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"The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. You look at the world around you, and take it apart into its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens."
- Frederik Pohl

Synthetic Food Dispenser  
  A machine that could make whatever food you wanted from basic elements.  

This is a very early use of the idea of a food synthesizer that could whip up whatever you wanted without needing to grow fruits and vegetables or breed animals for meat.

The restaurant had the food displayed directly, and I made a choice. The food was three hundred thousand years old, I suppose. I didn't know, and the machines that served it to me didn't care, for they made things synthetically, you see, and perfectly.
Technovelgy from Twilight, by John W. Campbell.
Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1934
Additional resources -

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Twilight
  More Ideas and Technology by John W. Campbell
  Tech news articles related to Twilight
  Tech news articles related to works by John W. Campbell

Synthetic Food Dispenser-related news articles:
  - MIT's Cornucopia Digital Robotic Food Concept

Articles related to Food
Garçon! A Menu For Artemis II, S'il Vous Plaît
A Beautiful Visualization Of Compact Food
Thermostabilized Wet Meat Product (NASA Prototype)
Edible Meat-Like Fungus Like Barbara Hambly's Slunch?

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Science Fiction in the News

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'Space-sickness is one of the most unpleasant sensations that a human being can experience. Not all are subject to it...'

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'...I saw a nice black heavy-looking cloud sailing by just now, and I can get the electrical machine out in five minutes to draw it down.'

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'From a distance it could resolve the cosmic rays reflected from various substances.'

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'The answer to the dumb student's prayer.'

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'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'

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'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'

Special Lights For Driverless Cars!
'That light is actually the Anamorphic Equalizer...'

'Old People Began to Cross The Continent In Their Own Cars'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'

Harrison Bergeron, Illustrated And Practiced
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'

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