in the hands of the reckless pharmaceutical companies who selfishly aim at pocketing more money with utter disregard to their social and moral responsibility.

• There would be no lunch bags, instead, only pill boxes. Kids would be able to select the pill boxes with their favorite characters.

• There would be no dinner tables, so no dining rooms. Instead, we will have poker tables, foosball tables, and other entertainment. The dining area would be replaced with a game room.

• Children would munch on sugar-coated, multi-flavored pills. We would have egg- or bacon-flavored pills for breakfast, turkey and ham pills for lunch, and mild vegetable flavor pills for dinner.

• Pharmacies would replace the fast-food joints and restaurants. There would be a food pick-up line, separate from the prescription drive-through lane.

• Pharmacies would have ‘all-you-can-eat’ buffets, where the pills would be arranged beautifully on the table. There would be ‘vegan,’ ‘gluten-free,’ and ‘nut-free’ pills, too. On special occasions like Thanksgiving, pharmacies would serve ‘turkey meal’ pills.

• Pantries would look much more colorful as different colors and shapes of pills would occupy the pantry boxes in place of lentils, beans, and nuts. The labels would read, ‘breakfast,’ ‘lunch,’ ‘dinner,’ ‘snacks,’ ‘comfort food,’ and ‘boredom food.’

• Celebrity chefs would be a thing of the past, just like having a stove or a microwave in a kitchen.

• If kids ever come across an apple tree, they would not know what to do with the fruits.

• People would have more time on their hands, time saved by no cooking, no dining, and no cleaning up after meals. Children would play more video games and drive parents crazy. Adults would catch up on their favorite hobbies and TV series. People would socialize more often to kill the ‘meal’ boredom, maybe even get into more arguments and fights.

• There would be an emergence of mouth/jaw yoga studios to get those lazy muscles moving.

• Grandparents’ stories would begin with, “This tale is from the times when people used to eat seated at the dinner table…”

In the absence of real food, the entire landscape would go for a toss. Real food not only keeps us healthy but occupied and sane too. In essence, some inventions look good only in fiction, and ‘food in a pill’ belongs to that category.
Are you ready to replace this-

with this?

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