In some ways, the story of future food is of prediction running so close on the heels of progress that they tend to fall over one another with tedious regularity. 

Take the case of food packaging.  The idea of a complete pre-packaged meal that doesn't need any preparation is a perfect artefact of the ideal world of tomorrow, but no sooner did the pundits start to wrap their minds around the concept in the '50s than the Swanson people took several thousand surplus turkeys and turned them into the world's first TV dinners.  

In fact, the very term "TV dinner" was coined to point up the futuristic idea of a complete meal that you just heat and eat.  Contrary to popular belief, TV dinner had nothing to do with munching on rubber chicken in front of the goggle box.  In '50s America, television was the symbol of modernity and what could make this Ur convenience food seem like the meal of tomorrow better than latching the letters TV to it.  If it had been invented twenty years earlier they'd have called them Radio Dinners. 

But pre-packed meals were only half of the equation.  What really made the Buck Rogers school of food take off was the microwave oven.  Now you not only had the meal, you didn't even have to hang about while it heated up.  Just stick it in the box, push a button, and let the electrons do the work in seconds.

This wasn't cooking, it was nuking and it worked so well that the automatic kitchen so often predicted became redundant.  Why build a machine to cook for you when you can buy your dinner ready made and zap it in thirty seconds?

Amazingly, this didn't just drop out of the blue after the Second World War.  Back in the 1930s, Hugo Gernsback's magazines were toying with cooking with radio waves, though in a fashion that was even more rough and ready than the early microwave model featured above.

One prediction that did come true, though with remarkable slowness was the self-heating can.  It seems that every ten years or so someone again says that it would be great if someone makes a can that could heat itself up when you opened it and shortly thereafter someone claims to have perfected it.  It was such a regular item on the grocery list of the future that Heinlein was writing about them in his juvenile novels in the '50s. 

Trouble is, the self-heating can is one of those things that is easy in theory and hard in practice.   Basically all you need to make such a can is a compartment filled with slaked lime that you add water to at the appropriate moment.  The water and the lime interact, you get an exothermic reaction and voila!  You have a hot meal.  Thing is, you've got to get the chemicals to mix just right or you either get lukewarm chicken soup or your pork and beans becomes a neat little hand grenade.

Thanks to decades of tinkering, and a big push from the military who regard self-heating food as a real plus for the infantry, the self-heating can is now a reality–though incredibly pricey compared to their non-heating cousins. 

And the sausages still need some work.

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