Bamax wrote: ↑Fri Jul 22, 2022 1:45 am
I reckon I probably should not pursue this questioning since Outsider is NOT about Umiak cook books, but curiousity is what I do so... anyway now that I know what a traditional Loroi meal is (flat breads and finger foods as well as weird fruit and veggies), I was curious about Umiak gastronomy.
What does a traditional Umiak meal look like? I presume it is optimized like all else is. For soldiers they probably have allotted portions per day and trying to get more than the usual will cast suspicious glances in that Umiak's direction.
I think food is a fairly consequential element of a fictional alien race, since it plays an important role not just in expressions of culture but in basic biology. So it's worth thinking about even if there won't be many ways to directly address it in the story.
A key point to consider when thinking about Umiak cuisine (and Umiak culture in general) is that Umiak social structures tend to be decentralized... Umiak totalitarianism flows from the bottom up as much as from the top down. We can expect Umiak food customs to be fairly diverse... there will be some ancient traditional food types that date all the way back to the three Umiak subspecies on their homeworld, but local groups throughout the expanse of Umiak-controlled territory will put the local resources to the best use they can, and obsessive-compulsive Umiak cooks will work hard to optimize recipes according to every imaginable factor (and a few maybe not so easy to imagine... like a certain percentage of every meal must be particular colors).
The oldest food traditions date back to the semi-historical tales of Empire, the Umiak homeworld, and its three sentient subspecies. Most modern Umiak have genes from all three lineages (along with a lot of manual tweaking), though the majority of their genome is inherited from the Hal-tik nomads. Hal-tik culture was based on pastoralism (the Hal-tik have their own built-in ponies, but they herded both vertebrate and exoskeletal livestock), and so traditional foods revolve around herd food sources (meat, blood, eggs, etc.) and ease of preservation (dried meats and produce, salted dry food or pickling brines, fermentation, etc.). The end results usually hover around the "extremely gross" to the "unspeakably gross." However, as with Loroi military cuisine, the importance of food preservation leads a lot of these traditional recipes to find their way into modern military cooking, even if they are made with alien ingredients. Many Umiak-controlled worlds have Soia-liron organisms, and so at least part of the Umiak ingredient list will be familiar to Loroi cooking.
The more "civilized" Tizik-tik had moved beyond technological limits on available foods, and many had very "refined" tastes. If this sybaritic element still exists in the modern Umiak, it is probably in an Umiak cook's obsessive need to add just that certain variety of spices to that synthesized protein paste, and to painstakingly sculpt it into an ephemeral postmodern sculpture (and in the crew which will solemnly and reverently admire each carefully extracted portion... before violently devouring them).
The third subspecies, the Kikkut, literally lived in the sewers of Tizik-tik urban centers... so you can imagine what they were eating. In the modern Umiak, this manifests itself in the Umiak willingness to eat almost anything. And, together with the Hal-tik nomadic heritage, in the ability to go for long stretches with very little food.
Umiak starships will be stocked with whatever was available and cost-effective at their most recent supply stop (after some hysterical screaming from the chief cook at the three captains about "WHAT DO YOU EXPECT ME TO MAKE OUT OF THIS SLOP?!?!?!"); mostly pre-prepared preserved foods and ingredients along with some fresh meat and produce when available, for however long they last... and a little beyond. There would also be the nutrient goo fed to the hardtroops, which is probably synthesized aboard ship, and is something the entire crew can fall back on if supplies fail.
