NYC World's Fair 1939-1940 : in a world facing an an apocalyptic war, a synthetic wonderland that presumed never an apocalyptic war

In the Spring and Summer of 1945 , the few people still left alive in war-seared Belarus,Ukraine and Poland could easily spot the difference between the new-fashioned synthetic food promised at New York's 1939-1940 World's Fair and good old-fashioned natural food.

If one looked hard enough, one could still natural food growing all by itself close by - without aid of any human effort - shoots, roots, fruits and berries  growing in the hidden nooks and crannies of forests and fields.

At least something to fill the aching tummies of small children until the first peacetime harvest came in.

But all those factory-made synthetic foods were nowhere to be seen.

Because their nations' factories, power poles, power plants, streetcars, roads, bridges, railways were also nowhere to be seen.

For what a high tech and globally interconnected synthetic food system unconsciously presumes is a world at peace, with open trade for all.

It sees petroleum from the Near East shipped worldwide and then turned into Japanese seafood and American burgers and British fish 'n' chips.

To give a more important and more current example of our refusal to embrace the natural as a lifeline backup : America produces no lifesaving natural penicillin, from which it then makes almost all our semi-natural antibiotics.

The natural stuff all comes from a few big brewing factories in China and India.

In the event of a war, America might once again be reduced to following wartime's Dr Martin Henry Dawson and produce the natural stuff in any available room with any old bunch of used but clean food bottles.

In a perfect world, national depositories would carefully husband ultra high yielding surface grown strains of the penicillium to guard against such an event.

But I don't have to remind you, this is no perfect world - it is a mad, profit-driven, shortsighted, greedy world ...

Journalists : selected from among the very stupid or just lobotomized after being hired ?

Synthetic Food is deadly !

Are bread and yogurt "synthetic" food ? Heavily processed yes - but not synthetic !


But they are claimed as such - by a few dishonest scientists and many, many, many journalists.

Meat grow in a test tube from cells is truly an amazing feat - but it is not synthetic food. Like bread and beer - it is merely a processed food : food made out of other food.

If all life on earth died but for Man, humans would soon voluntarily starve to death, rather than go on eating the synthetic 'food molecules ' we can currently make. But all the food we actually do eat and crave to eat, originated in food synthesized by other, more humble, beings.

Only Skygods deny this basic - grounded - fact of life and of food.

Is it a firm rule that all journalists must learn about the Food Chain in Grade 8 and then must forget it by Grade 9 ?

Using light energy, only some bacteria and all true plants actually  synthesize food from out of some basic chemical elements : carbon, hydrogen and oxygen mostly.

Actually from carbon dioxide ,water and a bit of minerals - even they can't make food from pure chemical elements.

This is because very few pure elements actually exist in nature : almost everything in the world is built up from raw natural compound molecules.

Plants do the job well enough to supply all our basic energy foods like sugar and starch, the simplest molecules we call food.

But we animals eat plants - the tender parts of them anyway, break them down into very simple molecules and then make some of them into much much bigger molecules , ie more complex food aka fat and muscles/meat.

Some of us animals must at least occasionally eat other animals as well as plants to be fully fed and to survive - humans are one of those kinds of animals.

(Some living things - bacteria and all fungi (aka mushrooms) - survive by eating the tough parts of plants and animals the rest of us can't digest . They break them down further into simple molecules and then re-build some of them into bigger molecules.)

We human animals can and do make in a factory some of the simplest foods molecules - vitamins. But only because the irrational fad for artificial vitamins supports the high cost of making them artificially.

But we do not make the vital complex molecules we need to survive - they are both too big and too uniquely shaped (ie stereoisomers) to be cheaper to manufacture rather than simply letting plants and animals do it for us on a farm.

But note well,  these are food molecules, not "food" as we conventionally understand it - ie amino molecules but not meat.

A total array of truly synthetic food molecules ,enough in variety to completely supply our body's chemical needs, can and have been made.

 But when people eat them and only them (as during an infamous 1965 space experiment), they soon resolve to starve and die rather than eat them any longer.

Our body craves solid, chewy, fibrous, tasty food - not just the chemical powders found inside them.

Yes, we can take basic elements and make the amino molecules that go into things like meat - and yes we can can make meat-like products from other food materials or from living cells - but we can't yet make,simply from chemical elements, a fully synthetic meat.

Calling synthetic amino molecules "meat" and calling meat made from living cells "synthetic" are simply lies - and scientists, even if they are restlessly seeking grants and fame, shouldn't say them.

(Big shout out to Dr Vladimir Mironov !)

But more importantly, stupid journalists shouldn't report them saying so....

1939-1945's Apogee of Modernity :the promise of SYNTHETIC food pills and the reality of NATURAL mass starvation

For 60 years Modernity promised food for all in the form of  little food pills, made artificially out of "air,water and useless coal tar".

The wonders of modern chemistry behold: the promises made at the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940 for the millionth time: food pills aplenty, for all.

But shortly after WWII started , severe hunger appeared throughout much of the world.

That was soon followed by mass starvation in so many places that ultimately lack of enough of the right sort of food killed more people during and after the war than did combat or execution could ever dream of doing.

Where was Modernity's  magical little food pills when the world really needed them ?

Millions died in parts of the British,German,Japanese,Russian and American empires from starvation.

 But these ignoble five, the leading lights of modern science, couldn't even invent enough food pills to save their own people.

The advantages of the little food pills was never claimed to be their taste - even their most ardent proponents admitted to that.

No, their ace in the hole was the claim they would be invulnerable to the vagaries of weather, pests and disease.

 As well,  everyone knew that war leads to harsh food blockades by the enemy and big demands on a  country's agricultural sector from their  own military.

 Blockades lead to the end of imported foodstuffs, animals feed and fertilizers.

 Your own military demands to take away farm labour to the army and to turn the tractor factories into making tanks  and the fertilizer plants into making explosives.

But the chemists promised that just a few huge plants would quickly turn the very air and water, abundant and free, together with the equally abundant, useless, hills of coal waste into cheap, healthy, balanced meals 'in a pill'.

This would stave off death and lead to a military victory for the nation with the best pills.

But it never happened, not once, in all of the six long years of competing warfare between nations of battling Big Scientists.

Big Science ??? Big Mouth: All talk: No Action.

Blowhards.

Modern Science's boasts turned out to be as hollow and as wretched as its morality proved to be.

1939-1945 the Apogee of Modernity you say ?

Aye, and its Nadir as well ...