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Alien Meals; Dare we partake?
Topic Started: Feb 23 2010, 04:46 PM (1,933 Views)
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Are you plausible?

Okay, in an extraterrestrial restaurant you seat yourself to a nice meal of steak and taters, but when the plate comes to you the steak is marbled green and purple and the taters are striped red and orange. Your waiter insists that it hasn't gone bad or anything, so you come to the conclusion that it's not from Earth.

In seriousness, I'm wondering about the odds of actually finding something edible on another planet. What kind of factors need to be considered when thinking of whether humans can rely on a planet's nutritional resources?
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food for thought
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Ddraig Goch
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Having the same, or really similar biochemistry as life on Earth, although I'm guessing that's not all that likely. I'm guessing that eating alien foods would be like trying to eat Snaiadi animals - filling, but little or no nutrients
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Likewise, I suppose we can rest assured alien predators won't find US tasty or nutritious.
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Are you plausible?

Good points. From what I've read, nutritional compounds are made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements that are considered common in the universe and necessary for life as we know it, but alien material is considered nutritionally useless at best and poisonous at worst. But why is it so unlikely for life on other planets to give us the chemical compounds we need to survive? What are the obstacles that prevent us from obtaining nutrition from alien food?
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lamna
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Chance really. Left Handed Amino acids are not compatible with Right Hand ones, so any protein is out the window unless it matches ours. Sugars are likely to be compatable un-killy, as will alcohol made from it. Probably.

Edited by lamna, Feb 23 2010, 05:56 PM.
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colddigger
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if our saliva/digestive enzymes are able to break down the molecules into simple sugars fats and so on then it should be all good, but you have to remember that one misplaced atom will result in a deadly molecule. water and hydrogen peroxide for example.

cells are pretty resourceful though, as in they are able to get energy from a lot of things, and i would imagine that if there is anything resembling nutrients at all in the food our bodies will absorb it, and if the poison doesn't kill us immediately then we would probably develop a tolerance. you know, store it in our fat until we jog and poison ourselves or something...
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agatharights
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I assume that in resturants that serve an interspecies clientel, there'd be some sort of developed system for what certain species can eat.

Ex- A squiddie could eat unprepared fugu (toxic pufferfish) but not almonds.
A human could eat squiddie-egg delicacies, but not Caw melonfruits

So there'd be some sort of system to deffer what one can eat and one can't. Some species could probably have stern enough guts to devour nearly anything, while others might only dine on the finest, more precisely prepared things.
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colddigger
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then misinformed squiddie radicals start violent protests against humans consuming their eggs.
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Actually, Squiddie regularly consume their own eggs. See, squiddie reproduction produces lots of unfertilized eggs, sometimes too many. Females typically have to manually remove excess eggs and there's a variety of uses, first and foremost being eating them, returning that nutrition to the body. The eggs taste rather like caviar, with a slightly sweet taste to the inner "meat" and are the size and consistency of large grapes. It's not uncommon for squiddie to offer eggs to one another, friends, or as tourism comes along offer and prepare them for other species. They're considered to be high in proteins and sugar. A good eat, if you don't mind where they come from.

agatharights designs alien species down to the letter.

EDIT - Usually excess eggs are absorbed back into the body when they become too old (eggs are constantly being produced and replenished, rather than being there from birth like in humans), but what I meant to say is that squiddie prefer eating them. It's a cultural thing, yanno- "Returning to whence it came"
Edited by agatharights, Feb 23 2010, 10:09 PM.
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agatharights
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Also, if you must know, yes, I did once run an RP campaign involving an alien food court in an interspecies space station. That's why I've thought about this so much.
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lamna
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I don't know why but I would feel uncomfortable eating those. Like Arthur Dent at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

And whether or not they would care about you eating something bad depends on the place. In tourist-y places they would probably all be safe, but cheaper places on earth sometimes serve you fried beaks and claws.
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I have often thought about this too. I had a dream once of being on the fictional planet Namek from Dragon Ball Z and I ate this plant thing, plucked it out the water because it looked tasty and it tasted sort of like salad except it had a squidgy gooey interior that tasted unpleasant and bitter. Turned out it was actually an animal with photosynthetic pigments, since it squirmed when I bit into it. It was kind of like a green semi-translucent mollusc.

I don't remember enough of the dream to know if I got poisoned by it or not. I think I kept eating it though because I felt bad for harming it for nothing.

I agree though that it would have to be very very similar to Earth life. We are evolved to break down a few of the molecules found naturally in our food here on Earth, but not all. There are still things that can kill us here. There are still molecules that our enzymes don't know what to do with here on Earth, and that either build up in our bodies (trans-fatty acids come to mind) or go right through us (such as fibre).

colddigger pointed out about the fact that one misplaced atom could result in a deadly molecule, this reminded me of how our enzymes are very specific about what molecules they will catalyse the reactions for. So we could get something that looks like, say, sucrose, but with a very slightly different structure or composition it's likely to be metabolised very poorly or not at all.
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agatharights
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I imagine that even the safest alien cusisine would have consequences. Just like really strong mexican food or that time I had korean while in Japan.
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lamna
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And what you could eat might depend on your ancestry as well. Native Americans, East Asians and West Africans can't digest lactose that well as adults because their ancestors did not use dairy products much. Their might be alien foods that we could theoretically digest but we don't need to at the moment.
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Depends heavily on what you're eating and where it came from.

Even rather chemically familiar life could be heavily different from our own.

Reversed chirality, toxic compounds or totally new chemicals, you name it.

Reversed chirality would result in food with little or no nutritional value. Toxic compounds (the obvious ones, like stuff containing cyanid or arsenic) would kill you or make you ill, and wholly alien chemicals could do several things to you. They might be nutritional, to differing degrees, they might have little to no nutritional value, they could be toxic or have medicational effects, or they could break down into toxic compounds etc within you.

Alien life would probably contain a mixture of these, especially the last two.

Toxic compounds to us might be mundane to them, and vice versa.

Alien compounds are the wildcard, however, since they're just that- alien. They could kill you, feed you or do nothing to you, or they could have narcotic or medicating effects. Alien life could be a huge boost to the production of medications. Or people could get high on regular and ubiquitous foodstuffs (think Prawns and catfood here). It might be very hard to control.

So if I walked into an alien resturant, I would not touch anything. Even if we knew quite a bit about the chemistry there, there would be wholly alien molecules which could have very bad effects. In a multisophont society, getting proper food might be a major problem.

And that is not counting the preperation of the food or what it actually is. Alien sago grubs, anyone? Covered in Mottled Sulligalf saliva.
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