Throughout the industrialized world, citizens are “the beneficiaries of food production technologies – and a wealth of delicious and formerly exotic ingredients – our ancestors could only dream about,” says the NPR blog The Salt. The array of food “is quieter and less showy than what previous generations of inventors and innovators dreamed up,” writes historian Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft. Dreams of totally synthetic food, delivery of meals by pneumatic tube or global conversion to vegetarian diets, giant vegetables or algae burgers proved out of reach. Progress tends to move more slowly. “Margarine and saccharine, for example, were once ‘foods of the future,’ and so was the synthetic fertilizer we now depend upon.”