When we think of the retro futures portrayed in old movies and television, the culinary aspects tend to get lost amid the flying cars, robot maids, and glittery space travel. I guess we tend to assume that futures past all contained food in pill form or something similarly high-tech.But that’s simply not the case. The food portrayed in seminal dystopian space flicks, compiled in this brilliant video dug up by Miriam Simun, is anything but boring. As she writes, "Mm… Listening to waiter from eXistenz makes me think what the stuff crawling around the bottom of the East River taste's like, if it's true, that “‘mutant reptiles and amphibians provide new and previously unimagined taste sensations.’”Working in Williamsburg, a neighborhood whose rabid food obsession seems mostly focused on the superficial, I have to wonder how a beautifully geometric tray with four rectangular slots of uniformly-colored slop, like portrayed in 2001: A Space Odyssey, would fare. Probably pretty well, actually. But consider this: Bioengineered humans, robotic exoskeletons, and tablet computers are either here or on the horizon, and all were predicted by old movies. If all that’s come true, does that mean space traveler food of the future is really going to be amorphous paste and truck-stop sandwiches?