Dear 22nd Century,

What's for dinner?

A basic enough question for you, perhaps. But for early 21st century food experts, predicting what you'll be eating eight decades hence is a task more taxing than any Iron Chef challenge.

Sure, we know the classic 20th century science-fiction notion that you lot eat "food pills" isn't going to pan out — it's physically impossible to squeeze our daily intake of calories into tablets. And while you may be knocking back those disturbingly tasteless Soylent shakes that are currently all the rage in Silicon Valley, we can assume human ethics won't decline to the point of chowing down on Soylent Green. (Today's secret ingredient is ... people!)

Beyond those near-certainties, all is speculation. Maybe future cities will be awash in fresh fruit and vegetables, thanks to massive vertical farms such as the one that just sprung up in Las Vegas and the one breaking records in a tunnel in Seoul. Maybe, as the New York Times recently suggested, Americans and Europeans will join the estimated 2 billion people on the planet who regularly get their protein from insects.

Or maybe, as food writer Michael Pollan fears, the whole structure of society is designed to make us eat more and more of what he calls "edible food-like substances." Defining "real food" is "going to get harder and harder to do as time goes on,” Pollan told me in a phone interview. “The imperative to process food, to change it, is so strong — because the more you process food, the more money you make from it. That’s one of the fundamental contradictions between the way capitalism works and the way human biology works.”

But now Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food and one of the world's foremost champions of real food, has become a lot more ambivalent about whether that's a bad thing.

In fact, he thinks certain edible food-like substances could help to save the planet by the time you come around — the ones that may largely displace meat in our diet for good.

How so? What helped to change Pollan's mind? Two words: fake meatballs.