Section 99 Factsheets: Food in the Freelands

Hey folks! Been a while since I did an extra like this, so here's some worldbuilding for Section 99. Yeah, I might have wrote this while I was hungry. And maybe don't read it if you're hungry. But yeah, this is how Freelanders eat. 

More Van stories coming soon! Also, Seagal: Beware!

The Hell Are These People Eating?

A Section 99 Factsheet

The Freelands consist of hundreds of millions of free individual people, a galactic migration made possible through the massive scale afforded by orbital construction yards, colony ships and mass-scale geoengineering technology. While the majority of life is spread across the Three Gems of the Freelands, the three settled planets with one hundred stable settlement-states that form the core of the region, millions of others are found on space stations, nomad ships and frontier colonies.

So the big question is: how the hell are these people all eating? Because they sure as shit ain’t ordering in over FTL delivery service, that’s just not reliable enough to work.

The short answer is, because agricultural technology has advanced to a point that a starship hold can be converted to a farm field that grows crops in fast forward, and medical cloning tech is such that it can print a nicely marbled side of beef out of processed soy and memetic biomass. Things aren’t being replicated in the more utopian science fiction sense, but rather, people have given themselves the tools to carry like normal despite unimaginable circumstances.

Hey look, a theme of the setting!

Even still, there’s some odd quibbles here and there, ranging from things that seem terrible at first and then you get used to because they really do taste good, to things you might develop a taste for (but might just stay weird forever), to stuff that people do but really shouldn’t. You wouldn’t think eating szhaza, a rhidling pest, these fat little toad-things that get everywhere ant eat everything, would be any good for you- you’d be wrong, as prepared right, they’re some delicious umami. The same cannot be said of eating Mayonaka Taproot, which is considered somewhat of a difficult delicacy on Evergreen, a delicacy said to make colours a part of the flavour profile in the rest of your dining experience, because you just ate something bioluminescent and psychoactive. As for things people shouldn’t do, but do anyway: hello moonshine, you sure exist, and sure are a problem. Sure, it’s been proven you can make safe ‘shine, it’s nothing more or less than any other high-proof liquor when made right, by people that have been certified in the art and science of distillery. But when made by dopes in the border country between colonies, distilling it in the wreck of a fusion reactor from a mash made of alien fruits and Things That Seem to Be Fruit, that’s where things start to go wrong and people start going blind.

Production and Harvest

Vertical Farms and Scaled Greenhouses

Growing crops in the depths of space or on the face of an inhospitable world seems a daunting task, and for many years, it was. But now, as the Freelands begin to chaotically flourish as more and more find their way to its shores, technology has reached a point where local growth and harvest seems less like Babel, and more just a more typical sort of tower: specifically, a tower that makes use of the power output of scale-fusion tech to power its arrays of sunlamps, allowing each floor, wall and ceiling of the interior compartments to be viable growing space.

Mental exercise: picture a big, green, cylindrical module that mounts to the exterior of a space station or a less-sleek starship chassis. It’s big enough to be a small apartment building, at least 4 floors tall (or long, because space and gravity let you cheat like that), and while its interior compartments are sectioned off as floors, each of these floors share the same monolithic feature that drives upward through them: a massive, pillar-shaped, 360-degree sunlamp that blares a UV-rich simulacra of a blue sky too bright to look directly at- though it’s a growing chamber, safety equipment is required at all times while workers are inside. The floor plots allow the production of long and tall crops, grains, grasses and trees, while they’re also fitted with rows of shelf plots growing roots, tubers and berry bushes on a slight lean; from the ceiling, hanging crops trail down from between the sprinkler system nozzles, accessible from motorized gantries. This is the average Freeland vertical farm, a piece of tech that’s some Inner Galaxy darkness turned into light, a realization that comes to you once you look at it for just a little while: it’s a panopticon that produces a varied and bountiful harvest, rather than misery and little else.

Vertical farms like these have become not merely a normal feature in the Freelands, but also a major priority in any sort of space colony establishment, not merely because they allow a station, ship or frontier colony to become food-independent quickly, but for a number of other morale-based reasons. For one, while plant-based nutrition provides a nice foundation, fresh fruit is also a major mood improver- having healthy sugar sources around means the world to just about any species that actually derives pleasure from eating. Two, while you’re never going to want to walk around in one without an environment suit on, people are going to want to do so regardless with their masks off, because these farms tend to produce the most refreshingly breathable air aboard ship and station (save for during fertilization cycles), unless they also have an arboretum as well. Last but certainly not least, a farm like this can also greatly aid in the production of medicine, allowing individuals the option of more conventional (and gentle) methods of healing- nanomeds work quick, yeah, but they really do not give a shit about the sympathetic nervous system and treat big patches of your nerve tissue as a field waiting to be a parking lot if given half a chance.

Challenges in this form of tech lies in that of any other agricultural pursuit: sustainability, and in this case, sustainability in a very small environment. Tended poorly, even the fanciest vertical farm will eventually turn into a very tall and elaborate sandbox, a dry and depleted wasteland that you’re now just hauling around in the structure of your vessel (or colony-fortress). This is solved with a very simple and very old solution, but one that takes elbow grease nonetheless: crop rotation, achieved through systemic monitoring of soil conditions and a strictly-abided planting schedule. The technology might be new, like the plot probes that monitor soil conditions over an array of points and can render an accurate 3D image of a farm compartment’s fertility conditions and the reclaiming fertilizer systems that are exactly what they sound like, and don’t need further elaboration, the wisdom driving them is ancient: know the seasons, tend the soil, reap the bounty.

The same tech that allows this sort of growth in large compartments has also been scaled down, to the point that some people have been calling it the Vegetable Closet. Called Scaled Greenhouses, these range anywhere in size from walk-in refrigerators to wardrobe closets, but work functionally the same way: A similar high-powered grow light saturating a contained and enclosed growth space, with as much arable planting surface as can logically be arranged within. Obviously, these lend themselves far better to growing smaller crops than larger ones, and are frequently used in a role to augment preserved food brought aboard ship. Even so, this allows a ship’s crew to reduce their reliance on stocked provisions, as well as improve their taste with the addition of fresh ingredients- you can pretty much grow your own marinara sauce with a closet-sized one of these, given the time and patience. Though, with additional tech, not that much time and patience…

Speed Yield Tech

When you can keep the lights going, so can you keep the grow cycle growing. Freelander greenhousing tech alone creates an overall faster crop yield than traditional farming simply because it eliminates a need for sunlight (at least, direct sunlight- it’s still something that generally only works when you’ve got fusion power on your side). But this is just the beginning for most colonies, as other output and yields are frequently pumped by the sparing application of more advanced technologies. Sparing application, as if the Consortium has proven time and time again, too much of a good thing equals a bad thing.

Which is why the use of gene-modded crops and nanite-laced soil conditioners has been adopted across the Freelands to a healthy degree- the idea isn’t to make a food-factory, it’s to keep everyone fed. Though these innovations, multiple varieties of fruit can be grown off the same bush, including things that typically grow on trees, not bushes, while crops can be produced and ripened in fast-motion via nanite-assisted construction. While some prefer their vegetables to be produced the old fashioned way, many are quick to point out that’s unfortunately not an option any more in the grand scheme of things- all farming in space is unnatural, it’s just degrees of unnatural, which is why these practices are very commonly accepted. Many will also be quick to point out too, that a carrot grown in nanite laced soil that was partially machine-assembled into its ripened state, is still ultimately a carrot; it’s not an extruded orange length of vitamin-wax and plant fibers that’s flavoured with a touch of carrot juice, which is what most people on Terra can get in terms of root veggies. All this, plus the addition of advanced soil regeneration techniques, allowing colonists to not only fold and churn viability back into depleted plots, but also aid planetside geoengineering in the process.

People have had worse, is the point. Plus, at this point, nobody’s gotten sick from any of this yet, so Freelander common sense would have it that folks should keep on at it, while also monitoring to make sure things stay all-systems operational.

Supercrops of the Freelands

Some crops are so useful, people quite literally don’t leave home without them: starships carry seeds for these things, just in case. Because not only do these crops keep folks fed, they make colonies grow, and there’s a big difference between living and flourishing.

• Soybeans - Of course folks knew this was coming, and for good reason. Besides edamame being delicious to eat on their own and being highly processable into other foodstuffs, and aside from them being potent soil cultivators, soybeans also serve another important purpose: they’re easily reducible into memetic biomass, the neutral-protein gel that is widely used in nano-reconstitutional medicine- the goopy stuff in the packet of biofill that you squeeze into an open wound, so the nanites can reconstruct it into a tissue patch that rapidly grows into replacement flesh and bone. Go figure: pub grub, and also advanced battlefield medicine.
• Programmable Citron - Exactly what it sounds like. The horrible cosmic truth of citrus fruit, is that they’re all basically the same fucking thing, just with the ratios adjusted differently. This advanced gene-mod seed, a valuable piece of House-Corporate tech liberated by Freeland hands, is made to exploit that fact. By pre-treating these environmentally hardened and adaptive seeds in differing pH pre-soaks, the programmable citron will then grow into a hardened geoengineering arbour (y’know, a tree, but for alien planets) when planted that should (should) eventually produce the desired fruit. They don’t always work as intended, and sometimes they’ll take to soil that’s still too dead to produce viable fruit, but sometimes an undesired outcome produces an interesting result. The New Lagos Indigo is one such interesting result, a citrus fruit that’s the exact colour it says on the label and tastes a dead ringer for peaches. So that’s peaches solved. Sorta. Peach flavour, at least.
• Kasmousara - The name, roughly translated, means Lowland Giant Water Legume, which is why most folks call them by the rhidling word regardless of what language they speak. Picture something halfway between a edamame and peanut in terms of taste and texture, except it’s as big as a coconut and similarly has a hollow full of milk when fully grown and ripened. This milk is pretty gross, and ordinarily something rhidlings would process for the salt, discarding the rest. Except that terrans have discovered something interesting about it: put cheese culture in it, it makes cheese. Specifically, a light, stringy cheese that’s alarmingly like mozzarella, enough that this workable imitation has functionally resurrected pizza in the Freelands. The hulls themselves are good eating too, either raw or cooked, you mostly just have to watch out for the edges, as they can slice up your mouth pretty good if you don’t make sure to properly de-corner the bits if they haven’t been softened through cooking.
• Vlasaka - The sewer systems of Rysia are a toxic hell that run kilometers deep beneath stratospheric cities, built on the planet’s last viable land. They’re the sort of place where you don’t go without wearing a hazard suit made to survive a Venusian hothouse and carrying a large gun, such are the lethality of the conditions. Yet in such unspeakable conditions, a miracle has happened: a superfungus has adapted to the environment and flourished, and it’s actually delicious. Its name is slightly vulgar in Reconstructed Ios, implied by the hard consonant sound- the name roughly translates to abyss ribbon, though there’s decidedly unclean connotations to that interpretation of the word abyss, less a dark pit of demons, more a place of discarded death and rot. Yet despite it sounding to the average arissiyan like something a witch would use in their brew, Vlasaka is astonishingly nutrient rich and safe to eat despite being capable of growing in filth that defies description. Often credited with keeping much of the homeworld arissiyan lower class fed, it’s frequently used as a meat replacement, pan or batter fried, or simply eaten dried as a healthy snack. Yes, you want to wash the lobe-bundles of this stuff extremely thoroughly before you cook it, and it’s going to take time. And while you take that time, consider how frequently Freeland settlers have solved the problem of ‘unknown but horrid biomass near colony people are afraid to approach’ with ‘throw vlasaka spores at it, turn it into a mushroom farm, eat good while exponential terrorshrooms geoengineer the fuck out of mystery body-horror gunk.’ There, aren’t you happy you washed that?

Clonemeat and Other Synthetic Alternatives

Listen, you want to eat meat in space, that’s cool. Just understand that if you’re going carnivore, the meat you’re eating isn’t really meat-meat, it’s clone meat, made with the same processes that doctors use to regrow people’s limbs in tanks and surgically reattach them. It’s also made with the same memetic biomass, which means it started life as a mixture of processed soy and reclaimed medical waste.

Freelanders recycle everything, and you’re going to have to get used to that.

Still, once you cross that gross line, the process of making clonemeat suddenly gets a lot sunnier, because it involves well-raised and cheerily-treated animals being harvested for only a few cells at a time. Donor animals are treated with respect and rights, being raised in comfortable habitats aboard ship, station or settlement, and provided the highest quality habitat, food and veterinary treatment available. In other words, they’re given celebrity treatment, because just one DNA anneal from them can then convert a few litres or so of memetic biocarbon goop into a nicely marbled side of meat inside of a cloning tank- their service to the colony deserves compensation, in terms the animal can understand and appreciate.

The reasons for this process are numerous, ranging from the environmental concerns aboard ship or planetside, the comfort of the animals themselves, and the geoengineering and medical synergy that comes with soybean crops. There’s also the simple fact that the process yields so much product for the resources required, that there’s no real reason to go back. The sheer quantity produced for the effort and resources invested is vastly superior to traditional techniques, arcological quantities produced completely sustainably.

But again: recycled medical waste. Take that into consideration, is all.

The Final Frontier of Eating Native

So you want to eat something from a planet that isn’t your homeworld, or from anyone elses’ for that matter? Sure, fine, it’s doable. You just have to observe some safety standards, lest you find yourself being eaten from the inside out by horrifying parasites, becoming a host for a seed that wanted you to eat it, or simply dropping dead from something that reacts with your insides in one of a million volatile ways.

The first thing that people need to understand about edibility test probes, is that they’re legally not allowed to return a result of “100% safe to eat” on any thing you stick into them. The best they can do by union standards, is a spectrum that ranges between “this probably won’t hurt you” and “this will definitely kill you.” So you can’t really rely on that alone.

Instead, you need to invest your time and effort into observing the food chain of your surroundings. You need to watch how the food chain operates, see what eats what, and then see if anything else will dare to eat the what the ate the what. In survival situations, this is time that most folks really don’t have, which is why if they find something that’s carbon-based and has identifiable meat-like tissues, they’ll generally slice it thin and cook the fuck out of it in the hopes that if there’s anything living in it, oven temperature will kill it. Sometimes this works; sometimes people catch a prion disease and fucking die painfully. Welcome to the Freelands.

So the risk is extremely clear: death might not be certain, but it will be extremely painful. Even still, people take the risk, both out of necessity and out of want to develop Freeland culture. What people have discovered is that what’s scary is very scary indeed, but what’s edible out there is pretty tasty and nutritious. Because for as much for as people like to catastrophize what’s out there waiting for us (with good reason, in a lot of cases), sometimes a root vegetable is just a damn alien yam, so mash it into a pie and eat the damn thing, it’s good for you.

Here’s some formerly weird alien shit that we now know is food:

• Solitos - Little Suns, the local speciality of Dos Santos on Omitochtli. The fruit of a symbiotic vine that lives off of trees in the surrounding jungle, which feeds off of amber bleeds on branches and trunks while emitting a fragrance that repels pests. Pale white-skinned and similar in internal structure to a citron, with a a red-orange flesh similar in texture to nectarine, the taste of Solito is deep and rich, a mixture of peach and blood orange with a slight hint of heat and a delightful electric tingle, not unlike licking a 9-volt battery’s terminal. Delicious raw, with dozens of ways to cook them, they’re also the main ingredient in a dark orange liquor called Penumbra, which is similar in flavour profile to dark rum, with distinct citrus notes and the preserved electric tingle. Solito also makes a popular flavour for candies and sodas, the electric zing being preserved so long as natural flavours are used.
• Tahir Coast Gigacuda - Lake Tahir is a beautiful place, but it’s also one where tourists are advised to stay on the lake, and please do not head out onto the ocean. It might look just as peaceful out there on a clear day, and much of the sea life consists of leviathans that are surprisingly gentle and tolerant to alien invasion. But these aren’t the apex predators of this biome: the gigacuda is, and like its name might suggest, it doesn’t play, not even slightly. Born the size of a tiger shark, and as large as an orca by the time it hits young adulthood, and growing continually throughout its lifespan of centuries, the gigacuda is a scaled, aquatic bus with rail spike teeth and saw blade fins, a vice-jawed picene nightmare clad in incarnadine, the very picture of what Freelanders think xenowildlife is: excessively large, uncannily agile and apocalyptically angry, to such a degree that you’d think they’d be able to conceptualize hatred. Zoological study has posited that they’re so territorial that they barely tolerate each other even during mating season, and seem to reproduce out of sheer spite. Their hunger is immense; the only thing that will stop a gigacuda’s triggered feeding drive is satiation or a violent death. Note: ‘hunger’ and ‘anger’ are identical sensations to a gigacuda. That there’s also evidence to suggest that they’re an evolved form of invasive biomatter that rode down into the ocean on an asteroid is all the more reason why the locals cull them. Frequently with Gauss rifles or plasma cannons, because they’re required in some cases. The one bright side of these culls: once they’re dead (and stop deathknell-biting), these monsters can be broken down for their shockingly light and buttery meat- the fuckers are just giant whitefish! Whitefish where one flake of the skinned flesh is the size of a typical fillet-steak. Word of advice though: before you open your fish and chips shop down by the shore, just remember that when you offload one of these from the truck, you’re going to legitimately want to put a 12 gauge slug through the thing’s dorsal bone to start the de-heading the safe way; if you use a powersaw to start, there’s a chance the fish will ‘go off’ and probably take one of your arms or legs with it. Or break your powersaw, at least, that’d suck too.
• Shaza - This is one that’s more of a discovery to people that aren’t rhidling, who find themselves dealing with shaza infestations because the multi-eyed toady little bastards just get every-goddamned-where. Because while they might eat food stores (or limbs) like raw meat in a piranha tank, quick vengeance can be yours, because they’re vaguely amphibian-shaped umami. Yes, it is somewhat brutal to eat the crisped skin right of the carcass once they’ve been flamed out from from a ventilation shaft. But is it safe? Yes, actually, as long as you only eat the skin, not the flesh. They’re naturally so oily and salty, they turn to pork rinds with remarkable efficiency when lightly broiled with a plasma shotgun. Something that’s fed rhidling country folk and poor folk for years and years, shaza skin is commonly used as a wrapper for pazzani, roughly the rhidling equivalent of a rice ball. Though farm raised shaza have edible flesh- it’s fine, imagine if pork chop came in chicken wing quantity -it’s general wisdom to not eat the deeper tissues of ones torched out of the dark corners of a station’s ductwork. They tend to be… pestilential, and do horrifying things to the digestive tract. Skin them, fry them, throw the rest in the compost processor. Freelanders don’t know it’s not bacon.
• Urmuh - The aforementioned alien yam, which was discovered and named by ukarhen explorers on Samoud. The name means ‘aquifer pod’, as they uncovered them with a dousing sensor while looking for water. The edible product of mostly subterranean root structures, urmuhaani grow out of a ‘headcap’ that acts as a water reservoir to keep them growing despite drought conditions, eventually growing to the size of a medicine ball and breaking up out of the ground, becoming bait for herbivores to eat and spread the seeds. Other their size and the neat trick for finding them growing in the wild, there’s nothing particularly exotic about them, aside from the fact that they’ve got an appealingly earthy and sweet flavour. Most ukarhen recommend you just bake them by building a little bonfire around them, then peel them, slice them like a cake, and eat them with a little salt. The caramelization does all the work.

So What’s Good Then?

Hundreds of millions of people are scattered across the thousands of colonies of the Freelands, so the short answer is: ask the locals. Even so, there’s a few popular items that are about as universal as things can actually get, crossing cultural and even species lines, becoming adopted as just a part of the greater Freelands’ culture instead. So here’s the stuff you can get nearly anywhere, be it made in a restaurant kitchen in a planetside metro-colony, or ordered out of a mechanized vending machine from the cramped food court of a shipbuilding station.

• Pizza - One of the tastier methods of Italian cultural reclamation, now that the matter of mozzarella has been solved via kasmousara. Frequently the freshest thing you can get at any station, thanks to its basic ingredients being things well suited to Freeland farming tech, and that’s probably why it’s become as popular as it has: people get out of FTL displacement and back into reality, and the first thing they want to do is eat something that tastes of warmth and sunlight. That, and to at least half of the species that populate the Freelands, “flatbread with sauce and goodness on it” is an extremely non-daunting prospect to their native tastes, leading them to make their own variations on the design.
• Pazzani - To the terran eye, these are rhidling riceballs, as the concept is basically the same: soft-cooked grains, called akiz, steamed in broth to steep-in flavour, then packed like a snowball around a morsel of something equally tasty, like spiced root-mash or slow-cooked meat. They’re either wrapped in the deep fried skin of the shaza to add a layer of crispy umami, or sheets of an edible macrolichen called eklit that tastes of salted sunflower seeds, only as a crispy paper. Popular to the point that convenience stores and even vending machines will fresh-pack them for customers, let alone rhidling restaurants, they’re considered the valorous middle ground between fast food and health food for the working class: complex carbs, vitamins and even some antioxidants in something that fits in hand and can be ordered out of a food truck.
• Manomero - Meaning ‘this and that’ in Reconstructed Ios, the name of this dish traces back to the fact that it’s cuisine made from the only food that can naturally grow on Rysia, a dish that has kept the countless billions of the homeworld lower class alive and eating relatively decent. That it’s roughly equivalent to fish and chips has made it something with cross-species appeal, consisting of battered and fried olonos, a small but hardy fish that can persist in unimaginable conditions, and strips of vlasaka fungus. Given that both of these are frequently harvested from runoff cisterns filled with trash on the homeworld, the light, delicate, slightly salty meat of the olonos and the rich earthiness of the vlaska comes as a minor miracle of flavour. A course sauce of esthesar, vine-grown vegetables that have the texture of grapes but a taste like slightly mustard-bittered tomato, is the most popular side. On Rysia, it’s basically the only side.
• Kintaro Candy - A sweet treat that has become something of a regular across the Freelands, this delicious form of Japanese cultural reclamation frequently makes use of vert-farm grown sugarcane and whatever local flavours colonists have been growing in their backyard. This is frequently the way many people get a taste for the literal fruits of another world: in little pieces of pulled-and-cut hard candies, the image of the flavouring fruit cleverly arranged as a center emblem.
• Smoked Gigacuda - You can excuse the people of the Tahir Coast region for sometimes being squeamish about eating a biological killing machine that is culled using HERCs. Those that like it, like it a lot; those that don’t, smoke it in sweet, savoury and spicy syrup and ship it offworld, where it’s enjoyed as a tasty and shelf-stable food for people with the luxury of having degrees of separation from an enormous, toothed, picene font of hatred. You can find it in starship pantries, the cookhouses of frontier colonies, on the shelves of settlement convenience stores and in station vending machines.
• Turuma - An herbed fry bread made from an extremely arid-growing form of grain called ustav, native to Arvonn, the homeworld of the Ukharen. First wadded into a loose ball, then tossed hand to hand to fold in air, turuma puffs when it’s exposed to direct high heat, cooking extremely quickly into a crunchy crust with tender, airy insides. In the ukharhen cultures it’s native to, it’s used in place of eating utensils, an edible delivery vector for slow-cooked meats, roasted vegetables and preserves. Adopted by terrans, it’s become popular for sandwiches in delis, akin to having two thin and extra-crispy croissants with garlic and oregano for slices of bread.
• Dominguez Bros. Soda - One of the most well-known exports of the metro-colony of Dos Santos, Dominguez Bros is bottled and consumed across the galaxy, a wildly popular soda with natural fruit flavours. It comes in a complete rainbow of varieties, including non-caffeinated, high octane hypercaffeinated, and even a line made specifically for synthetics, containing union-standard maintenance nanites and edible piezoelectrics. Orange and lemon-lime sit among their most popular flavours, but Solito is the one that people tend to actively look for, as they only make it with fresh, local harvests, and it tends to get rare both because of this and the demand.
• Noodles - You know, noodles. Soup. Ramen, pho, lomo, akkaran, and dozens of similar dishes from other a cornucopia of cultures and species who came together in the Freelands, placed their bowls of lunch on the table and said, as one, “wow, we all had the same idea.” You can’t really blame us though, because noodles are good, and among the species that can more or less eat each other’s cuisine without ill effect, they’ve become a way of going on a tour of the galaxy that still sits within people’s general comfort zone. Yes, the given ingredients of different varieties can get a little hairy- some folks don’t like that there’s edible insects in rhidling akkaran, just like some folks don’t like that there’s sometimes blood in the lomo broth. But for those that know what to expect in their bowl of Freeland soup, it quickly stops mattering what sort of language the hololiths on the outside of the noodlehouse read: it could be Japanese and that’s a big slice of char-siu in your salt ramen, or it could be Middle Ios glyphs and it’s fried strips of sweet-stewed vlasaka in your halite lomo instead. At the end of the day? Close enough.