TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
/c/TenFoward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.
~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.
~ 3. Use spoiler tags. This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.
~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.
~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.
~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.
~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'
~ 8. No Political Upheaval. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.
Fun will now commence.
Sister Communities:
Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!
Honorary Badbitch:
@[email protected] for realizing that the line used to be "want to be added to the sidebar?" and capitalized on it. Congratulations and welcome to the sidebar. Stamets is both ashamed and proud.
Creator Resources:
Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)
Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)
view the rest of the comments
One more reason: The dish tastes exactly the same every time. No variation at all.
But when you cook real food, there is always a little variation because the ingredients are usually always slightly different (vegetables more or less watery, meat more or less lean, a little bit more or a little bit less salt or flavouring). It's one of the main skills of a really good cook: To perceive the subtle differences during the preparation and to bring out the best possible taste incorporating the differences.
There's no technological reason why there couldn't be hundreds of versions of each exact dish. In fact they could've even had a simple variation program so that every time it's made it comes out a bit different
I mean, that is conjecture right? With how much the real military puts into food science, I could imagine that there's a Federation food science division that could easily make a dish from scratch a number of times and store each attempt's pattern as a random variation that gets distributed out to the fleet.
When I was in, they put zero thought into it other than "needs more calories" and "make soldiers poop less."
Considering a post-scarcity universe where the machines they're working with can take even those considerations away from us (IIRC the replicators automatically do adjust nutrients/calories per-person per-meal). I think after a while, someone would've just... Gotten bored and futzed with it. I'd also assume consumers on earth to contribute to the databases. Heck, there could be a whole food influencer culture thing going on. "Oh man, you haven't lived until you've tried 'eggs, scrambled, variant 37578a'!"
I think we have something contemporary to compare this sci-fi scenario with: recorded vs. live music (especially now that we can keep making exact digital duplicates as nauseam.)
When you play a CD, it sounds the same each time (ignoring things like the equipment you're playing through, the room, the ambient noise, etc.). Usually, the studio recording is the best, most pristine recording of a song you can get.
But when you see the original artist performing the song live, it's different! A good performer will make you feel like you're experiencing something special. And the little variations, and even, imperfections, make the song even more compelling!
It's the CD recording of the song bad? No. It's perfectly serviceable. It might even contain things that can't be performed live. But it's the same each time. And for some people, that makes it less desirable, and live performances, with all their deviations and mistakes become more desirable.
And going back to replicated food, apart from Eddington and grandpa Sisko, I don't remember anyone else saying replicated food was bad. Just less desirable. And even Eddington grudgingly admitted that the TV dîner he was eating in the shuttle with Sisko wasn't that bad.