Red pill, blue pill

India's nutraceutical industry is booming thanks to advanced technology, distrust of the medical system and rising vanity. With multivitamins becoming purer and more effective, NIDHI GUPTA finds out if supplements have become the new serum

My idea of the future of food and nutrition was shaped by Cartoon Network. In Hanna-Barbera's '60s _cartoon The Jetsons, food was created by feeding prompts into wonder gadgets like the Menulator and DialA-Meal, or beamed down on restaurant tables in capsule form. These weren't simply flights of fancy, I'd learn later, but actually riffed off the predominant anxiety around food-propelled by suffragettes discussing kitchen politics and futurists viewing food as mere sustenance.

The idea of a meal-in-a-pill, common in post-apocalyptic sci-fi from the likes of Brave New World to Snowpiercer, hasn't materialised yet. But the current boom in the nutraceutical industry might be read as evidence of the growing need for functional nutrition. "The human population is only increasing, and so is the need for food," observes celebrity nutritionist Pooja Makhija. "But cultivable land is not. We have 1/100th the nutrition left in the food we eat today, compared to the food our grandparents ate.

Which is why the human body needs supplementation."

Health supplements aren't new, of course. Multivitamins became available to the general population in the 1950s.