9 Seriously Bizarre "Future Predictions" From The 1900s
7. We'd Turn Used Underwear Into Food
In the same article for Popular Mechanics the writers envisaged, for reasons that are less than clear, that we in the future would love nothing more than to literally eat our own underwear.
Some of the food that Jane Dobson buys is what we miscall synthetic. In the middle of the 20th century statisticians were predicting that the world would starve to death because the population was increasing more rapidly than the food supply. By 2000, a vast amount of research has been conducted to exploit principles that were embryonic in the first quarter of the 20th century. Thus sawdust and wood pulp are converted into sugary foods. Discarded paper table linen and rayon underwear are bought by chemical factories to be converted into candy.
The idea is born of a challenge that still faces us today, that is, the encroaching food crisis.
As the human population continues to boom, we are, at some point, going to run out of food. Or at least food as we know it.
Luckily for us, the boffins of the 21st century have decided to pour their efforts into lab-grown meat and genetically modified high-yield crops as opposed to an imaginative range of jockstrap flavoured candies.