Food in a Cyberpunk setting

So Veeky Forums,

How does one present food in a cyberpunk world? Would it be like meals in boxes or freshly prepared plate of food? I would like opinions on how best to present food ranging from somewhat plausible and realistic to utter synthetic abominations. The only limitations would be saying no to "Meal in a Pill" type things.

Here is my example

> Citizens of the city often buy meal boxes from their local stores. These range from well done to utterly slipshod.
> Fresh meat, vegetables and fruits are expensive due to the sheer logistical costs of keeping them fresh. (Electricity is expensive!)
> Canned meat from actual animals are highly sought after by the regular citizens of the city. They taste better.
> Synthetically grown meat or soy based fake meat is the standard "meat" products available for the citizens.
> Many people buy standard meal ration packs simply because they do not have kitchens to store food.
> Some brands of meal rations come with flameless ration heaters that are of inconsistent quality. Sometimes they wont work, sometimes they actually cause fires.
> Beer is no longer made from fermented grain and flavored with hops but rather from chemicals. One of the chemicals is a rat poison.
> Local restaurants make "fresh" food from canned or preserved ingredients. Fresh ingredients are often too expensive for mass consumption.
> Lard is worth its weight in gold.

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The bigger fast-food chains still exist.
Their fries are now made from processed rice starch, while the burgers are soy and/or aquacultured protein.
Only the scuzzier backstreet independents actually use potato products, as mutations have left them something like a larger sundew/flytrap that are hazardous to farm in quantity. The plants do produce larger tubers, making "spud-bashing" (as fighting the plants to harvest them is referred to) profitable enough to allow a person to support themselves.

I'm stealing this spud bashing thing. My players will be very confused when they have to go fight a secluded farm full of potatoes.

>The bigger fast-food chains still exist.
>Their fries are now made from processed rice starch, while the burgers are soy and/or aquacultured protein.

Killer potato plants is a little cartoony for me but I'm totally behind this. A lot of cyberpunk seems to have the kind of protagonists that eat MREs and astronaut food for every meal, and that's fine if it's the vibe you're going for, but real people tend to prioritize taste over efficiency. Most average cyberpunk folks are going to be eating McDonald's level food day to day, except made from soy and lab-cultured beef. Expect a lot of public school lunch or hospital food level meals, too- with that thin veneer of a theme like "Italian" spaghetti and "Mexican" tacos and "Indian" curry and it's all just the same cultured beef/soy/filler mixture with a couple different artificial flavorings. Palatable, but depressing.

Like Deckard eating his noodles while somebody say he Brade Runner, be sure to mix other cultures in there. Chinese and Japanese foods are the go-to but any culture that has a lot of street food is a good go, stuff like German currywurst or Indonesian satay. Ethiopian food is a good pick for group meals (true in real life, too, take your lady friend), especially because its natural meat-and-vegetable mix makes it super easy to add lots of filler without changing the taste much (think of how Taco Bell gets a way with a lot less actual beef content in its "beef" compared to hamburger joints.)

Jamaican patties have gotten big in New York especially in the past few years and they're cyberpunk as all hell- compact, microwave-ready and plenty of filler.

Also junk foods. For me, Pringles seem like the prototypical cyberpunk food- a more efficient, corporatized version of a classic food with a space-saving design, a palatable but slightly "off" taste that's pretty far removed from the original main ingredient, tasty but mainly through the use hefty use of artificial flavoring.

You get prize tickets by hitting the monster real good. You can exchange prize tickets for foods like pepperoni pizza and chicken nuggets. They're kinda bad though because the meat is made from monsters that you hit real good..

I see, in the future GBP are legal tender.

I wouldn't be too hasty. Manticore in curry sauce can be delicious.

I'd work with pills containing nutrition and vitamins, or at least something very compact and without all the ambiance around having a family/friendy dinner.
I also quite like the Force Awakens food portions, just little compact bricks you put water on that turns it into a little loaf of bread or biscuit.
You could also have a look at the foodpackets the military or NASA uses

I could see it be every much tiered.
>homeless, extremely poor, etc. - whatever waste food they manage to scavenge from dumpsters, possibly some near-expiration date (i.e. god knows how many years old) preserved food items handed out in charity, stray animals & vermin offer extra source of protein when caught
>proles - mass-produced crap with barely any nutrients (but plenty of empty calories) in it, probably will exist on diet that is mixture of vitamin pills, whatever happens to be cheapest at the nearest McFriedWay, and cheap microwavable convenience food
>lower upper-class - tends to use tsp and other meat substitutes instead actual meat, plants used in food tend to be type that can easily adapt to growing in hydroponic or aeroponic conditions
>middle upper-class - fairly similar to lower upper-class but cultivated meat is probably used instead of plant or microbe based substitutes
>ultra rich - complete degeneracy, wanna eat panda testicles on a truffle bed? no problem, so long as you've got money to burn you'll be able to eat whatever (or whomever) you happen to wish to taste
>common trends - most foods are either freeze-dried or irradiated&vacuum packaged, entomophagy has become far more common than it is these days, mass-produced micobes are among the most common sources of protein among most of the population, most of the food available if loaded to brim with artificial preservatives, color enchanters, and flavor agents

In my cyberpunk settings, I have government entity, that enforce distribution of NutriUnit, that's basically processed food package containing everything that will body of adult human need to survive one day. If you have System Registration card, you are entitled for one package a day from licensed vendors or vending machine linked to MetroNet.

Because low class often does not have SysReg (mostly street kids) there are few organizations that travel to lower city levels and acts like mission, dispensing food packages on community centers, communication hubs, etc.

After the famine struck the City circa century ago, Metropolitan Government Body have strict self-sufficiency food program in which many corporation, for limited tax refunds, contribute.

But NutriUnits are basically the bare basic for survival, so there are alternatives:

>High City
They have all the imported, or locally produced goods that is accessible for middle class and up. Greenhouse produce, protein substitutes from insects (not considered as trash tier food), limited access to meat from farms and tank grown fish.

>Lower City
Things are worse here as majority of high quality food produced in Lower City is exported up, they are often left with everything that didn't pass quality control and didn't end in reclamation as fertilizer. Food reserves are often bumped with aforementioned NutriUnits, mass produced water based plants, mutated soy and potato derivate and local non-industrial production of meat and produce.

It all boil down to machine processed food packs and, in Lower City, street vendors operating with everything they can get their hands on. Large part of organized crime is illegally producing licensed GMO for black market.

If your culture is paternalistic and wants you weak and emotional everything is made of soy.
If your culture is godless and entirelly profit-based everyone eats cloned meat and lettuce.

Unless it's an Asia dominant market. Then it's chicken and rice.

Lettuce is almost as ridiculous as weed. You can eat from the same bud indefinately so long as you don't damage the stem and keep it in water.

There's one tomato farm in Poland with its own power plant. Blasts sunlight-equivalent bulbs 24/7 to make plants yield 3 times a year. Above ground though, but the same principle can be applied

Wasn't there an "underground city" project in Chicago?
Making that shit into hydroponic farmland instead of one more super market would solve a shit ton of problems.

Hell most super markets should be turned into factories and farms. Marketers need to get fucked and understand they can't sell shit no matter how many stores and ads they shove down our throats if people have no money to spend.

I ate an MRE once. Shit was alright. It was meatballs in marinara sauce, heated up with a chemical heating packet that got pretty fucking hot, a strawberry smoothie drink mix, and a slice of marble pound cake on top of a few other things.

Gave me the shits.

Weird. Whenever I have MRE's i'm bunged up for days. Usually have em two nights before any test so i can be assured I won't have to shit during it.

I think it was the sauce.

That's an interesting idea. Abandoned metropolitan areas that have been compeltely turned over to being factory farms essentially

Thiiisss is going in my notebook, thanks for the clarification!

>Food in a Cyberpunk setting

Sure.
Generally speaking I use the same kind of 'food' situation as deep-space (like if you lived/worked on a space station, asteroid mining place, or barren planet) as I do with a Cyberpunk setting in that it's a high-tech, high-population-density, low-to-no-farmland, maximum convenience prioritized situation.

-Most people get their food from: vending machines, convenience stores, fast food chains, actual grocery stores, organized from most inexpensive and available to most expensive and least available. Everybody can depend on a vending machine cup of coffee, instant noodles, or a convenience store sandwich, but very few but the 'richest' can afford to buy real food from a real grocer.
-Food doesn't taste 'bad', but if you've eaten 'real' food you'll immediately notice the difference. Most people simply don't have a point of context: they eat processed pre-made meals from day one to death and they're perfectly happy with it; nothing tastes explicitly bad or awful, and even the least appetizing food could be described as 'bland', it really isn't a problem- they're loaded with artificial flavors, preservatives, some people who've even eaten 'real' food still go back to processed out of nostalgia.
-Food production is more associated with pharmaceuticals than agriculture: food is manufactured and processed in small, self-contained, factories and medical-esque facilities via cloning and manipulation of starches, proteins, and other very basic organic materials enriched with nutrients, vitamins, flavors, before being shaped and finished into easily preserved (even at room temperature) stackable ration 'shapes'. These ration shapes are then shipped and used as the raw material for fast food restaurants and convenience stores to constructs ready meals.

There is, though, one exception to the 'artificial' rule and that's pest organisms, vermin, varmints, both plants, animals, and insects that are so unbearably persistent that even in the science fiction future they simply can't be exterminated.

-Pigeons, insects, rats, gulls, dogs, cats, anoles, catfish, carp, just to name a few can all still be found surviving and rummaging around in futuristic landscapes and waterways, getting fat off of all the nutrient dense organic waste that manages to slip past the recycling facilities, and mutating and becoming if anything MORE fertile and adaptable from the constant hormone waste pumped into the untreated waste water.
-Vermin occupy an 'interesting' blurred area between the haves and have nots: the poor wouldn't DREAM of eating them, but the rich often shell out livable wages to anyone willing to humor their need to eat something that's actually "lived in the wild". They obviously don't taste amazing, but bored, rich, degenerates, love eating weird things.

I'd mention a note on 'cuisine' itself or how people prepare food, but, really, if you been to any current city you'll know what to expect: disingenuous 'globalized' fast food trying to pass off as 'ethnic' cuisine with 'safe' flavors to appeal to a wide varieties of users, way too much consumption of alcohol and sugary drinks despite water being FREE and completely safe to drink (people think it's filled with mind-tampering agents, but it's ironically the one thing the government DOESN'T tamper with), you CAN actually ironically still get fruit juices and REAL MILK but people still refuse to drink it.

There ya go.

Literally prison loafs.

As a person who survived 4 weeks in Taiwan living off 711 food, FamilyMart lunch boxes and train station bento, most of the food its really good when you first eat them. Once you eaten a number of them the opinions starts to set in and preferences are made.

>FamilyMart bento boxes tend to be more plentiful and cleaner looking. Hence the higher price
>711 stuff tend to be cheaper and the chicken onigiri they sell has cream sauce and is shredded. FamilyMart's version is thicker strips with BBQ sauce.
>FamilyMart loves to shove their own brand food but does not have much variety.
>the box lunchs the large corner store sells 3 USD lunchboxes that are filling and hot. Its often rice, one large piece of cooked meat and two shitty sides.

>Or there's a crowd because Wu Yi AgriGroup is re-introducing their freeze-dried imitation beef meals, everybody loves those, but there's only a limited amount available and everybody's trying to buy them up before they run out.

Casual reminder that cyberpunk is dead because we are in a cyberpunk setting.

>freeze-dried imitation beef meals
It's ground pork and barbecue sauce

I have no idea what I was doing because I've spent the last half hour watching this guy enjoy MREs.

Steve is love, steve is life.

His body and stomach died for your sins

>disingenuous 'globalized' fast food trying to pass off as 'ethnic' cuisine with 'safe' flavors to appeal to a wide varieties of users

This is something I tried to get across in an earlier post () but it really bears repeating, depressing lowest common denominator "white people" versions of ethnic foods should be a staple of cyberpunk cuisine.

Robot prosthetics and Japanese capsule hotels are nice and all but nothing in the modern day really hits the cyberpunk aesthetic for me like Taco Bell does. Fifty years ago if you wanted a taco you were probably only going to get it from a stand run by a Mexican guy who learned to make tacos from his momma. Taking that and turning it into such a safe, watered down, mass-marketable corporate brand mentioned in the same breath as a dozen bland burger joints is so deliciously dystopian if you really think about it.

If you want your setting to say "This world is shitty in the same way our world is shitty, except worse", which to me is what cyberpunk is all about, then take some nice likeable foreign cuisine that hasn't yet gotten the Taco Bell treatment in our world and distill it down into the most shallow, corporate thing you can make it. Nothing says "human culture has died and the corporations killed it" like stopping for a 5 Dollar Jerk Chicken™ at the local Big Momma's Jamaica Shack™ or grabbing some falafel at the Happy Sheikh™.

I mentioned Ethiopian food in particular because it's both super nice and homey and cozy in the present day and also an up-an-coming ethnic cuisine in the United States that's just ripe to be watered down and exploited.

This guy gets it.

You're welcome.

Glad I could help, I love this kind of slice-of-life stuff in any setting but it's at its best in cyberpunk where the intense and bittersweet relatability actually makes it into a storytelling tool.

Don't do what shadowrun did. Just don't...

If you're going for the Orwellian food thing than make sure it actually makes sense in your setting. If the earth is still perfectly fine and most of the farm land hasn't been affected by anything negatively, then just have normal food. If your on an alien world everything is either being shipped in or caught locally. So, you could have some odd alien critters serving as people food supply. If you're in a damaged environment, then food produced from genetic engineering such as cloned shrimp or pigs would be more likely. If you're in a really fucked setting, then insect, rat, soy, and other shit tier solutions might be a temporary stop gap for the society, but not for long.

Usually the exploitation of cusines is the inevitable result of a significant population from the originating country migrating to a new one. Its not bad its a dact of life.

In my dystopian future the food situation is much like 1984. For people living in the hive cities food is directly controlled and rationed by the state. There isn't any future soy paste but the quality and variety of food is pretty shitty. Most people get 50% or more of their daily caloric intake from enriched bread rations and the adjoining multi-vit tabs that come with the packaging.

In the loosely controlled outzones people tend to have home gardens since weekly rations can take a month or more to arrive (if they do).

Ongoing bread riots, people from the underclass having obvious diseases from nutritional deficits like goiters or rickets and the quality of "upper deck" dining were all running themes for the campaign.

Thing is that Indoor Farbe aren't really energy efficient, sure the specialised LED light helps but still got some land around that's cheaper to use since the sun is free.
Also we still got room for improvements when it comes to agriculture, it's just that getting more land is easier, right now, than getting more out of your land.

Just because something is an acceptable fact of life doesn't mean it isn't also bad. That's like all of cyberpunk as a genre.

Experiences may vary. My experience with food in Asia, Canada and the US left me somewhat leery about claims of cultrual appropriation.

Heh i was reading about rationing during WW1 and WW2 by the US and the UK. Came off thinking "huh that may not be bad i might get healthier"

Then i look at Eastern Europe and Russia and thr shittery that happened.

The feeling is that a rationing system is all up to the proper administration.

>In 20XX dairy was deemed a leading health concern after a disease-based crash of the dairy industry and public awareness over the chemically addictive nature of dairy.
>The meat industry was similarly harmed during some government shake ups around the same time leading to subsidies moving to high-volume plant-based nutrition production. Most folks can't afford the actual cost of meat products.
>Alternative food industries hit a boom and consolidation into [Primary Agriculture Industry Corporations] has led to the money being in Synthetic food sources.
>Advances in synthetic food production and quality have basically eliminated animal-based food products, as they aren't cost effective.
>Health benefits and nutritional balancing of synthetics foods also far exceed their natural counterparts. i.e., a synth-food burger is gonna be healthier to eat than a traditional balanced diet.
>There are still outliers who insist that "natural" food both tastes better and is healthier, but most citizens at all levels think those folks are crazy, usually its people out of touch with the Everyman, celebrities or people born into money.
>The improvement in general health of the population has led to various options for preferred foods, usually based on preparation methods.
Most popular methods are as follows:
>Dehydrated - preparation requires minimal amenities, some products are self heating when hydrated.
>Canned - more popular for folks who don't have a reliable water source, i.e., vagabonds and the destitute.
>Pellets - easy to ship, easy to store, requires a reconstituter, however, which keeps it to the growing middle class.
>Pre-fab - the way people used to get food at stores.
>Ready-To-Eat - Prepared food, may be derived from any of the other sources but is professionally prepared either for fast, pick-up, or dine-in options.

I've been equating Cyberpunk more and more with real life circumstances turnunf into an Oligarchical hell-hole, and fast food and fake food are the first things that popped into my head for this discussion. Rather than looking like MREs, it's still burger and fries, only available from whatever megacorp cornered the market, and made with the most processed and profitable scraps of technically edible substances.

>Immediately Consumable - no preparation required. Think chips or nuts or jerky or whatever.
Food Service Industry:
>Ready-To-Eat is primarily supported by Burrito Dome, which won the franchise wars. However, a stipulation within the 20XX Franchise Contracting Decision allows businesses where food is a secondary product (bars, grocery, quick-charging stations, coffee shops, etc.) to maintain their own brand identity.
>All restaurants are now under the "Burrito Dome" albeit sometimes with various branding. One concession BD made during the 20XX FCD was that they cannot produce products for home preparation under the branding.
Large families, the middle class, and well-to-do folks often have food at home as both a cost saving measure and for convenience. However there is a growing industry for mobile food options, which often show up resembling the MRE or other Military Rations of the previous century. They often include a variety of Dehydrated, Pref-Fab, immediately consumable product.

Various fringe products also exist, such as a resurgence of Tube-based products (basically flavor pastes with nutritional value - very popular with the highest speed in society) and dietary "Meal Representative Lozenges" which work with membranous implants to trick your brain into believing you are eating more than the limited caloric and vitamin capsule appears. Sometimes these are sold as food alternatives to prey on poor communities who cannot afford reliable food options.

It's not so much cultural appropriation as cultural dilution. The nice corner Chinese restaurant in a South Dakota town is not a problem, it's the deconstruction of the appealing parts of a culture the second it shows any mass market appeal.

Taco Bell was a franchise started by a white dude who owned a hot dog stand because he was jealous that the Mexicans next door were getting more business. But the fact that he stole something he had no cultural link to just to make a buck isn't a problem, food has been introduced to other cultures and adopted in new ways since the dawn of time. But the problem is that the taco didn't get *changed* or *improved*, it was diluted, made safer and shittier and more profitable, and sold on a mass level. And Taco Bell happens to be owned by the same mega-corporation that owns Kentucky Fried Chicken, another great example. And it's not just a cross-cultural thing, of course, McDonald's did the same thing to the hamburger.

Rinse and repeat with music and fashion and films and whatever else you want. If someone shows even a spark of mass-marketability it gets scooped up by corporations and milked for everything it's worth and loses what was special about it in the first place. When your one-time favorite meme gets posted by your mom on Facebook and that's it, it's not fun anymore, well that's the same shit.

And of course, all this shit probably doesn't spell death for society, but cyberpunk is a genre built on building a fantasy off of those kinds of fears, a world where everyone's a worthless corporate wage slave who eats bland food and consumes bland media and is miserable all the time, except for a few damaged but colorful and rebellious protagonists.

>Burrito Dome, which won the franchise wars.

At least somebody around here knows how to use the three seashells.

>In response to the Mega-Corporate farming conglomerates cornering markets, a relatively industry savvy consumer group built a legal case for the defense of individual food production, which now sells and manages licenses under the name "IndiCho Foods."
>Licenses allow folks who wish to or are sufficiently off grid to not have a reliable food source to grow their own plants for food production, but only as individual consumption.
>The details of the licenses require that no sale of derivatives can occur.
>This has resulted in black markets for real vegetables, especially where imitation of the well-to-do (who are often presented eating actual vegetables), or for things such as baked goods, etc. where relationships with local and distant corporations are strained.
>Most localities do not enforce the licenses, most often the extent is that IndiCho simply fines the perpetrators.
>In areas where police and military forces are more heavily subsidized by the food manufacturing/production industries the retaliation is substantially more severe.

>it's the deconstruction of the appealing parts of a culture the second it shows any mass market appeal.
Interestingly enough, a lot of what people around the world think of as "ethnic cuisine" is a fabrication playing up stereotypes. It's actually quite fascinating. TexMex isn't traditional "real" Mexican food, but it is what most Americans think is Mexican food. Same way that what most of the world thinks of as "Chinese Food" is actually hybridized foods based usually on traditional methods but using new ingredients and local flavor preferences.

Shit, Korean BBQ in the US ain't got nothing on that shop run by ajumma on a back corner of Seoul.

That was kind of my point, even if I didn't word it properly. Mexican food becoming Tex-Mex food is a natural progression of culture. Tex-Mex food becoming Taco Bell is cultural dilution.

I was picking up what you were putting down. Basically anything that is not [individually produced] is going to suffer dilution the more people are involved, whether as producers or consumers. Shit, I love me some Taco Bell, but I am pretty cognizant of what it is. I'm pretty snobby about a lot of foods, but it is all based around how it is presented. Like, at this point Taco Bell really doesn't try to pretend it is anything above what it is, and I dig that.

Sadly there are a lot of local or boutique restaurants that don't understand that and market boring ass, bland as shit, mass consumption products as being something special. All them "my water is too spicy" white folk with daddy's money to start up a food truck fuckin' ruin my day so much.

Lots of good ideas in this thread. I only have so much to contribute, but I will say I like the broader idea that, technically, a majority of the population has gone vegetarian or vegan. Not intentionally or for moral reasons, but because animals are either extinct or rare/protected/expensive enough that they aren't eaten and 90% of the food is synthetic enough to qualify. A "silver lining" given by a grim future.

Forced vegetarianism/veganism is one of the easy ways to make something feel dystopian to most Americans, entertainingly enough. Regardless of the fact that overall animal-based food consumption is dropping in many places in reality. But people use food as a source of comfort, or to retain familiarity. And going from a 30+% animal-based diet to a 0% one is a kick in the nuts to a lot of people.

IIRC Brazil was looking into some of these food alternatives for the populace, the degrading kind.

"Part of a project called Food for Everyone, the food pellets are called "Allimento" and are made out of the dehydrated leftovers of food from the commercial processing industry that are close to expiring or "out of marketing standard." There is no public information on what, exactly, is in these things."

The fucking things are called Feed.
Even if it's still a free translation it still sounds and looks like something you'd give to livestock.

A food dispenser right outside your apartment. Wave your card/chip and you get paste shaped like food with a tube of guacamole on the side so it meets minimum nutritional requirements. Then the machine thanks you but all you hear is it blurting out static in place of words. The bin next to the machine has many full tubes of guacamole.

Seems like the sort of thing that would get used as an ingredient, though. Like a TVP style thing. But yeah. I mean, Brazil is getting closer and closer to a right proper dystopia.

Reminds me of the coffee machine in ILoveBees.

Meatballs in marinara is a solid one, good potential to be fought over.

The "smoothie" is what gave you the shits. They produce a few types (Vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and strawberry banana) and every single one of them give me the shits. 100% worth it though.

t. soldier whose consumed MREs for far longer than an average human should

Totally, and I'm not over here pretending I'm some high class motherfucker slurping up foie gras for dinner, I've eaten more than my share of dollar tacos and hamburgers. But taking a step back and looking at any of that shit on a cultural level makes you realize how depressing it can be.

And that's what makes cyberpunk, because it takes that shit that's frustrating about our world and shows what it would be like taken to the extreme.

At that point I like the idea that people would be actively grossed out by actual, non-imitation, non-lab-grown meat. Both for moral and cultural reasons, as it could come from a place of "What? This came from a real cow? But cows are so cute! Why would you want to kill one just for food?" or of "What? This came from a real cow? Like that rolls around in the mud or whatever the fuckers do? Don't feed me that shit, it'll make me sick."

Oddly enough, even though they're on opposite ends of the idealism scale that would put a cyberpunk setting on the same page as Star Trek, if for completely different reasons.

Eyup, it was mostly meant to be a supplement to actual food, but well, politician went retarded and introduced it as a standalone pellet.
In its primary form, it's a nutrient flour.
Looks like dog kibble don't it?

>put a cyberpunk setting on the same page as Star Trek
Take technological extremes and present them with a deprecated and an idealize society and you get quite different results. Really positive and hopeful fiction is a great place to pluck out pieces for depressing shit.

> it takes that shit that's frustrating about our world and shows what it would be like taken to the extreme.
I think a lot of it is taken past the extreme, to the benefit of the fiction it is building. Because while I do expect the future to result in eventually phasing out animal-based foods with a slow cultural shift, but mostly an economic and environmental shift, I like to take it past "this is the logical extreme of this" and put it in the "this is batshit and nutty." Recycling human bodies as a nutrition source (highly processed, human meat is extra not good for humans) is a fun one. Complete erasure of any cultural identity of food as everyone eats generic pastes or something is another favorite.

The vegetarian MREs are always the best because they always have peanut butter and generally the best supplementary foods. Most of the entrees are trash and not for human consumption.

Well, TVP is pic related. Thankfully it is marketed as an ingredient in the states.

Food pills, one pill a day keeps you going. And most of them are lassed with drugs to keep the lower classes working harder.

>this food pill? it's laced with drugs

don't forget crows

>> Canned meat from actual animals
As opposed to meat from fake animals? Explain this pls.

>(Electricity is expensive!)
But it's cyberpunk, not the fucking 1800s.

I've always said that the McRib tastes how I expect fake cyberpunk food would.

Indeed, the similarity is uncanny.
Allimento is literal scraps from industries tho, kind of worrying when you think about it, since it is known TVP is basically soy.

Couple the fact that you don't know what goes in allimento AND with Brazil's hygiene issues thanks to the rampant corruption in the authorities that should regulate these processes...

Shit's not pretty, especially when politicians try and succeed pushing stupid laws.

yes, fake meat from fake animals a.k.a. artificially grown protein

This post proves that people who like cyberpunk are faggots who don't know shit about economics.

Brazil is probably the future of the developed world. A small elite overclass living walled off from teeming, rat-like masses of hideously-poor half-feral people living in stinking, maze-like favelas eating refuse and wallowing in filth and violence while breeding out of control.

You wanna contribute a little there, buttercup? Maybe tell everyone *why* they're wrong?

Please explain.

It is cyberpunk, so everything is Extra Commodified(TM)

>Soylent Grün ist ein Produkt aus Menschenfleisch
And politicians pushing stuff is a really interesting thing that I think belongs more in cyberpunk than it has traditionally showed. But then again, my development point for my setting is to take the concepts that created Classic Cyberpunk relative to when it was created, the same for 90's era, etc. and extrapolating from many modern concerns to build a setting. Basically ending at the point that Governments are basically operating under Corporate Sponsors.

>one person proves a wide selection of people X of Y
UMMMMMMMM. The pupper is probably angry with you for posting.

>don't forget crows

In the grim and dystopian future of cyberpunk Australia: they will still have to deal with magpies and bin chickens.

...
Honestly despite feeling bad about it I can see it happening, although I'd wager Venezuela is far closer to that image, at least the ravening rabble part.
I feel like it can only get worse here, Rio and São Paulo would probably be the first of those evolved favelas of the developed world, the disparity in standards of living in those cities is absurd

Yeah, a politician here in monkey-land holds dear to every scrap of power he can acquire, even more so if it means pushing away loads of revisions and new laws which could greatly benefit the country.

And in a way Brazil's politicians shy away from privatizations and corporations, even if their pockets are being stuffed full of cash from both public and private sectors.
They claim it's about maintaining sovereignty.

It's an interesting dilemma.
Even if the government cedes some sector for privatization, monopolization is allowed, cartels are formed behind all of the legal tape, in a way, they still get paid for their agendas.

What a shit-show, worst thing is, it happens everywhere else too in some manner.

>Ctrl-f no bugs or roaches.
Clearly that is the perfect food for the people of the future high in protein and can create a population on almost any bio-waste.

ramen noodles

An interesting twist on your "disgusted reaction to animal-based foods" thought would be to use it to play up the divide between rich and poor- the poor have a visceral reaction against it, but the rich see it as a mark of distinction (pretentiousness?) to be able to appreciate the rustic flavor of real animal flesh.

As a funny side to this, Taco Bell absolutelly failed in Mexico for obvious reasons. Why eat that shit when there's better tacos at almost every corner for less than half the price? And hamburger joints also have a really hard time keeping up because Mexico's beef is great and all the ingredients of the burger exist at a better quality from Mexican companies (Bimbo's bread, La Costeña's peppers and sauces, plus fresh vegetables) than what the franchises can offer make it so any corner burger joint can again offer much better burgers for half the price.

But then there's KFC, Wendy's and sushi joints. KFC is ridiculously good in Mexico because their chicken is good quality and extremelly plentiful, and mexicans love fried chicken but don't have the patience to make it. Wendy's on the other hand doesn't subsist on their burgers but their chilli. And there's almost as many japanese restorants in Mexico City as there are mexican restorants.

In my experience after travelling all across the american continent, most of europe, China, Mongolia, S. Korea, Phillipines and Japan. I have never eaten as well as I did in Mexico.

The problem with food in America isn't "cultural appropiation" or "cultural dilution". It's trying to force the use of shitty ingredients and an autistic dependance on recipes. If MacDonnalds used all local ingredients and preparations people would travel for their preffered style of burger the way people in San Diego go to Tijuana for sugar cane sweetened Coke.

Mexico is a terrible country at a lot of things but the way they force foreign companies to use local ingredients and preparations is fucking genius from a (non oligarchic) capitalist standpoint.

It could be like people who are overly snooty about their audio formats. They're adamant real meat is far superior but in a blind taste test most of them couldn't distinguish it from cultured meat.

In a less grimdark bent it would be cute to see traditional food animals be more widely accepted as pets once the food association was gone. Fancy chickens, pigs, fluffy cows that stay little thanks to genetic engineering. That's very setting-dependent, though.

If the morality police handn't interfered so staunchly we'd have cloned meat right now and it would be cheaper than soy and corn "based" product.

I can't foresee a world where fakemeat is not the poor people food unless it's literally to force high levels of strogen on the non-rich to keep them meek.

With the consumption of so many sugar and carbs people would be fat and sick.

Doesn't matter so long as they can keep consuming.

I mean, given how cost-inefficient cultured meat is right now we're fast coming up on a time already where the rich can afford to eat indistinguishable lab-grown meat for moral reasons while the poor eat real hormone-pumped animals.

That's kind of an interesting thought for a setting all around, a dystopia in the time of Whole Foods, a snooty upper class exemplified by moral grandstanding rather than the shady oligarchs who hunt humans for sport kinda deal that normally gets presented. Though I realize how quickly and easily it would devolve into /pol/ li-brul bashing makes it not worth the effort.

>depressing lowest common denominator "white people" versions of ethnic foods
KYS

Hey man, sorry your chocolate milk was too spicy tonight, but don't get triggered on me.

In my cyberpunk setting, the cities have levels, those on the ground are basically on their own, the upper levels are standard cyberpunk cities with flying cars, etc. They all live under clouds of pollution, so basically every time is nighttime. And on top of everything over the cloud is the utopic all white colored cities with solar panels and farms even with animals(maybe not, haven't decided it yet).

KYS SJW faggot.

So what do they all eat?

Oh, don't be so fragile. You could've at least read the rest of the thread.

The shit and trash of the rich or the vermin that subsist on them.

That actually doesn't surprise me from what I've heard of people traveling there. And as it goes, usually the best food in the states are the smallest places which put a lot of stock into their ingredient selection and degree of flavor on their menu. Not only is America happy to use sub-standard ingredients (because unbridled capitalism) but most of the corporate restaurants are trying to do that broad appeal thing and to save a buck. A personal scale for quality of food is actually how good some place can prepare tofu, because it basically says "here is nothing curd" when you get it, so you actually have to make something out of it instead of pretending like whatever you are using as a base is good enough.

This, I like this. Albeit pigs would also be on the list of genetically made "house sized."

The only way lab-grown meat would be cheaper than plant-based alternatives is through government subsidies and orchestrated supply/demand differences.

Plant-based alternatives are only as expensive as they are due to production volumes, which means over time as demand increases the costs to produce will go down. At the moment in some areas plant-based alternatives are already less expensive than animal meat, based on availability. Additionally, animal meat is only at the cost it is through government subsidies. If those subsidies went to soy/corn/wheat/etc. the plant-based foods would easily drop in price as they are then able to reach a wider demand due to thriftiness alone.

"So what do they all eat?"
That's the reason why I am here.

This is actually a highly interesting proposition. Video related.

youtube.com/watch?v=bVzppWSIFU0

Grim darkness aside, how does that work? 90% of people are eating the refuse of the top 10%?

As long as we're already genetically modifying animals for the city, why not your own apartment hen? Free source of eggs.

>Grim darkness aside, how does that work? 90% of people are eating the refuse of the top 10%?
Well cows on farms and thing produce massive ammounts of waste that would dwarf what the people leave out plus if you assume that the rich eat over 10x what the proletariat need to survive then their waste will provide a lot resources. Plus rats and bugs are pretty hardy creatures that can eat shit no problem and humans can eat them no problem.

His face is priceless.

/pol/ has me scared of soy. What's a good protein replacement that won't make me all wimpy?