在2026年世界学者杯第2期WSC Weekly栏目中，我们与小学者一起了解了为什么飞行越来越颠簸以及背后的科学原因。在上期的趣味Quiz中，你是否找到了正确答案？现在就让我们一起来揭晓吧！
感觉飞机越来越颠了，是你的错觉吗？
Why plane turbulence is becoming more frequent？
第02期Quiz答案揭晓：
With progression of global warming, which of the following predictions about airplanes is LEAST likely to be true?
随着全球变暖的加剧，以下关于飞机的预测中，哪一项最不可能成为现实？
A. Flights will experience more orographic turbulence than clear air turbulence航班将遭遇比晴空湍流更多地形湍流
B. The time of cabin service will be shortened 客舱服务时间将缩短
C. The variety of in-flight meals will decrease 航班餐食种类将减少
D. Flight insurance rates will increase 航班保险费率将提高
E. The aviation industry will cause more pollution 航空业将造成更多空气污染
正确答案：A
Key: A
2026年第3期Weekly Intro
如果一日三餐可以消失会怎样？一颗小小药丸真的能替代一整顿饭吗？
本期Weekly将带你探索“代餐药丸”的科幻想象、历史起源以及现实中的科学限制，一起来看看吧！
2026 No.3
让你一辈子不用吃饭的神药会到来吗？
Why don't we have food pills to replace meals?
如果吃饭可以被一颗药丸替代
如果一日三餐可以消失，会怎样？没有切菜，没有咀嚼，没有餐盘，也没有碎屑，只需吞下一颗小小的白色药丸，再配上一杯水，你的身体就能获得所需的一切。
几个世纪以来，这一设想始终萦绕在现代人的想象之中。它频繁出现在科幻电影、漫画和各种未来预测中，常被当作效率与进步的象征。
What if meals could disappear? No chopping, no chewing, no plates, no crumbs, just a small white pill swallowed with a glass of water, and your body would receive everything it needed.For generations, this idea has haunted the modern imagination. It shows up in science fiction films, comic strips, and futuristic predictions, often as a symbol of efficiency and progress.
科幻中的“药丸餐”想象
“代餐药丸”的概念常与经典科幻作品联系在一起。一个典型例子是 1930 年的音乐喜剧电影《试想一下》（Just Imagine）。影片讲述了一名男子从长达五十年的昏迷中醒来，发现自己置身于未来的纽约。在这个奇特的世界里，人们不再使用名字，而是用数字来彼此识别，食物也被高度压缩。在一家咖啡馆中，主人公被端上来一整顿“药丸餐”：蛤蜊浓汤、烤牛肉、蔬菜、派和咖啡，全都以药丸形式呈现。他勉强吞下后打趣说烤牛肉药丸“太难嚼”，并开始怀念过去的日子。
在科幻作品中，食物药丸常既令人惊叹，又略显可怖。它承诺将人类从劳动中解放出来，却也可能抹去味道、仪式感和进食的乐趣。
The idea of the meal-in-a-pill is often associated with classic science fiction. One of the best examples is the 1930 musical Just Imagine, which imagines a man waking from a fifty-year coma and finding himself in a futuristic New York. In this strange future, people are identified by numbers rather than names, and food has become radically compressed. At a café, the protagonist is served an entire meal—clam chowder, roast beef, vegetables, pie, and coffee—in pill form. After reluctantly swallowing it, he jokes that the roast beef was tough and starts longing for the old days.The food pill in science fiction is often presented as both marvelous and slightly horrifying. It promises liberation from labor, but it also threatens to erase flavor, ritual, and pleasure.
代餐药丸的社会起源
事实上，代餐药丸的思想根源可以追溯到 19 世纪末的女性主义运动。在 1893 年芝加哥世博会前夕，美国新闻协会曾邀请作家设想一百年后的生活。其中，美国女性主义作家玛丽·伊丽莎白·利斯预测，到 1993 年，人们将不再依赖传统餐食，而会食用合成的浓缩食品。她的设想并非主要围绕科学效率，而是倡导社会解放。利斯认为，如果人类能从土地中提取营养并以浓缩形式摄取，那么女性或许终于能摆脱在厨房中无休止的家务劳动。
从这个角度看，代餐药丸与关于不平等的家务分工和性别角色的讨论密切相关。然而，并非所有人都欢迎这一愿景。反女性主义作家很快将代餐药丸变成嘲讽的对象。在诸如安娜·多德 1887 年的讽刺作品《未来共和国》中，颗粒化餐食被用来讥笑女性放弃家庭角色的设想。
The roots of the food pill lie not in futuristic entertainment but in late nineteenth-century feminism. In the lead-up to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the American Press Association invited writers to imagine what life might be like a century later. Among them was the American suffragette Mary Elizabeth Lease, who predicted that by 1993 people would eat synthetic, condensed food instead of conventional meals. Her vision was not mainly about scientific efficiency. It was about social liberation. Lease imagined that if nourishment could be extracted from the earth and consumed in concentrated form, women might finally be freed from endless domestic labor in the kitchen.In this sense, the meal-in-a-pill was connected to debates about unequal division of household work and gender expectations.However, not everyone welcomed this vision. Anti-feminist writers quickly turned the food pill into a target of ridicule. In satirical works such as The Republic of the Future (1887) by Anna Dodd, the pelletized meal became a joke about women supposedly abandoning their proper domestic role.
食物从享受变成“燃料”
到了 20 世纪初，代餐药丸的想象又因对人口过剩与粮食短缺的恐惧而获得新动力。随着城市扩张和工业化加速，许多人开始担忧传统农业无法养活未来社会。在 20 世纪二三十年代，药丸餐频繁出现在报纸、漫画和大众文化中。1926 年犹他州的一组漫画通过日常场景调侃这一想法：工人把药丸餐忘在家里，顾客购买“火鸡晚餐”药丸，家庭把脏盘子当作古董收藏。
这些画面虽然幽默，却也反映出一种严肃的文化情绪。食物不再主要被理解为愉悦的来源、待客的方式或文化身份，而越来越被视为“燃料”，一种可以被拆解、优化并以最高效率输送的物质。在这种世界观中，代餐药丸显得顺理成章。如果工厂能让机器更高效，也许同样可以让吃饭更高效。
In the early twentieth century, the food pill gained new force from the fear of overpopulation and food scarcity.As cities grew and industrial modernity accelerated, many people began worrying that traditional agriculture would not be able to feed the future. In the 1920s and 1930s, meal pills appeared repeatedly in newspapers, cartoons, and popular culture. A 1926 cartoon series in Utah mocked the idea through everyday scenarios: a worker forgetting his meal pill at home, a shopper buying “turkey dinner” pills, and households treating dirty dishes as antique relics. These images were humorous, but they also reflected a serious cultural mood.Food was no longer imagined primarily as pleasure, hospitality, or cultural identity. Instead, it was increasingly framed as fuel, something that could be broken into parts, optimized, and delivered with maximum efficiency.
太空时代带来的新想象
20 世纪 60 年代，人们对这一幻想的态度开始发生转变。早期对于“药丸餐”设想往往带有讽刺或阴郁色彩，但随着人类太空探索激发的科学乐观主义，代餐药丸被重新包装为进步的象征。当宇航员开始从银色软袋、粉末和可复水凝胶中摄取食物时，紧凑而工程化的营养形式突然不再显得反乌托邦，反而显得时尚而令人向往。食物的未来似乎与火箭、实验室和现代设计紧密相连，速溶饮品以及其他脱水食品因与“太空时代生活方式”相联系而获得声望。漫画《我们的新时代》（Our New Age）甚至把合成食品描绘为人类发展的下一大步——一种通过化学而非传统农业来养活快速增长人口的方式。在这一时期，代餐药丸象征着人类对自然的科学掌控，成为人类能够通过工程手段摆脱饥饿的愿景。
By the 1960s, however, the tone of the food-pill fantasy shifted.Earlier visions had sometimes been satirical or bleak, but now the concept became part of a more optimistic belief in scientific progress, fueled by the space race.As astronauts consumed food from silver pouches, powders, and rehydratable gels, compact engineered nutrition suddenly looked not dystopian but glamorous. The future of food seemed linked to rockets, laboratories, and modern design. Dehydrated foods gained prestige because they felt connected to space-age living. Comic strips such as Our New Age described synthetic food as the next great step in human development, a way to feed a rapidly growing global population through chemistry rather than traditional farming. In this period, the food pill became a symbol of scientific mastery over nature, a portable promise that humanity could engineer its way out of hunger.
为什么“药丸餐”难以实现
然而，无论想象力多么丰富，代餐药丸始终面临一个根本难题：它在物理层面上并不适合作为真正的正餐替代品。虽然维生素和矿物质可以被制成药丸，但热量需要占据体积。真正的一餐不仅包含微量营养素，还提供大量能量、脂肪、蛋白质和碳水化合物。1936 年，哥伦比亚大学的米尔顿·A·布里奇斯博士直言不讳地指出，药丸永远无法提供足够的热量来取代餐食。由于成年人平均每天需要约 2000 千卡的能量，若完全依赖药丸饮食，我们要做的不是吞下一两片，而是每天需要数百片（估算约为 450 片）。这并不意味着这一梦想已经消失，相反，它演变成了各种相关产品，例如代餐粉、营养奶昔和工程化营养补充剂。
“药丸餐”的梦想并不仅仅关乎营养本身，它还促使我们思考更宏大的问题，关于效率是否应取代愉悦，化学是否能取代文化，以及人类是否真的渴望一种没有“用餐”的营养方式。
And yet, for all its imaginative power, the food pill has one major problem: it is not physically practical as a true meal replacement. While it is possible to put vitamins and minerals into pill form, calories take up space. A real meal does not just contain trace nutrients; it provides substantial energy, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates.In 1936, Dr. Milton A. Bridges of Columbia University bluntly explained that pills could never contain sufficient caloric volume to replace meals. The modern version of this argument is even more precise. Since an average adult needs around 2,000 calories a day, a true pill-based diet would require not one or two tablets, but hundreds—about 450 pills daily. That does not mean the dream has vanished. Instead, it has evolved into related products such as meal-replacement powders, shakes, and engineered nutritional supplements. The dream of the food pill is not really just about nutrition.It is about much larger questions about whether efficiency should replace pleasure, whether chemistry can replace culture, and whether human beings really want nourishment without meals.
Weekly 关键词 Key Words
►food pills 代餐药丸
所属话题
Introductory Questions
相关阅读
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20120221-food-pills-a-staple-of-sci-fi
Weekly FUN Quiz
相信现在你已经知道了代餐药丸为何难以成为现实以及背后的原因了吧！那就快来参与本期Weekly FUN Quiz👇，告诉老师你的答案吧！
Quiz
A cartoon about food pills that appears on the newspaper in 1968 is most likely to be titled as
1968年刊登在报纸上的一幅关于“代餐药丸”的漫画，其标题最可能是
A. Freedom for Housewives 主妇的自由
B. End of Human Hunger in 2000 人类饥饿终结于2000年
C. Fuel for Your Husband in Five Seconds 五秒钟为丈夫补充能量
D. A Tablet for Two 一片药丸，两人共享
E. The Death of the Gourmet 美食家的消亡
