Textured vegetable protein. You've almost certainly eaten it. The fact that you probably don't realize that you have is what makes it the other food of the dystopian future. For that matter, the food of the topian present; it's used as a meat extender in a lot of what is loosely termed "food." That microwave beef and cheese burrito doesn't get to be 89 cents by being filled with 100% cow products. Textured vegetable protein is also the "bit" in "imitation bacon bits." You may be noticing a trend. Textured vegetable protein is good at pretending to be food that it isn't.
Shame, really, because straight up, it's not that bad, especially with a bit of cheese. You can find it in the natural foods section of most grocery stores - dystopia has a sense of irony, since textured vegetable protein isn't natural, and it's claim to being food is really more of a technicality - as baggies of nondescript beige granules. Apparently, all the most sci-fi food is shades of brown. Combined with equal parts water, the granules fluff up to something vaguely akin to crumbled ground beef in texture.
Being dehydrated doesn't make a food sci-fi. Being an industrial byproduct does. Textured vegetable protein starts off as what is left over from sucking the soybean oil out of soybeans. From there, the soy leftovers are run through a processor that poufs it up and dries it out to make the granules.
There you have it. Textured vegetable protein isn't the balanced nutrition that our post-apocalyptic sci-fi bretheren get from peanut butter ball mix, but it does provide a source of cheaply-transported protein, while solving the problem of what to do with the waste from creating biodiesel.
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