food pill n.

In Moonland the only food is pills. Every day the Official Feeders visit every house and every member of the household is put on the weighing machine. If the person is above the standard weight, he or she is left without foot until reduced to the lawful standard. If the person is below the standard weight, he or she is stuffed with pills…. The exceptions…are the President, the members of the Council, and the officials. They may be fat or thin; they do not swallow the food pills they prescribe for the people, but eat and drink what they like.

Perhaps the time will come when the art of extracting and condensing the active principle or essence of comestibles will be so advanced that one may be able to obtain in a small pellet as much refreshment and nourishment as he now obtains in a whole meal…. A person will carry a few food pills in his pocket, and when he grows hungry he will take one and swallow his whole meal at once. Perhaps.

First, one fellow came in with an electric fly-killer, and then another with a bicycle sidewalk cleaner—sort of a snowsweeper—and another had a patent compressed food pill, and there were several hundred men with communications to the editor.

Not until the time comes when people gather around the festal board and instead of the gross consumption of cooked viands swallow a food pill or a lozenge will the limits of possible reform have been reached.

At noon he swallowed some food pills and, tired by his morning’s exercise, went to sleep under a massive oak tree.

They ate in the strange manner necessitated by spacesuits. By buttons in a niche outside their suits they manipulated levers which reached into a complicated mechanism, pulling out food pills—tasteless things—and water, which they sucked through a tube.

Someone gave me a food pill and I took it automatically.

Artificial food pills are what I’ve eaten all my life. They better not try to put no synthetic substitutes on the market now. I won’t have it.

‘John…we’ve forgotten to take our food pills.’ She clicked two bright wafers from a thing on her belt and passed one to him.

My stomach is literally concave. I’m losing flesh off my bones. I need a food pill.

I thought we’d be living on food pills like you see in the movies, but if you tell rRego [sc. a robot] what you want to eat, he can produce it in a few minutes.