Imagine The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels without food and drink.

Easy, right?

Oh, sure, you’d have to go back in time and get Douglas Adams to cut that utterly fabulous scene at the core of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where the Dish of the Day tries to sell Arthur a nice bit of his shoulder before going off to shoot himself . . . and promising to do it humanely. In fact, Adams would have to cut out the whole restaurant. And maybe re-title the book.

But that wouldn’t be such a big deal, would it? Other than that one teeny little thing, the rest would all be more or less the same, right?

Okay, perhaps there may be one or two other cosmetic changes. Like tea. Remember Arthur Dent describing tea in lavishly sensual terms to the Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesizer, tying up the shipboard computer in the process and almost getting everyone aboard the Heart of Gold killed? Come to that, wasn’t tea integral to the invention of the Heart of Gold’s Infinite Improbability Drive? And what about all the delicious food-related throwaway details—the way Arthur, when he’s trying to grasp the wholly ungraspable notion that the Earth is destroyed, seizes on the idea that there is no longer such a thing as a McDonald’s hamburger? Not to mention the way every planet in the Galaxy has a completely different drink whose name sounds like “gin and tonic.”

And say, now that  …