With six Oscar nominations — including best picture and actor — "Darkest Hour" is fascinating audiences with its portrayal of Winston Churchill facing history-altering decisions at a turning point in World War II. In fact, Churchill had been thinking about the future of humanity in rather radical ways for years already.
In 1931, Churchill published an essay, "Fifty Years Hence," in which he made predictions about what the world might look like by the 1980s. Among the more stunning: that humans would figure out how to permanently divorce meat production from animal husbandry.
"We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing," Churchill prophesied, "by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium." Because doing so would free up land that had been used for growing crops to feed farm animals, he concluded, "parks and gardens will cover our pastures and ploughed fields."