Mega Nourish Pill™

NEXT YEAR THEY WILL ROLL OUT THE MEGA NOURISH PILL™, WHICH MEANS YOU’LL NEVER HAVE TO EAT FOOD AGAIN. You’ll go to your doctor for a Mega Nourish Pill™ prescription. Nurses will calibrate your weight, caloric requirements, genetic predispositions, and compound a Mega Nourish Pill™ just for you. The under eaters will be happy because they won’t have to face the plate—all those steaming potatoes, useless starch. The binge eaters will finally feel full, effortlessly rejecting another cream tartlet, a second order of wings. The athletes will swallow their pill on the run, streamlining their metabolic precision, and the mothers—the mothers will love it the most. The Mega Nourish Pill™ will mean no more sweaty, sugar-crashed children. No more exhausted dinners, no more slapping together Sloppy-Joes after a day at the office, where—as modern mothers do—they manage to swipe bites of salad between meetings, pump their swollen breasts in the break room. The Mega Nourish Pill™ will mean no more shame when you’re not invited to jovial drinks with colleagues you don’t even like. No more yelling at your adolescent to empty the dishwasher, because there will be no more dishes. Instead, the recycling depots will crush plastic Mega Nourish Pill™ bottles, efficiently, as there will be no food containers, no pop bottles, no milk or milk-alternative cartons to sort through. Each sustainably produced Mega Nourish Pill™ bottle will be the same, but for the labels indicating proportions of nutrients in milligrams, the recipient’s name and dosage. So much conserved energy. Saved time. Impeccable digestion. You’ll function like the machine you ought to be.

The Italians will protest, of course, filling their plazas and pizzerias with ‘Slow Food’ pamphlets. The older generation will take to vandalism, marking up billboards and highway bridges with their spray-painted snails, stencilled forks and spoons. India will no longer smell like India. Turmeric, cumin, asafoetida and saffron will have no culinary use. The devout will still adorn their skin and hair with spice-derived pastes, but the soup pots—those brass and copper vessels once overflowing with dhal, korma, chana masala—will be repurposed into children’s toys, helmets and shields, or sold as baby bathtubs.

There will be great debates. What about religious ceremonies? Is God satisfied with a Mega Nourish Pill™? Is the offering holy, worthy? What about tradition? The milk, honey. Wine, bread. There will be dedicated talk-show episodes, experts weighing in on both sides. Food technologists, dieticians, anthropologists and sociologists will all have their view. But alas, the people will want the pill. There’ll be a vote, and the pill will win. “In a few generations,” the Mega Nourish Pill™’s CEO will say, “food will become a historical event. Your great-great-grandchildren will only know the pill.” Global health agencies will agree, promoting the slogan: “Pass the pill.”

Babies will prefer the shape and texture of the pill to their mother’s nipple; they’ll turn from the breast. Guests will shake bottles of Mega Nourish Pill™ at weddings, the rattle-rattle-rattle more satisfying than the scuff of falling rice. On holidays, celebrants will make toasts with their daily pill, swallowing back in unison, a new ritual. Christmas dinners won’t matter. Thanksgiving will be folklore. All those peanut butter sandwiches wilting in lunchboxes, the menacing gulls at seaside picnics, the awkward chewing on a first date, bloated bellies of the starved, wasted food thrown in dumpsters for rats and scavengers, feed lots, factory farms, pesticides, sprays, transport costs and cargo, poorly paid migrant workers, the desperate plight of birds and bees and small rodents to try and survive the thresher machines during harvest season—gone. The Mega Nourish Pill™ will be exactly what one mega planet needs. A twenty-first century miracle, one they will write books about in praise of its inventors.

And you—how will you feel? A person with so many food issues of your own. You’re one year away from dispensing of them forever. The hypoglycaemia and family history of diabetes, the threat of anaphylaxis, the acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, restaurant anxiety, the stuffing your face in the bathroom with chocolate and pretzels and frozen pierogis, the stomach aches and restrictions (gluten-lactose-sugar-sulphate free), those tense dinners with your grandfather who pounds his fists on the table, salt shakers thrown, milk in your eyes, sauce in your hair, a broken tooth, a burnt tongue—will you miss it? How will it feel, one year from now, to sit at an empty table, no placemats, no crockery, no cutlery? You’ll just need a glass of water. You’ll just need your Mega Nourish Pill™. Tasteless, odourless, complete. You might welcome the ease. You might not miss the noise. Forks scraping, soup bubbling over, the shriek of anything fried.

But now, already, you feel some undeniable craving. Some brooding protest of your own. Your mouth aches to move. Up and down, back and forth. It anticipates the loss. Your mouth will miss the sticky caramel, the sour grape, the density of fruit and flesh. Your mouth is all voracious wolf, all stalking prairie dog. Your mouth was made to bite. It wants to tear. You will have to remind it, next year, that we don’t bite things anymore. Maybe fit your mouth with a muzzle. Lacking a job, it might start biting you, or worse.