Grrl Power #1447 – Meat?
Fogo de Chão is my go-to for fancy restaurants. Birthdays, wanting to suffer from a delicious meat coma, other reasons… I’m sure there are some. It’s not really a Valentines Day place. Because the meat comas aren’t conducive to post-V-Day activities. Sure, you can go to other “fancier” steak places and spend $60 on an 8-ounce steak, or you can do churrascaria and get all you can eat amazing steak. The math works for me. It used to be my favorite thing to get there was the house special, Picanha, which is the “prime part of the top sirloin,” and don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic piece of meat, but over time, I migrated to the bottom sirloin. It’s like… a looser… weave? I like it. Go eat some.
There’s something wrong with that couch if flopping on one side of it makes you pop up all the way around the L-bend. Maybe it’s a single-piece inflatable couch. Oh! Maybe it’s a water-couch.
You know, if you had a machine that could just make quantumly-perfect meat, like, say you Star Trek style transported a cow, and kept it in the pattern buffer… I mean, kept a copy in the pattern buffer, then every once in a while, you energize just the ribeye part… it’d be perfectly ethical meat, right? It’d be just tissue. But beyond that, if could just make meat, I guess you’d have a library of pattern buffer meats you could print – why couldn’t you make other food? I don’t mean like, celery, I mean, couldn’t you invent food? Like, categories of food. Not meat or cheese or vegetables. Like cheese combined with… celery. NO! BAD IDEA! That would be absolutely… like… string cheese. Huh.
I know, food is just proteins and starches and sugars and all that, but surely you could make some food that’s like part ham and part avocado. Oh, geeze, that would be an upsetting texture. No, not some combo of two other foods, like a totally new kind of food. It would probably be hard to do, since most stuff you’d come up with would be either nutritionally inert or poisonous.
(The Cuisine Forge 5000 didn’t create meat from a pattern buffer, it transported meat… from sources. At random… It just worked at such an extreme range (measured in thousands of light years) that no on realized it for several years.)
Ah! I thought I had more time till March. I’m bad at looking at dates apparently.
Here is Gaxgy’s painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.
I did try and do an oil painting version of this, by actually re-painting over the whole thing with brush-strokey brushes, but what I figured out is that most brushy oil paintings are kind of low detail. Sure, a skilled painter like Bob Ross or whoever can dab a brush down a canvas and make a great looking tree or a shed with shingles, but in trying to preserve the detail of my picture (eyelashes, reflections, etc) was that I had to keep making the brush smaller and smaller, and the end result was that honestly, it didn’t really look all that oil-painted. I’ll post that version over at Patreon, just for fun, but I kind of quit on it after getting mostly done with re-painting Max.
Patreon has a no-dragon-bikini version of of the picture as well, naturally.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Her mind be like: Let me do the ethical math right now
While the math it SHOULD be doing is gastrointestinal. When a person who hasn’t eaten meat for a long, long time eats meat for the first time, you want it to be something easy, like chicken, and small. And even then, your body may decide, nope, I don’t understand this and I’m having a fit. (Hey, also like math!) Going straight to steak, one of the richest of meats to digest is like going straight to Diff. Eq. Your stomach is gonna ask which end it wants to get rid of it from, and the answer may be “Yes.”
Yeah, I was hoping someone would bring this up. Sydney is missing some of the enzymes that she needs to process and digest said meat. You can get those enzymes back, but the less you know about that process that happier you will be.
What about the (awful) taste? Is that also a bodily reaction?
Panels 4 and 5, Maxima looks 10 years younger.
Effects of the healing potion she just drank?
That’s Max being relaxed and not sporting her Professional Face, or doing Mil’tary things…
Possibly a dose of post-O chill after having been able to *Cut Loose* for the first time in ages..
She is an *extremely* beautiful woman who usually actively hides that behind professionalism, uniforms, and low-key annoyance at most anything ( quite often Dabbles…).
The face ordinarily only Fireman Sam gets to see…
We normally see her on the job, so we get her professional on-duty face most of the time. We rarely get to see Max just relaxing.
I think Max has her game face on pretty much all the time. Except just now.
Riding herd on cats must be easy compared to Arc-Swat.
We don’t get to see Max not in her resting Commander Oleander face very often. Expression goes a loooong way to completely altering someone’s appearance.
Then again, Sydney: Fish from other planets.
That was my immediate thought too since fish, dairy & eggs are all perfectly fine for pescatarians.
Which also brings to mind… SPACE ICE CREAM!!
Hopefully she doesnt eat seafood from Mon Cala.
You need to try out Moo Glue. Want a hunk of meat that’s steak on one side, chicken on the other, and has veins of scallop running through it? You can make it with Moo Glue. (I mostly use it to keep Chicken Kiev from leaking.)
It’s an enzyme that makes the proteins leaking out of cut meat polymerize, gluing them together.
You just have to be careful not to get it in your eyes, or inhale it. Because you’re made of meat…
Half the meat people buy at the store uses meat glue. Roasts, tenderloin, and boneless turkeys always use it, but so do a lot of other types of meat. Basically, if it’s big and boneless, it uses meat glue. If it’s not, it might.
Moo Glue gai pan? Now if only the space chef serving it was a (not) Kryptonian named El-Mer.
El-Mer Fudge?
Just don’t mention rabbit or duck around him (his eye starts to twitch and he goes really really quiet… )
In this case, Elmer’s Glue, a popular brand of white (PVA) glue in elementary schools in Canada and the United States.
…How would you cook it? I mean, aside from the question of whether this Moo Glue is edible, or whether it polymerizes into anything edible, the meats you’re Frankensteining together cook at different temperatures. The chicken part would finish cooking long before the steak part became safe to eat, or you overcook the scallions… I’d feel a lot more comfortable cooking the meats separately, and eating them together.
If you keep your chicken reasonably moist, you can probably cook it for a while without it overcooking. This means you could easily get your steak to temperature. Not sure about scallops, but it worked for fish as well when I tried it.
There’s a Korean hotpot restaurant that I like. I cook the beef cuts on the grill, but toss the chicken and the fish into mushroom broth over the electric burner and just sort of forget about them for a while. No matter how long I leave them stewing, both the chicken and the fish come out perfect. Meanwhile I need to carefully mind the steak so it doesn’t overcook. (I like anywhere from rare to medium. Well done is chewy and bland.)
Well, I’d sous vide it at about 132 or so, about as low as it’s safe to go for anything that doesn’t cook super-fast. That would still over-cook the scallops a bit.
You could always cook it sous vide, where you set a final temperature, then toss it on a screamingly hot skillet or griddle for a few seconds per side to sear and get color. You can trade time for temperature, so you can bring the chimeric assembly to, say, 145°F and hold it there until it’s been long enough for the chicken to pasteurize — around ten minutes once it’s come fully to temperature, then remove it, pat it dry, and sear it quickly on both sides.
Then again, turducken works, so maybe I’m worrying for nothing. Still, I’d feel more comfortable cooking them separately.
Gofibepo anybody?
One, where do you get it? I remember trying to buy transglutaminase years ago and it was a pain in the butt. Like, we only sell by the barrel kind of pain in the butt. And two, you just gave me a completely new irrational fear.
… Oh no! I’m delicious!!
The next scene is going to have Sydney doing the backstroke a pool of medium rare Aberdeen Angus cuts.
No, she is going to discover ethical SPACE BACON.
The transporter buffer thing is pretty much how the Star Trek food replicators work yeah, depending on the writer anyway.
I mean, there’s no reason for them not to be the same thing given how the transporters are explained to work, the replicators are an obvious extension of that technology (heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if the replicators were invented first and the teleporters were an application for that technology that somebody thought of when they realized you could replicate living creatures and they’d still be alive).
You have one machine that deconstructs an object at the atomic level and stores a scan of that object, then another machine that takes that scan and rebuilds the object atom by atom to be perfectly identical to the original object. It makes far more sense to make a library of scans of useful objects, like various delicious foods, and have a replicator that can make you whatever you want whenever you want it. And so long as you keep it to nonliving, or at least nonsapient, objects, then you don’t have the ethical quandaries of the teleporter.
I mean, really, it’s just a 3d printer that works at the atomic level, building molecules from scratch and arranging them how you want/need them to get the object you desire. I feel like that’s not significantly far off from our current tech, if we’re being honest, the tricky part would be figuring out a way to store individual atoms of the various elements without having things be wildly unsafe but still keep them in a usuable state, like once we figure that out, I figure turning the storage method into a nozel that can spit out one atom at a time wouldn’t be a huge leap from there. But the basic concept of 3d printing and modeling objects for printing is already a huge innovation in that direction.
You don’t need to have non-living samples. The teleporter can create matter from pure energy and then convert matter back to energy on a whim. You can just synthesise the required proteins and other parts from getting energy from the reactor itself. You just need to store a simple scan of something and that’s it.
(Yeah, replicators and teleporters and simply just space magic).
The amount of energy required to create a cup of tea, Earl Gray, hot is prohibitive, and due to conservation laws you’d have to create an anti-cup of anti-tea as well. Replicators would necessarily have a reserve of bulk matter they draw from.
Transporters, however, aren’t a technology. They’re a plot device.
According to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy video game, you can definitely have both tea and no tea at the same time. I have the Infocom feelie of No Tea to prove it.
My understanding of the replicators (and transporters too) is that they can safely and easily convert mass to energy and vice versa. So they may siphon off some of the isojoules that come from the warp reactor, or they may keep a block of suitable matter in the bowels of the ship to convert to energy and from that energy back into food. And speaking of bowels, I have a suspicion where at least some of that matter may come from.
I’d be interested to learn more about the assertion that it would require creating a cup of antimatter at the same time. Do you have a link to something I could read (or better yet, watch)?
The ship carries a supply of general-purpose goo on board. When an item is ordered from a replicator, the exact mass required for the requested item (and any accessories such as plates and cutlery) is dematerialized from the goo, its molecular structure gets altered in the pattern buffer, and you get your order at the dispenser. Technically, your steak is made from the same base material as the plate it was served on. When done, you place leftovers and dishes back into the replicator, and the process is reversed. However, Replicators are considered a high-energy device as they are basically small transporters.
I imagine the transporters came rather a while after the replicators. After all, in the original series McCoy was pretty set against them (though not enough against them not to use them). Which likely means they’re relatively new in that series.
[reads]
Apparently Enterprise had an experimental one early in the series and then they certified it for human use later. And that was set 80 years before the original series. That seems like a long time for McCoy’s attitude to persist.
The series likely got too expensive to use shuttlecraft and they switched to the transporters. After all, that was the original reason to have them in the show – shuttlecraft would have been too expensive and take up too much time for each episode.
Looking around modern society should be enough to convince you that irrational prejudices are persistent.
Actually, TOS didn’t have a shuttlecraft yet, until “The Galileo Seven”. This was the reason that Sulu and party were trapped on the planet’s surface in “The Enemy Within”.
Various interviews explain that they had not built the sets or the miniatures yet, but that doesn’t actually sit right with me. Star Trek does so much action off-screen that someone could have simply said “We’re sending a shuttle for the away team. They’ll be back in a half an hour or so.”
I think that the writers simply had not thought of having auxiliary craft yet, since the show relied so much on transporters as the landing device.
And I’ll point out that while the transporter was written as a quick way to get back and forth from the ship, “Enterprise” did just fine using shuttle pods. And shuttles would have saved so many plot contrivances over the course of the show, including innumerable technobabble explanations like “particle scattering fields” or just “we lost our communicators.”
According to the Technical Manual, there’s some sort of quantum engagement thing involved, which is why living matter stays living when transported, but not when replicated.
Basically, you can’t replicate *life*. While you could use a replicator to create the conditions that living tissue needs to work, the thing that makes up the consciousness of a living being is some sort of field effect that can only be maintained when the entity is transported in its entirety through a system that maintains the continuous connection of all the particles and energy that make up that being.
There’s actually an episode where the transport process is shown from the inside, and it’s demonstrated that the subject is both conscious and connected to both sides of the transport process as it is happening. The subject is basically in two places at the same time while transporting.
Honestly, this requires that the transporter work a little differently than described in the show, that it actually bridges two distinct locations in spacetime simultaneously. I’m actually okay with that, and I think it serves as a better way to describe the process than the way Roddenberry originally described it. In fact, “from a certain point of view”, perhaps the two are the same thing, and the “you’re disassembled and sent through space” is just the Explain Like I’m 5 version of the description.
Or maybe it’s like so many things we’re taught in school that turn out later to be incorrect or incomplete, like primary colors.
One of the George O. Smith’s _Venus Equilateral_ stories went deeply into this, with the creation of a teleportation system that did essentially this — deconstructed an object atom by atom while building up its pattern, sending that pattern to another transporter, and reconstructing it from a matter buffer — then someone saw that you could record the pattern and recreate it endlessly as long as you had power and the correct elements in the matter buffer. Along with the economic crash that went with it — with a duplicator and a supply of recordings, you could be functionally independent of everything (dupe new batteries to run the duplicator when a set ran down), making money worthless until a material was discovered that could not be scanned and broken down.
Of course, energy cannot be created from nothing, so a duplicator would need a supply of energy to transmute base materials into whatever power supply the duplicator runs on.
All of the replicators in Star Trek ran from some sort of nuclear power: usually fusion reactors or antimatter reactors. (Yes, antimatter power is still nuclear. It’s just one form of nuclear energy.) That’s the only way to get enough energy to perform matter transmutation, the fundamental process by which a replicator works, and which is itself a nuclear reaction.
(Since “nuclear” means “alters of the mass of the nucleus”, any type of power that alters the nucleus of an atom is nuclear power, including fission, fusion, radiothermal (RTG), antimatter, and mass conversion.)
Of course, I guess if you’re able to build a portable matter transmuter, then you’re able to build a mass conversion power plant. After all, matter transmutation is itself a nuclear energy process. So a hypothetical self-contained replicator could simply consume part of the input material as fuel, using maybe 1-5% of the input material to process the conversion process.
No Syd. If you’ve not eaten red meat in long enough your stomach bacteria won’t be used to it anymore, and you’ll get sick if you eat a lot of it out of nowhere. Go with some fancy space fish.
You can eat chocolate for flavor even though it makes you sick. Why couldn’t you meat?
Could and Should are two completely different things tho…
I was gonna say. I’ve not intentionally had red meat in almost 30 years, and nowadays even a bit of beef broth (finding out the hard way that “vegetable soup” doesn’t mean “vegetarian vegetable soup”) is a 4-hour invitation to digestive upset. One gets the temptation, but it’s not a good call.
I think the most vexing thing about trying new foods when traveling is getting to really like something and then discovering it’s totally unavailable where you live. I’m STILL craving a good bangus sisig.
From looking at a recipe for bangus sisig, the hard ingredient to replace is the milkfish. Everything else should be relatively obtainable in the Western hemisphere. From what I’ve read you could use tilapia or catfish to make it instead?
It’s not red ‘meat’ though, it just tastes like it (with none of that icky tofu shit mixed in)
I’m sure Mr. Woof has something she could take to prevent that.
If the Cuisine Forge 5000 transported meat from thousands of light years away, it essentially meant that random victims had their flesh being teleported away thousands of years before the machine was even invented.
So you need the machine to operate on principles that break causality. (And yes, any sort of faster-than-light travel breaks causality. The so-called speed of light is actually the speed of causality. It only corresponds to the speed of light in a vacuum, as light can be slowed significantly by the medium it traverses.)
Hence the War Crimes. The most devastating war ever known was the Time War, which was fought to prevent itself from ever having begun.
Don’t know where you get the “thousands of years before the machine was even invented” part from. Basically they’re stealing the meat from Germany and placing it in New York, just with much greater distances involved….
Any FTL machine actually is a time machine, according to general relativity.
Removing the meat from Germany and instantaneously placing it in New York would also violate causality. But the distances are so small relative to the speed of light that you would be hard pressed to measure it.
It’s not really time travel. You’re just causing an effect much earlier than known physics could have communicated the information to cause it. But if you have some clarketech gadget that can bypass the light speed limit, everything works just fine.
While physically transporting a steak from Germany to New York would at the very least take several hours (under modern means), we do have the ability to transmit the amount of data required to perfectly describe it within seconds.
It would only be a time paradox if there was no way at all to travel faster than light – which in the Grrl-verse has been demonstrated to be possible in several different instances. It’s not sending information back in time, just faster than it would propagate naturally. (Although we’ve technically seen that too, with Sciona’s time-displaced two-way portal.)
Apparently the space people have multiple forms of FTL. There’s Cora’s ship’s method, as well as the Nth drive causeway thing at least.
Even magic seems to break causality as we understand it.
After all, where was Tom located before the portal to Earth? Either somewhere else in space, or a different plane. If it’s a different plane, one method for FTL would be the W40K method. It likely wouldn’t even drive you insane; the demons seem amenable to reason.
I imagine the Cuisine Forge’s method doesn’t allow anything passing through it to retain life, or it would be a much more convenient method than the methods in common use. Instantaneous transport for thousands of light years, from a box you can fit on your counter? Presumably it didn’t need a power plant the size of Jupiter either.
“retain life”? How do you define “life”?
Don’t even start with transporters, they’re an ethical and philosophical nightmare on every level.
Only if you start believing in ‘souls’ and ‘individuality’
Remember Riker’s “Brother”?
Only if you think the soul exists. If you are a pure materialist, then teleporters are not much more of a nightmare than going to sleep or losing consciousness.
The basic premise as the designers intended is fine. Transform an object or entity into energy, transmit that specific energy to a new location, transform the specific energy back into the matter it was before. Things only got weird when individual episode writers decided to ignore that premise and do bizarre space magic things with it, like randomly duplicating people or transforming them into children.
If you could just make up food with a Cuisine Forge 6000, as a simple matter of programming, then you could make the gourmet equivalent of Nutraloaf.
Specifically, some thing (or things) that are nutritionally complete, but with a good flavor/texture.
Meaning, your daily doughnut really could be part of a balanced breakfast. Or your steak could have all your vitamins, &ct.
Meals would simply be about finding your preferred mouth feel and taste profile, and chefs would simply be people whose job it is to come up with enticing combinations, rather than doing cooking.
Entire game shows could be had with people trying out the results of bad programming.
The Eclipse Phase TTRPG setting basically has the equivalent of the Cuisine Forge 6000, the cornucopia machine. If you have mass and energy available, it will print anything you have a pattern for. One of my major NPCs in a campaign is a chef, and his thing is creating novel patterns for trade. He sends dinner invitations to anyone he finds interesting, and requests access to their order history from restaurants and cornucopia machines, then makes new ingredients and dishes tailored to their tastes. So, one guy who goes for surf-and-turf a lot might get a steak where the marbling is actually garlic-butter-infused lobster, or the uplifted octopus might get a plate of something like sashimi, but with delicate floral aromas. He takes the most successful of these recipes and pitches them as new snack or dinner patterns for the public-access cornucopias.
Hah! The aliens nicked “The Price is Right!” for their gameshows!
Actually, we stole it from the Xevoarchy. That’s why Area 51 is so secure – The US is afraid of alien lawsuits if word ever got out. Their swirly dollar-sign logo actually means “glondorf breshnik wuu”, which translates to “betcha can’t guess the price”.
why don’t just eat Totally-Bland Nutrient Paste (TM) and just stimulate the taste center of the brain to replicate what you want to eat?
because deep down we are hunters and killers, while we can survive like that for a while, our brains will go haywire if we do not take different “forms and textures” after a while
i can eat eggs with 50 different flavours, but always eating eggs texture? HELL NO
plus everything that’s not used decays overtime (think of muscle mass not used) I like my jaw to be able to move and speak
Nah, make it all the gum that tastes like a 6 course meal from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Preferably without the blueberry pie at the end.
No bad Sydney whatever level spiciness your thinking about will probably melt the machines internal infrastructure just trying to replicate it.
In Isaac Asimov’s short story ‘A Statue for Father’ {What a terrible title!} scientists testing a time
portal got a small nest of dinosaur eggs and eventually got chicken sized dinosaurs from them.
They were delicious! The scientists gave up on the portal they could never get to work properly
and franchised ‘Dino burgers’ becoming fantastically wealthy.
So….Sydney could try some of that too.
Then again… If ethics are not a concern…. As the meat was never alive…. Long Pork.
I seem to recall reading a news story about something like that recently, lab-grown meat cultured from human tissue. (Or maybe it was a Cracked article, I’m not sure.)
Wasn’t that for transplants?
What!? I know the story, and how that is the same thing? those were real, living dinosaurs Eating one of them would be no different from eating a chicken (except that they’d taste much better).
but ti you mean they could replicate it, it seems hard considering they are fictional.
Myaybe a thing they could do is examine somoene brain and recreate his personal Perfect Food, something that would have the best possible taste for that person, the platonic ideal of delicious.
That “Your Perfect Food” was the premise of an episode of ‘Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius’ where an AI automated diner read customer’s taste buds and created customized meals. As there are some people who can’t be pleased, in this case Jimmy’s father, it went crazy and had to be sent into deep space.
“Long Pork” is a thing. that’s what “Pakeha” originally meant (before they realized how bad it was and wanted world wide support and started to re-write history)
Then again, this is from the same people who claim to be travelers who discovered and, at the same time, are native to, this country
I read that story back in the 1970’s as a teenager. I remember the feeling of “Yeah, they got rich, but they never got what they wanted”. It was in a collection of Asimov’s humorous/punny stories.
There’s a short story by Larry Niven (RIP) where some aliens clone parts of a human diplomat for food.
Wonder about the ethics of “Star Trek.” What comes out of the transporter at the end is still the same person, but what comes out of the replicator is ethical to eat.
(Great legs, Maxima.)
What is the difference between a ‘transporter’ and a ‘replicator’?
A Replicator “just” scans for molecules, a transporter somehow captures the quantum state of every particle so that even thought is preserved.
Just think if Transporters did not capture short term memory, you would be continually stepping out in a new place and saying “now where was I going”?
Some of us manage that simply by walking into another room.
You can’t male *living* meat in a replicator. Resolution’s too low, a replicated animal would die instantly.
You also have to define “living” and “dead.” How dead is the “dead” meat a replicator puts out? Freshly killed? Aged for weeks and weeks?
Star Trek replicators make for some really weird ethics conundrums.
Like, what if you replicate human meat?
You could go the extra mile and replicate your OWN human meat from your DNA code, then eat it.
Is that Ethical? Moral? Still inherently disgusting?
I can definitely see the new generation eating it to piss off the olds…
I would suspect there is code in there to block that kind of usage, though, that said, it would not stop someone who really wanted to do it, and had the hacking skills to disable that restriction.
Sydney will have filet mignon in the shape and color and texture and taste of broccoli, from the cuisine forge 5000 mutilating cattle with teleportation, rather than risk eating filet mignon without space capsaicin that the warcrime is about.
I guess at a certain level of tech advancement, cattle becomes useless so long as you have the resources to supply however the molecule builder works.
Actually that rises a good question.
Would artifically constructed meat that uses Tissue Molocules be Vegan Friendly?
Like the mentioned Synthesizer thing. Or Star Trek dispensers?
I mean, these meats are meant to be a practical 1:1 on taste texture and substances. But as its no longer an animal carcase being used, does it mean that Vegans have no reason to hate it?
It would mean that. I know several vegetarians who would don’t eat meat because they don’t like the flavor/texture of meat. To them the entire concept of “fake meat” made from vegetables (bean burgers, etc.) is ridiculous, and meat from the Cuisine Forge 6000 would be a complete no-go.
Then there are people who do it for health reasons. Eating red meat is usually less healthy than vegetable matter (even the healthiest broccoli becomes less so if soaked in enough oil), so fake meat from plant matter is mostly ok (unless too much fat), but lab-grown meat would still be out. Unless the Cuisine Forge 6000 can create red meat without the health issues of real meat.
Then you get the militant vegans who don’t even eat honey because it exploits bees and thinks anyone eating a steak is no better than a murderer. Some of them would rip into a lab-grown steak without hesitation; but others would still avoid it for the same reason I’d consider it ethically icky to eat lab-grown human meat, or have sex with someone pretending to be under-age. It may be legal, but… eww.
My go-to is to wait for standing rib roasts to go on sale and stock up. Separate the bones for cooking later (slow smoke), cut the rest into 1.5-2″ (4-5cm) thick steaks, season, vacuum seal, freeze. Always freeze first; makes the meat more tender. Sear in a hot cast-iron skillet to medium rare. I’ve dabbled in sous vide cooking steaks, and sometimes use a grill, but my wife can do a fine steak in a cast iron skillet in any weather.
I can’t say I’ve ever eaten a bottom sirloin “steak”, and a quick search confirms that section of meat typically isn’t used for high-heat cooking typically done with steaks. The tri-tip muscle is in that area, which is relatively tender, but usually for kebabs or similar. The whole section is usually used more for slow-cooking to well done… wait… hold up… is Max a “steak well done” type of gal? Or does she just like chewing because she’s so strong it isn’t a big deal for her?
Anyone else hearing Jameison Price as Iron Tager for the big red guy?
Reading the blurb underneath this comic of “The meat produced by the Cuisine Forge 5000 was wildly unethical. Like, War Crime unethical” has me wondering what sort of terrible things they were making with it.
“Yes I’ll have a baby steak please. Preferably from one no older than 6 months, that’s when the fat renders the best.”
“Excellent choice monsieur” (sorry I automatically assume a waiter for this would be french)
“Oh and no wine for today, I’ll just have a soft drink. Perhaps a cola made from the tears of puppies or possibly some other sort of animal. Which ones are particularly endangered on your computer database’s menu? You know what? Never mind. Baby tears as well. I’m sure that would pair well with the baby steak.”
“Of course monsieur. Any preference on the race of the baby?”
“Oh well, human, and… you know what, I’m feeling in the mood for polynesian cuisine today. And could you simulate the glucose levels to simulate high adrenaline of fear in the connective tissue?”
“Oui oui. Monsieur must have a very refined palate. it shall be right out.”
(The Cuisine Forge 5000 didn’t create meat from a pattern buffer, it transported meat… from sources. At random… It just worked at such an extreme range (measured in thousands of light years) that no on realized it for several years.)
Oh god, now what I wrote takes on all new levels of horror. I really need to read DaveB’s post underneath before I post.
Indeed, the scientists never knew what they had done, they merely ordered their normal steaks…….. and somewhere in the universe, a baby vanishes from its crib.
People usually learn to do that the hard way :P
Now THAT is a discussion… Dietary issues aside, what would food replicators (and adjacent analogues) mean for diets taken by choice?
Feedstock for the food printer is the big question mark. The latest model always starts out ethical, until the questions get answered.
I mean, if it could disassemble and reconfigure sewage waste, it just becomes a shortcut in the normal life cycle.
We call bottom sirloin “contrafilé” here in Brazil, which means literally “opposed to the filet”, as in its physical position in the cow. Just a fun fact.
You can have either texture or taste, pick one. Filet is among the tenderest cuts of beef, not the most tender but the biggest of the tender bits, but it has very little taste compared to a flatiron, which is also quite tender, or brisket. The cuts in the middle range, with more flavour that don’t need a day of slow cooking to chew are the ones to try. That includes ‘bottom sirloin’ , skirt steak, Delmonico cut, even round steak if you prepare it properly. The biggest mistake people make is thinking the leanest cuts are the best but marbling makes the ‘working muscles’ tender and the fat is where a lot of the flavour lies. Give me a nice tri-tip or roundeye that’s been cooked a little slower and I’m fine. Your mileage may vary, people taste things differently and on person’s ‘tender’ might be another one’s ‘tough’, try as many cuts as you can and then pick your favourite.
Soylet Green is people!
Like people we know or…
Ugh, Bernie, I can’t even…
I had to be a wild ride for the people investigating the random cases of teleported body parts.
When it comes to steak, I like a nice scotch fillet. Garlic seasoning, charcoal on the outside, medium rare on the inside
I.. probably would be in trouble as I’d be like ‘Can’t you just make a suppository that injects nutrients into my system? I don’t want to slosh today’
The reason filet mignon is so desired is that it is so tender. This is because in our prey species, it hardly does any work. That also means it has very little fat and has very little flavour. If you want to get more flavour, and a little more chewiness, find a muscle that did some work. Muscles that did a lot of work while the animal was alive, like parts of the leg or diaphragm, are going to be very flavourful, but very chewy and tough. These cuts need low and slow, often wet, cooking, like a stew, to become easy to chew. The typical high-heat steaks did some work, like the meat along the back (rib steaks, strip steaks, T-bone, etc.) did the work of distributing the mass of the beast, but were not constantly holding up the whole beast, or keeping it breathing.
Reading along, reading along, ok, steaks, gotcha, Sydney’s reaction is funny, then I have to pause, notice, and ask why there’s a vagina in the lower right corner of the last panel, before my dumb brain works out what it really is.
The first time you find yourself in outer space being offered grub, remember one thing. Soylent Green is people.
“Cave Johnson here. Just wanna let the cafeteria staff know to lay off the soylent green. I’m holding a memo from the President, and it turns out that soylent green is… [paper rustling] let’s see here… doubling in price. Now listen up: I don’t care how good people tastes. This stuff’s costing me more than lobster, so we’re going back to fishsticks.”
Oh, Dear! Sydney is gonna do the Full on Texan Chili BBQ cook off.
Now she can source spices from the Galaxy entire. Worse yet, The Worldforge.
Some of that Chili is gonna be weaponized.
Lab-grown meat is something that already exists in the real world, it’s just not really commercially available yet. Partially because it’s still kinda expensive to make, partially because of regulations (either because it’s not yet proven safe, or because of backlash from the regular meat industry). But it could become commercially available soonish. So I do wonder how vegetarians/vegans feel about that stuff.
There’s a TV series called ‘Upload’ where they can 3D print food, and some woman is making a really nice thanksgiving or christmas meal, and her family basically messes it up because they don’t understand how the 3D printer works. One of them takes out the ham before it’s done, which ruins it, and they say ‘I think it didnt work anyway, it didnt smell like ham’ and the woman responds with ‘IT PUTS IN THE SCENT LAST.’ What I mainly remember from the scene is the family is the most ungrateful and annoying group of people I’ve ever seen to that poor woman.
Nothing wrong with that couch. If that bottom lands and shows intent to be on the other end, the couch MOVES. That couch is not STUPID!
There’s the HeeChee CHOM? food machines that used base materials to make food. I use this concept in my own book. Synthesizers that use ‘material blocks’.
But on the other hand there’s the miracle houses that used whatever was handy to make food.. and the designer had looser definition of humanity. I think it was a David Drake story.
When I first read the label on the replicator, I thought it read Cuisine Forge GOOO. That would probably be an early version.
Nice of them to put it in English, though. Made in China?
I glossed over the logo on the food replicator, but read gooo in the dialogue. And that made sense to me. It reminded me of a 3D printer demonstrated at a convention last year, that printed inside a gel rather than building a scaffold in open air.
Speaking of food may I recommend reading Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Food of the Gods” https://lecturia.org/en/short-stories/arthur-c-clarke-the-food-of-the-gods/8561/