How Indian famines helped inspire Star Trek

Gene Roddenberry, who created Star Trek, which launched 60 years ago this month, only once played a role in it. The second episode, ‘Charlie X’, deals with a boy, the sole survivor of a crash on a deserted planet. He grew up alone, yet gained superhuman powers, like the ability to reanimate things. Roddenberry voiced the ship’s chef who tells Captain Kirk over the intercom, bewildered, that he put turkey meatloaf in the oven, but “there’s real turkeys in there now, real turkeys”.

Later episodes show that this future world had replicators, machines that rear rang ed molecules to create any kind of food. So, why were ovens or a chef needed? Some of the answers suggested were : Replicators guzzled energy, so ovens were a back - up ; or , replicators only created proteins, so vegetable gardens and cooks were still needed for final meals; or, rather desperately, that cooking and eating that food together created important social bonds. The real answer was that no one expected the extraordinary, enduring success of Star Trek, so past plot details didn’t always sync with how the series developed.

Combined with the writer’s own experiences in India, themes of hunger and overpopulation often feature in the series.


In Star Trek Memories, William Shatner, who played Kirk, suggested that Roddenberry started developing his story ideas in Calcutta. He had been a pilot during World War II, and joined Pan Am airlines after. He was relatively junior, so often had to do long, less popular flights, such as New York to Calcutta. A long flight meant along lay over, so Roddenberry was often stuck in Calcutta. “The city is truly hellish, oppressively hot, extremely impoverished and teeming with sickness,” writes Shatner, with the typical prejudices of that time. “As a result, he writes profusely, honing his literary skills, and effectively shutting out the unpleasantness that his Calcutta layovers entail.”

On June 18, 1947, Roddenberry boarded a flight from Karachi to Istanbul. He wasn’t on official duty, but was asked by the pilots to help after two engines caught fire and they desperately tried to land. He was in the cabin calming passengers, which may be why he survived after the plane crashed in the Syrian desert, killing the pilots and several passengers . Roddenberry took charge of the survivors and got them to relief. The many scenes in Star Trek of a ship in danger and then the aftermath of a crash came from a very real place.

The year 1966 was also a period of f amine in India. Re peated monsoon failures had made India dependent on food aid from the USA, whose president Lyndon B Johnson controlled its flow to try make India support his politics. A shipment in December 1966 is said to have arrived only after Johnson’s daughter begged him to send it as a Christmas gift. Warren Belasco, in Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, points to a documentary that aired on CBS in 1959 called ‘The Population Explosion’ using Indian footage: “With a record breaking nine million viewers, the documentary was the first national network news report to discuss contraceptives frankly.”

Combined with Roddenberry’s own experiences, this suggests why themes of hunger and overpopulation often feature in the series. In ‘The Conscience of the King’ (season 1.13), the ship has to deal with a fugitive colony administrator who, facing a famine, executed many to help a few survive. In ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’ (season 2.15), the ship must guard grain seeds needed for a new colony. But it gets overrun by an adorable fuzzy lifeform that gorges on the grain – which is then revealed to have been deliberately poisoned.

In ‘The Mark of Gideon’ (season 3.16) Kirk has to deal with a planet so overpopulated due to refusal to use contraception that, again, deliberate killing is being considered. Couldn’t replicators just have been provided, in all these cases, to produce food? But then, as now, it is easier to keep people dependent, and blame them for it, rather than just helping them eat.