I've been wondering why there isn't a larger variety of sci-fi kinds of food in settings.
Fantasy has loads of edibles that blend real world food with fantasy ingredients, yet the most advanced sci fi seems to get are food bars/pills/paste.
Where's the extravagance, the variety? Surely there has to be more than just processed, nutrient dense organic shapes.
>tl;dr ITT Space Food
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>yet the most advanced sci fi seems to get are food bars/pills/paste.
This is for a reason. When traveling in space, you are limited by many different considerations. A fantasy adventurer only needs to carry a few things to get by; a bedroll, a blanket a pot, and a knife/hatchet will serve in 90% of cases. Food is everywhere, as is water, and it's unlikely you'll be totally screwed unless you have no survival skills and even then it's likely there's a settlement or something not too far from you. In space, you have only what you can take with you, and anything beyond your self-contained bubble is going to be deadly 100% of the time. There is no "surviving" exposure to space. If you run out of food, air, water, or fuel, you are dead. So you need to pack economically, and bars/paste can be nutrient dense while being easy to pack and have a long shelf life. Of course, if you have a little more space, you can go full MRE and get some variety, or maybe hydroponically grow some greens/veggies, but typically you're cramming as much necessity as you can into as small a space as possible to save fuel.
Of course, this all goes out the window when you start getting into Star Trek-level space fantasy where you can just manipulate shit into steak tartare via a replicator. Then it doesn't matter at all, you can just harvest space dust and feed yourself, or make air from the atoms, or whatever.
GROX. BURGERS.
Yes but what about stuff planetside? All I ever see it just that: ship rations. Never do I see the sort of things you get from creative/desperate explorers on a planet.
What sort of things would arise on a world that already has a ready source of alien grains and vegetation palatable to us? That's what I'm not seeing, and what I'd like to see more of.
...
I once typed up a list of foods on Veeky Forums for a cyberpunk setting, though I think they were foods to actually eat irl at the table that fit the cyberpunk theme.
I couldn't find it in the archive so you'll have to go looking for the thread yourself.
High protein algaes and other things you might find in nutrient pastes are usually very space efficient. You want the best produce-to-space ratio when you're trying to feed your planet, other planets that can't sustain themselves (ice planets, desert planets), space stations, and numerous interplanetary travelers. Of course Kobe beef and alien equivalents would still exist, but they'd likely be prohibitively expensive.
Sliced meats, cheeses and pates give quite a high amount of energy / volume.
I'm talking about the room needed to grow the food, not to store it.
>Where's the extravagance, the variety?
Surpassed and forgotten, as it should be.
We should eat to live, not live to eat.
Because it's not interesting? You don't get experience or loot for eating it, so who cares?
> Neelix
Just shoot me now.
I doubt that. There will always be those that want to create using food as a medium.
> You don't get experience or loot for eating it, so who cares?
That's a piss poor excuse if I've ever seen one. Just because there isn't a system of reward doesn't mean one can't be made
You're right that bland algaes and things are the most simple idea, but I'm trying to help OP with his idea.
>Alcoholic drinks are efficient in energy / volume and they won't rot or go off. A conservative approach would be to produce a ' vodka ' using sugar or waste starch. A more luxurious approach would be to use grain or rice. If grain or rice were used, then whisky, beer or sake could also be produced.
>You don't get experience or loot for eating it, so who cares?
>blatantly disregarding the black market, piracy, and bribing opportunities of any kind of luxury good
Never talk to me or my trade empire ever again.
My setting has long cords of rudimentary spinal cords surrounded by undifferentiated stem cells that can be used to grow meat of any type and flavor. It takes a couple of hours to a couple of days to grow the meat in question, depending on the complexity of the order.
Want lizard tongue? Just input the right settings.
Infant cow's heart? Easy enough
Human flesh? It's possible but that setting is banned for obvious reasons.
There's also similar things for various fruits, veggies, and wood that can be made to emulate various climates that can affect taste/quality of the produce/wood
OP never said a thing about piracy, smuggling, or bribery. You could do that with drugs or rare minerals or slaves or a million other things, the PCs aren't going to give a shit or take any particular note of it besides "It's the cargo."
Get better players.
Sci-fi food tends to be used differently from fantasy food. Fantasy food is generally creating familiarity. It adds details the reader can easily imagine and understand. Sci-fi food is generally used to alienate. The Chicken Gun buffet in Existenz, soylent green, the sentient cows in Hitch Hiker's guide. They're meant to show something as fundamental as food, something that's been evolving, but not so much that we can't make recipes from a thousand years ago pretty easily, has radically changed.
>Neelix and Chill
All the creativity to come up with food ends up going towards weird drinks
>Where's the extravagance, the variety? Surely there has to be more than just processed, nutrient dense organic shapes.
Modernist cooking is an entire artform and hobby in and of itself, and it's best not to let your players get too close to it, lest you start spending entire sessions sous-vide cooking exotic alien fauna and serving them with a sauce made from microgravity condensed filtered fruit puree.
And that's not even getting started on the fucking plating.
>You don't get experience or loot for eating it, so who cares?
Sounds like you're playing the wrong system. Ryuutama gives you modifiers and penalties depending on the quality of food you eat.
Weird food can define someone's oddity.
A habitat-born 'human' might sing the praises of her mother's cooking without getting too many weird looks. It's only when she tries to duplicate those recipes for her new friends that there are problems... like finding out that they were not bred/engineered to have the secondary liver structure needed to filter out the heavy metals and toxic protein structures that come from eating the things that she cultures on the outside the reactor shielding or midway through the waste-processing module.
>not my fault some folk are defective
>another shokugeki no souma newfag
Go critique american kitchen nightmares on youtube
In one campaign, we had food packs that could be programmed to change density, hardness and flavor. You could program a pack into a chocolate chip cookie or beer and everything in between.
In another campaign, we had replipacks. A small cardboard box with a pull string. It contained a one use replicator and enough power to make whatever was pictured on the box. Portable repli-meals. We reprogrammed one to greygoo a planet at some point.
If you want food examples, our GM seems to think that carbonated coconut milk soda and literal pasta salads (as in a leafy salad with spaghetti thrown in, sometimes wrapped like a gyro) are future foods.
END THIS!
What is between a chocolate chip cookie and a beer, apart from an obese man?
A very satisfied obese man.
Well, if current modern predictions of future foods are correct, all the food of the future will be some retarded vegan wheat slurry combined with bread made from insects.
Oh, and that faux-beef product they invented in Japan made entirely of human feces.
WH40K cook book when?
>Abaddons 13th Blackberry Lemonade
>Blackberry lemonade
How heretical! I should report you to the Commsiar for that! Everyone knows the sacred Black Berries are to only be used for pie!
...
Not what I had in mind but okay...
I would still think that to better create some unique culture to a planet's society an be reflected in what they have for sustenance. Are they more survivalist relying on ration bars, or have they managed to create their own crop and tried to figure out ways to make it palatable?
In my setting, there are thousands of habitats orbiting in stars "green belts" that produce huge quantities of edibles. This includes clone/GMO flesh and crops as well as mass produced nutrient matter. As an economy, the systems tend to use easily packed and shipped nutrient matter for common meals but will use the more easily damaged (and thus more expensive to ship) "fresh" foods for hosting, celebrating and other special occasions.
It isn't that better foods don't exist, it's just that they are too expensive to use for everyday sustenance. Why spend $50 for a steak and potato dinner when you can get all it has to offer (and more) from a tasty brick of Hungry Beef Loaf for $.50 at 5% of the preparation time.
>It isn't that better foods don't exist, it's just that they are too expensive to use for everyday sustenance. Why spend $50 for a steak and potato dinner when you can get all it has to offer (and more) from a tasty brick of Hungry Beef Loaf for $.50 at 5% of the preparation time.
This. Between artificial meat, GMOs becoming more and more tolerant of extreme conditions and the burgeoning population of earth it's only a matter of time before 90% of people are eating Hyper Oats and Soylent Beef/chicken/bacon/etc. every day of the week.
Most sci-fi assumes (like the universe we know) almost no planets have native life. Most planets are terraformed or otherwise colonized, so you'll see a handful of high-efficiency hydroponic foodcrops from each colonizing homeworld. And even in worlds that might have alien life, there's no guarantee explorers would be able to metabolize whatever energy storage biochemistry, or even elements, that the alien beef happens to be made of.
Of course, we don't have to do sci-fi in a universe like ours. We could have a massively panspermia'd universe, where life is abundant across a majority of planets, share some common basic biochemistry, but diverge wildly over the course of evolution. Foraging could be a viable, if risky, strategy for enterprising explorers.
Or we could do it in a more space-opera type of forgiving setting and just grow crops in space. Pure fucking space plants.
Like, in the vacuum?
Yes. Out in "space" space. Complete with convenient but ignorable gravity that shouldn't be there and glass-ball helmets for survival suits.
Food paste/pills/bars will never be be a common thing. Humans can only eat monotonous food paste for a few days before it turns into a torturous experience. US prisons experiment with nutraloaf and grue should show this clearly. Early space foods, in tubes or coated in gelatin, were so awful that astronauts started smuggling sandwiches to orbit.
NASA astronauts require about 0.6kg of dry food per day, and their food is nowadays made to be as appetizing as possible. Even if there's no mess and dedicated chef aboard, months worth of freeze dried MREs will weight less than the ship's reaction mass if the space ship engines are even close to realistic.
>why doesn't everyone micromanage
>every mundane daily task
>in space fantasy settings
>why
There was a Sim game where your char was the mayor of a city, yet you somehow got roped into driving the steamroller that paved the roads and the tractor that planted the trees. It sucked because mayors don't do that shit IRL - they're too busy mayoring - so all that industry is just background noise to them until it's time to cut a ribbon when all the hardhat shit is done. So, guess what? THEY HAVE PEOPLE FOR THAT. That's right: mayors delegate so they can mayor.
It's the same principle for my char's space clothes: You can crosspost from Veeky Forums all you want, but I still won't care because my char doesn't shop. He was "born" clothed, and changes only when it's explicitly called-for. He's not a tailor. SO HE HAS PEOPLE FOR THAT. You can be that one shekel-stacking faggot who posts here once or twice month about shit like fantasy amortization and sci-fi capital gains taxes, and I won't care. I'm not a space investment banker. I HAVE PEOPLE FOR THAT. Sensing a pattern, yet?
It's the same with cuisine: My char has a refined palette, so he eats tasty and varied fare as available, and has a weakness for single-malt and Cubans - but he's not a chef, a sommelier or a tobacconist because he's an adventurer - so he's too busy adventuring to bother with petty details AND HE HAS PEOPLE FOR THAT.
Get it, now?
Holy crap, you are off your meds.
He just wanted to talk about interesting food ideas in sci-fi space settings.
Many governments, especially in scifi settings, are considerably less considerate of things like "my food is boring :(" than the US, and as of 2012 none of the 22 cases against the use of "nutraloaf" in the prison system were successful.
I'll believe it'll never be a thing when Russia bans it.
There's nothing people from growing plants. If storage after production is a consideration then fruits and grains can be made into alcohol, jam and bread.
Meat might be made from stem cells, or transported in as squares of sliced meat.
Bland pates and algae soups can always be flavoured with spices and honey, citrus juice or artificial flavourings.
Citruses would be useful for the obvious reason of preventing scurvy, though another way to store citrus juice would be to squeeze it from the fruit and freeze it, probably in cubes. An even more efficient storage technique might be to concentrate the juice first through distillation.
Other sources of food might be mushrooms or seaweed.
Something that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
With tapioca pebbles.
In nalgene bottles.With tapioca pebbles.
In nalgene bottles.
I-is this delicious copy pasta or am I witnessing an autistic spergout?
I'm scared because I can't tell anymore.
Pills and super-microwave-dinners were the Bold New Future in golden-age sci fi, and everything else pretty much descends from that.
Most RPGs don't have a great deal of food in them. What they do have is a tradition of drawing from history and fiction where that variety of foods is already written up and available for players and GMs to use if they want. Most of George RR Martin's food porn is drawn directly from history books, from lamprey pie to lemony lemony lemon cakes.
Some sci fi stories DO have some food in them. Schismatrix, for example, has a food scene in each time period that gives a taste of the setting. So the main character is eating algae paste when he's in poverty, then you have common people eating fried algae cakes and flavored tofu sticks "piping hot from the microwave". IOW street food. Then an elaborate feast when he's a bigwig on a Shaper colony. Then he lands in a hospital on an ancient habitat, where he eats simple natural fare like fresh apples.
The late John Scalzi wrote a lot of food porn into Old Man's War. Mostly mundane foods.
A few RPGs like Transhuman Space have considerable attention drawn to sci fi foods meant to be delicious rather than pills and pastes.
But that leads to the other problem. When a fantasy writer wants to add some food, he has a huge library of sources from which to draw. When a sci fi writer wants to add some, he can copy other writers in his genre (no-no) or make it up himself. It's just plain harder to do.
I get it being nutrition/volume on a planet or space station, but on a spaceship it's nutrition/mass. Just a quibble.
As drives get good enough to be interesting, and as biotech gets good enough that you can have a closed system to begin with, you'll have more nutritionally dense foods that also give you varieties of tastes and textures.
So TL9 = yeast / algae. TL10 = vat-grown meat, extremely high-productivity fruits/grains/vegetable setups. TL11+ = nanoassembled foods of all kinds.
Of course, you can dodge the whole thing with VR. Eat your algae cakes and yeastbars IRL while in virtual space you're eating steak dinners and drinking ambrosia.
Because in a movie, adding food coloring to a conventional drink is cheap, quick, easy, and audience-friendly.
Food takes time and money to cook. You need a guy to cook it, need to pay him for time and materials and use of his equipment (often you're shooting on location). In a hot set, the food is sitting out all afternoon getting nasty, and over many takes the food runs out and has to be replaced. Over many takes, a guy eating gets his stomach full; at some point he stops eating on camera.
It's also tricky to get food to look good on screen. Look at any family chinese restaurant-- often they have pictures of their food which look awful even when the food is really delicious. A drink in a glass stands up tall where the audience can see it; food sits on the plate where it's less visible unless you go out of your way to give them a money shot.
Hence also why you see so many gross out alien grub food. Mealworms are safe (if disgusting), and wriggle nicely on the plate all afternoon. They're also dirt-cheap.
"Future foods" are often injected with politics about how everyone will be eating what the Right Honorable Gentleman from Turdslingham thinks people should eat.
So if your high horse is overpopulation, then it's corpse starch. If you're generically "eco-conscious" then it's usually algae or yeast or some such. If it's all healthy organic living, then it's a pure fresh apple or strawberry (or invert it with those being rare precious things that people treasure).
It's worth noting that the people who advocate others eating that shit almost never eat it themselves. The mayor of New York City who banned big soda cups, salt, and fatty foods was famous for eating monstrously unhealthy delicious foods himself. He got exceptions to the diet laws made for all his favorite super-elite restaurants, not to mention his personal chef. Not to mention all the guys who preach ascetic lifestyles to stop climate change... but live in mansions and fly personal jets everywhere.
This is nothing new. Three hundred years ago, the British aristocrats were recommending potatoes as a wholesome food that's perfect for ending starvation and nutritious and delicious, too! Except that they always wrote the recommendations in terms of what the stinky commoners should be eating, and were scandalized at the idea that they should eat potatoes, too.
That gets us to movies like Bladerunner, where it's cheap chinese street food for the average working man, but elaborate gourmet feasts for the super-rich and powerful.
Gaunt's Ghost pepper queso dip
>Even if there's no mess and dedicated chef aboard, months worth of freeze dried MREs will weight less than the ship's reaction mass if the space ship engines are even close to realistic.
If the space ship engines are even close to realistic, EVERYTHING on board, up to and including the hull, will weigh less than the ship's reaction mass.
If your propellant fraction is lower than 50%, then you're either not taking a trip of any significant distance or using a superscience engine.
>Something that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
Douglas Adams was satirizing Coca Cola. Which spends billions on sophisticated market research and segmentation before trying to sell the same fizzy caffeinated sugar water to every human being on the planet.
Fallout food pretty much covers it.
Also Sword & Sorcery food works for Space Fantasy and Gonzo settings in general.
As long as it's pleasing to the senses, people are gonna make an art out of it.
Russian space cheese.
Or the new us army meat.
How do they make food look so good in fast food adverts, then?
>A fantasy adventurer only needs to carry a few things to get by
More like a cart full of stuff, if he expects to be in the field for more than a week. Traveling from town to town was an ordeal unless you were on the road going through peaceful and densely populated lands, and going out into the wilds was the equivalent of Victorian expeditions into Africa. Cheap magic that makes you never need to eat, drink, shit, sleep, maintain your gear and suffer from the elements isn't a norm, even though decades of video games and d&d taint made it seem that way.
Hairspray, plastics, good lighting, perspective, photoedditing...
Since they want you to buy it they spend those thousands of dollars to get top-quality pictures of their products, just like almost every other company in the world does, so you will buy it.
You wouldn't really want to purchase a cheeseburger if the picture looked like what you get in the box. And in reverse, it wouldn't be economically viable to make each burger to look like the adverts, because that takes too long and takes too much effort.
And the sesame seeds are glued on one by one.
So then why will pictures in Chinese food restaurants look so bleh? Surely they want you to buy their food too.
A family Chinese restaurant probably doesn't have access to the same money and resources as a global fast-food chain does, and neither would the returns be the same.
>Most sci-fi assumes (like the universe we know) almost no planets have native life.
We most assuredly DON'T know. We don't even know that there's no life elsewhere in our own solar system. We can be fairly assured that there are no K3 civilizations in our galaxy and no K2 civilizations in our stellar neighbourhood, but beyond that we know jackshit about how common life is or is not.
How come no-one has mentioned Paranoia yet? Vat-grown algae, flavoured, shaped and otherwise manipulated into appetizing foods not too far from what you'd see in shops today. In addition, higher security clearances get access to real food.
Don't they literally have no salt?
Salt? What's that? Slang for cocainum?
Are you a communist junkie user?
Pretty sure you need at least SOME salt not to die horribly*
*does not apply to troubleshooters who are all but guaranteed to die horribly anyway. Dietary advice should never by taken as a guarantee that you won't die horribly.