The drawback of the food developed by professor plumb
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Humorists often see the possibilties of a new technologies before the SF writers do. Their sources are the same newspapers, magazines, and books that SF writers pull ideas from. An unending line of humorists from Robert Benchley through S. J. Perelman and Miles Kington to Dave Barry would seize a silly article and use it for comic fodder. That's one of the pillars of today's Internet. Imagine Fark.com without it.
The great Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock led the way in this as in so much else. Despite keeping his day job as chair of the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill University, he found the time to write more than 60 books. At one time the joke was that more people had heard of Leacock than of Canada. Benchley was Leacock's disciple in many ways; he once wrote "I have enjoyed Leacock's work so much that I have written everything he ever wrote - anywhere from one to five years after him."
His first book of humor was a collection of his early pieces called Literary Lapses, privately published in Canada in 1910. British publisher John Lane got word of its excellence and put out the edition that made Leacock famous. It's probably never been out of print since. Literary Lapses contains a short piece titled "The New Food," a story about a Christmas dinner and a concentrated food pill that can feed a huge family, eerily reminiscent of the "lozenge" in James Payn's "The Fatal Curiosity; or, A Hundred Years Hence." Coincidence or homage? My guess is coincidence, but you never knew who saw what in history.
And we talk about huge portion sizes today - 350 pounds of food for 13 people! I haven't been able to find a Professor Plumb from the University of Chicago, although a Charles Summer Plumb had a long career at Purdue and Ohio State as a Professor of Animal Husbandry and of Agriculture, among a variety of titles. The notion of concentrated food pellets was a common one, though, and went back in various forms a good half century. New and noteworthy in 1910 was the conviction that science had finally understood food so well that its basics could be provided in synthetic form. The discovery of "vitamines" by Casimir Funk would soon sink that hubris, but it continued to pop up time and again throughout the century. The only thing that changed is that our staid, puritan culture no longer allows humor about exploding babies at Christmas dinner.
Professor Plumb developed food in the form of pills having all the
nutrients.
Their only drawback was that they expanded on diluting in water. A
little baby swallowed the pill. Panicked his mother gave him water
and the pill expanded as if the baby had eaten thirteen Christmas
dinners
50 words