In 1893, the American suffragette and populist Mary E. Lease imagined a world without food. Writing for the American Press Association ahead of the World’s Fair in Chicago, she described her utopian vision for the year 1993, where a single plant-based pill could feed a person for days: “And thus the problems of cooks and cooking will be solved.” The “problem,” as she saw it, wasn’t food, but obligatory, time-consuming work. At a time when women were responsible for feeding the household, the meal replacement pill must have seemed a sensible solution to the shackles of domesticity, freeing women to stake their claim to the male-dominated public sphere.

But it wasn’t only women who were set to benefit: Lease positioned the pill as a feature of an enlightened society where men and women were equal, three hours constituted “a long day’s work” and money hoarders were classed with criminals.

1993 has come and gone, and, while food pills have become a sci-fi trope (see The Jetsons, Doctor Who, Star Trek, et al.), the meal-free future Lease imagined hasn’t come to pass, and likely never will. And this isn’t just because a lot of people seem to like food and dining, nor because science hasn’t backed it up.

While not an exact facsimile, meal replacement powders and drinks like Huel and Soylent—which offer all the nutritional value of a meal without the hassle of actually making one—build on Lease’s concept of better eating through chemistry.¹ But their proliferation has come to represent the opposite of what she’d intended.

Instead of free time and liberation, meal replacements have become symbols of the macho culture of overwork glorified by Silicon Valley. They’re the antithesis of the long lunch, the three-day workweek and the breezy out-of-office message warning that no, you will not be checking your email while on vacation—anything that prioritizes pleasure over productivity. 

Time reclaimed from cooking and eating seems poised to be redirected not to leisure and home life, but back into the very labor Lease had hoped to see reduced. Where she went wrong, then, wasn’t in imagining a world without traditional food, but a world where free time would be seen as anything more than more potential working hours. Food itself has never been the problem. It’s our relationships with leisure and labor that need to be reevaluated.