Do you ever think about the things you eat? I used to think about it a lot. I’ve gotten used to the replicator. The name is a joke, of course.
Reconstituted oils, proteins grown in vats, a mushroom cycle. Perhaps the mushroom is colonising space and uses us as mobile workers, to feed it, keep it warm, transport it. In exchange for these services it feeds us.
I read somewhere that plants are too expensive out here. Maybe if we had a geothermal energy source. This works on some of the larger moons, but not here. With so little power, we cannot afford to shine light on green plants.
Do you remember people eating animals? What a waste of plants. The thought of how our ancestors kept those animals… How did they do it? Everybody their little job to do and nobody looked at the entire machinery of death. Nobody felt any shame. And now we’re all guilty, except for those religious vegetarians. Their conscience is clear, they say.
But did you know that they took babies away from mothers and replace them with milk sucking machines of steel in order to get milk and to turn that into the plethora of products you still see in the old archive material? Milk, butter, yoghurt, curd, cheese… These days we are lucky. We are the masters of fermentation, of yeast. No sentient being has to suffer for our pleasure. The replicator has 1001 artificial flavours.
Sometimes I read the old journals and read the old library entries, and I wonder about the taste. How strange to think that they put all this stuff into their mouth. Like babies.
