Meaning

noun any substance that can be used as food

noun insipid intellectual nourishment

originBorrowed from Latin pābulum (“food, nourishment; fodder or pasture for animals; nourishment for the mind, food for thought”), from pā(scō) (“to nourish”) + -bulum (suffix denoting an instrument), or directly from Proto-Indo-European *peh₂-dʰlom (*peh₂- (“to protect, shepherd”) + *-dʰlom, variant of *-trom (suffix denoting a tool or instrument)).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0