The concept of urban farming has really taken off of late, with people concerned with freshness and frightened of the growing problem of food deserts. In 1920, PopSci suggested bringing country chickens to the big city, where they’d be closer to the people who were actually eating them. “The logical place to run a future poultry farm will be in a building in the city in which the product is to be consumed,” our writer said. The idea of a “chicken skyscraper” almost sounds like a vertical farm, a concept that still fascinates us today.

“Plant Hunters” sounds like the name of a boring Travel Channel series (though, if I’m being honest, I might watch that), but in reality, they were researchers like the one pictured who scoured the world for cheaper, more wholesome crops to farm in America. Some of the plant hunters’ key finds included Japanese rice, Guatemalan avocadoes and Durum wheat. Scientists in a lab closely examined all “immigrant plants” for potentially harmful insects or diseases before we went about sticking them in our soil.

In the 1920s, Dr. Herman A. Spoehr was on a mission to discover the secret life of chlorophyll, hoping to unlock the mystery of how plants form sugars from sunlight, water and air. Solving this puzzle was the key to creating massive sugar farms in the desert. Glass pipes in mirror-lined troughs would be filled with water charged with carbon dioxide, and set out in the sweltering desert sun, hopefully mimicking the process of photosynthesis. Nearby factories would take the byproducts of the desert sugar farms and turn them into foodstuffs.

This was the brainchild of French scientist Daniel Berthelot. (We spent a good amount of this article extolling Berthelot’s credentials, perhaps to make his idea sound more plausible?) Berthelot subjected naturally occurring gases to ultraviolet light, which produced sugars. He envisioned taking this process and manufacturing it on a large scale: factories full of glass tanks covered by UV lamps. Gases would enter the tanks through pipes, and vegetable material would rain down into fluffy piles which workers could then harvest.

A quick-freezing process invented in the 1930s claimed to take 40 minutes to preserve food, which could then be stored for two years and would “taste as they would have when picked.” (Though, unless technology has regressed from then to now, I suspect there was still a hint of freezer burn.) Fruits and vegetables were bleached in boiling water to help retain their colour. After being subjected to the necessary preparations, food was frozen in chambers full of methylene gas which reduced the temperature by 26 degrees in 40 minutes.

It has long been a dream of mine to dehydrate an entire watermelon down into a single chip, both to see how big the chip would be and because I suspect it would be packed with flavor. This dream could never be realised without the “magic quick drying processes that drive out bulky moisture while leaving in the flavor and vitamins.” And it still probably won’t be. But thank god they got rid of that bulky moisture, otherwise we wouldn’t have concentrated juice, those banana flakes that come in cereal or powder that turns into cranberry jam.

n 1950, the Stanford Research Institute put together a “pre-pilot plant” to demonstrate the efficiency of mass-producing the algae plant Chlorella, which harvests the sun’s energy “far more efficiently than any present farm crop,” thereby greatly increasing yields per acre. And without any stalks or other unsavory bits to remove before eating, “the resulting mass is entirely edible.” Hey, if it works for fish, it should work for us.

This gives a whole new meaning to “zapping some dinner.” The US Department of Defense pledged US$10 million to support research on shooting things that we put in our mouths with atomic radiation. As you can see from the picture, the rays help prevent mould from growing on waffles, macaroni and cheese, bread, potatoes and unidentifiable lumps of beige food product. And, if you’re lucky, after eating them, you may be eligible to star in The Avengers 2.

“Whales are cattle,” asserts this 1960 story about how to feed a hungry world. And their meat tastes remarkably like beef, apparently. Whale meat was considered a delicacy in Japan, and a single whale was worth $30,000 dollars in meat and other products that could be made from it. PopSci wasn’t advocating a mad rush of Ahab-like quests to kill wild whales and harvest their flesh, though. We instead imagined a world where we farmed the sea like the land, protecting and breeding whales like giant ocean cattle.