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"The SF approach: an awareness that things could have been different, that this is one of many possible worlds, that if you came to this world from some other planet, this would be a science fiction world."
- Neal Stephenson

Dewlog  
  A drug with the side-effect of virtually eliminating hunger.  

Dale Garth was the captain of the Stellar Queen - but he couldn't get another berth. He was addicted to dewlog, which saved his life but left him hopelessly addicted.

"Asteroid pierced our fuel tanks and set us adrift. It was eighteen months before a patrol found us out there - not like the heavily traveled inner orbits, you know. Two-thirds of us were gone by then - starvation. The rest of us were kept alive by some bottled stuff we found smuggled aboard... It was dewlog. You don't leave dewlog alone after living on it for three months. But it saved our lives."
Technovelgy from The Traitor, by Kurt von Rachen.
Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1941
Additional resources -

Here's some additional descriptive material:

There was a gasp from the doctor as he caught sight of the characteristically indrawn stomach, the ribs starkly plain beneath the pallid, glossy skin.

"When did you eat last?"

"Two years ago," he answered...

"This man's a dewlog drinker, Captain. His basic metabolism has been radically altered by the drug. He may live five years, no more, unless he quits the stuff.

Compare to the compact food pastilles from the 1879 short story The Senator's Daughter, by Edward Page Mitchell.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Traitor
  More Ideas and Technology by Kurt von Rachen
  Tech news articles related to The Traitor
  Tech news articles related to works by Kurt von Rachen

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