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The nostalgic resurrection of Futurama has been nailed to the heart of the entire community of fans behind the adventures of its futuristic dystopia. Although here, beyond the expected come back, we have come to comment on the gastronomic vision of its technological reality.
If we zoom in on all the tables and evenings that take place in the series, we can see how food is represented as a means of expression to illustrate and denounce the dangers of late capitalism. A metaphor that connects each of the episodes and is reflected not only in the dishes themselves, but also in their sordid restaurants, in their scarcity of products or in a misunderstood emotion that underlies the consumption of packaged industrial food.
That bleak vision of the future and sordid vision of gastronomy is also glimpsed through some characters such as Fry, a former pizza delivery boy, who frequently eats something called ‘Bachelor Chow’, a brown food similar to dog food that boasts an improved ‘flavored’ version.
In this same reality in which Futurama explores what the food of the future could be like -while serving up a critique of industrial overcrowding and the climate crisis- there are ‘edible’ materials such as Soylent made from human bodies, mentioned in its jokes, which even appears as a special ingredient in an Iron Chef contest.
The junk food of the future
Although if there is any drink positioned at the core of their culinary universe, that is Slurm: a highly addictive toxic green substance that is Fry’s favorite. In one of their standout episodes, in which they travel to Slurm’s subway factory, beyond uncovering their labor exploitation, they gain access to some of the secret ingredients of this drink, such as the anal secretions of Wormulon’s queen.
The subsequent revamp of this drink to ‘Slurm Zero’, promoted with the slogan ‘no taste, all the addictiveness of the original’, is also presented as a parallel to Diet Coke, and the pollution of large factory production, as well as our cultural obsession with caffeine. Symbologies that are part of a larger context or social satire around self-service stores, and the ‘real garbage’ that we humans may soon be eating in the future.
