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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 21, 2018 17:49:39 GMT -5
THEM'S GOOD EATING
Food on Set is about what you'd expect. It's a big mish-mash of alien cuisine, paranormal foodstuff, and Earth-native meals people have eaten so many times they've forgotten what they were called. Sometimes, it's real beef. Sometimes, it's ground-up moon crab with a seasoning of paleworlder blood. People will eat anything on this planet. Dirt, rocks, garbage, people - serve it up with a side of sour cream and you can call it a delicacy. One way or another, people are making due with what they've got.
At the same time, Set's full of aliens. Set's full of people with the strangest food allergies and the clumsiest of customs. Set's full of meat that's doing its best to kill everyone. Not everything's edible to everyone. Most folks are lucky just to make it past a few towns without spewing their guts onto the nearest tree. A good chef knows what they're serving and who's eating it. The following is a list of notable edibles on Set, including details on who can safely eat it.
This is an open topic.
If you'd like to invent a new kind of meal, feel free to post it here! Since Erf is a big, hungry place, just about anything's possible. Go nuts!
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 21, 2018 17:50:22 GMT -5
THE MEAT
Status: Staple
Edibility: Anyone
Region: Everywhere
Temperature: Hot
Taste: Sour, Gamey, Rancid
Safety: Awful
Shelf Life: 15s - 1h
Ingredients: Variable
Preparation:
- 100J+ blunt force trauma
- +1h heating
About the most disturbing thing about Set's many meatscapes is that people do actually eat it. Slap it around, fry it until it's not recognizable anymore, and you've got yourself a meal. A stringy, chewy, twitchy meal that's never quite dead, but it'll go down. Hopefully, it'll go down. If you're lucky, you'll squeak by with a nasty case of toilet trauma. If you're not, it'll hit your stomach already growing back fingers and eyeballs. When it comes to eating meat on Set, there's no taking chances.
As awful as it is putting angry guts into your mouth, the Cult of Meat thrives off it. It's in their name. It's their god, protector, and dinner all at once. They serve it up by the tons every day, so much that it's one of the most-eaten foods on the entire planet. They pass it out to anyone in need, teach people the best ways to pound the flesh into submission. They've perfected its preparation into an art form. Visit a Cult banquet at a major church and you'll forget that prime rib used to have rending claws. It might still kill you - or worse - but the Cult knows its meat.
Meat's a bit of a toss-up when it comes to edibility. While just about every drip and chunk has a wild streak, it's also got a history. An old maxim of the Cult is to never mix meats; redworlder meat is for redworlders and human meat is for humans. A meatscape that's been started by pinkskins isn't edible for the greys and vice versa. It's just the same as eating the wrong species' food. Allergies, food poisoning, traumatic gastrointestinal hemorrhaging - everything spacers worry about and more. Telling the difference is something only the Cult's been able to master. If you've got to eat the meat, know where it came from.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 21, 2018 17:50:51 GMT -5
RAT JUICE
Status: Staple
Edibility: Humans | Paleworlders | Boglanders | Sorassan
Region: Looney Bunkers
Temperature: Any
Taste: Variable
Safety: Good
Shelf Life: 3w exposed, 20y+ sealed
Ingredients: Variable
Preparation:
- 0.05l/s - 0.2l/s growth time in bioreactors
- 0.1l/s - 0.5ls assembly time in H-RAP printers
The simplest, cheapest source of food on Set short of killing something with your bare hands. Officially, its name is "emergency ration supplement 55, liquid, protein-enhanced". Not even command staff are willing to toss that name around. Most Loonies know it just as "ration juice". Just as many snip it to "rat juice" as per tradition. Loonies everywhere know how to make it. Loonies everywhere drink it by the barrel. They serve it out to traders and townsfolk as a cheap barter supplement. Scavengers find barrels of the stuff in dead bunkers. People as far down as the Chambers of Myth have gotten ahold of it. There's no escaping the rat.
At its most basic, rat juice looks about like what the name implies; a rat stuffed into a blender and left there overnight. Low-budget rat juice tastes about the same, too. It's a haphazard mix of vital nutrients and proteins crammed together in whatever way worked at the time. It tastes awful, goes down hard, and comes out nasty. Not much surprisingly, most Loonies would prefer a hunting trip in a caustic wasteland over a week of bargain-bin ration juice.
At the top end, rat juice isn't so bad. A little extra printing time or bioreactor maintenance makes for a better meal and a fresher flavor. Most bunkers serve it up as an inoffensive white cream that does the body well enough. Alone, it isn't exactly a culinary masterpiece, but a decent Looney chef can mask it up just fine. All the same, Looney bunkers sneak it into everything. It ends up in cakes, steaks, and even honest milkshakes. It's in the water, the whiskey, the ketchup, and the mustard. It provides about half or more of all the calories in a bunker's diet even after they've started printing potatoes.
Loonies on long-distance patrols or deep mining activities are usually supplied with a handheld bioreactor for a fallback food source. Rat juice "from the can", as it's called, usually isn't much better than the bottom line. It's safe, healthy, and easy to keep, but it's another reminder for the rank-and-file that home is where the heartburn isn't. In the same way, ration juice isn't much of a secret. Loonies will burn a town down to rub out a runaway railrifle, but the juice is on its own. Formulas, printing methods, the juice itself - as long as there aren't any coilgun schematics carved into it, nobody's fussed over a stray rat.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 21, 2018 17:53:51 GMT -5
SUIT SLIME
Status: Staple
Edibility: Anyone
Region: Low Orbit, High Orbit, Space Looney Fleets
Temperature: Cold, Lukewarm
Taste: Bland, Sour
Safety: Flawless
Shelf Life: 3d exposed, 2w sealed
Ingredients: Excreta, Dead Tissue, Sweat, Water, Sunlight
Preparation:
- 0.05l/d - 0.3l/d growth time in environment suits
- 0.08l/s - 0.23ls growth time in bioreactors
- 0.01l/s - 0.2l/s assembly time in three-dimensional printers
No one is safe from the slime. Even up in orbit, spacers have to deal with their own brand of gastrointestinal terror. Whether they're Space Loonies trapped on a rotting derelict or scrappers loitering around Lebedrovez, everyone's had suit slime before. It takes its name mostly from the thin biofilm layer in high-end pressure suits, which is routinely reconstituted into a source of food. People without the same kind of money to throw around get it from bioreactors and food printers.
Suit slime is a runny, viscous gel, usually with a taste like the skin of the person eating it. It's not really much of an exaggeration, either. Most forms of suit slime are produced on demand, with a quick sampling of the consumer's species and genes. This allows it to adapt to any species of any persuasion. It also means it tastes something like eating yourself. The only way to get something different is to steal someone else's lunch. Even that's not much of an improvement - provided it's even edible. One way or another, suit slime is a last resort.
The same goes for its culinary applications. Unlike its terrestrial counterpart, there's not much good that can be done with it. It's nutritious, but the prospect of eating something with the taste of sun-dried snot isn't appealing. Mixing it with other foods is a tragic waste. Trying to dilute it is putting off the inevitable. The same could be said of the way it goes down; no matter what you do to it, it's not going to be pretty. Suit slime hits the stomach like a hammer and the intestines like a hurricane. Time on the toilet is not pleasant. Spacers are usually happy to have their facilities on the go.
As much as it's hated and feared across high and low orbit, suit slime is one of the most-eaten sources of food in space. It's cheap. It's the easiest thing to print, grow, or reconstitute from the dead for anyone, anywhere. It's adaptable, sustaining, and easy to dump when something better comes along. Some ships and stations even use it as a low-grade biofuel. Brewed right, it's without disease and risk-free - provided it doesn't trigger a mutiny. One way or another, suit slime is here to stay.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 21, 2018 17:55:32 GMT -5
DIRTBALLS
Status: Treat
Edibility: Humans | Paleworlders | Boglanders | Sorassan
Region: Looney Bunkers
Temperature: Any
Taste: Variable
Safety: Average
Shelf Life: Variable
Ingredients: Variable
Preparation:
- Varies depending on bunker.
Spacers like to toss around the nickname "dirt-eater" for planetside folk. The strangest part about it is that, if at least only for the Loonies, it's true. Dirtballs are just what they sound like. They're a light dusting of local soil over top of an outer shell of native meat and vegetables. Deep inside is a creamy center of - usually - the bunker's finest rat juice. Most are kept as finger food, but some are served up like baked potatoes for heartier meals. For any fresh transfer, dirtballs are typically their first introduction to the local flavor.
Culinary tradition surrounding the dirtball is about as varied as the Loonies. Some are really just dirt all the way through. A few bunkers use them as part of a hazing ritual for newcomers and cadets alike. In places with hazardous soil, deadly game, or poisonous flora, bunkers usually substitute what they can from their printers. Plenty of bunkers do away with the dirt in favor of something a little less divisive. Some have traditions based on discipline; miners get dirt from underground, patrolmen get dirt from the bunker's entrance. It's hard to tell what exactly a dirtball's going to taste like, but Loonies can't get enough of them.
On most occasions, dirtballs are held in reserve for new arrivals and celebrations. On others, they're mixed in with other dishes. Noodles and crab legs are popular additions. Salads come fast behind, sometimes served up as "diced dirtballs" with all the ingredients separated into the bowl. Dirtball subs aren't all that uncommon. Dirtball burgers are a favorite in well-off outposts. For Loonies coming back from dangerous assignments, the dirtball's usually their reward. Plenty are happy to see that funny little brown lump waiting for them. Spacers think it's a myth. Space Loonies get nauseous at the mention of it. Loonies love them to bits.
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