this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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They always make up some excuse, like replicated food tastes different, even though it's capable of reproducing things at the molecular level and there would literally be no difference.
The best headcanon I have for replicated food is, especially on federation starships, you're getting an approximation of the taste which has been balanced with healthy nutrition requirements. Which is why Deanna had asked for a chocolate sundae with real chocolate. So the idea is that you could having nothing but chocolate sundaes for a week straight but you're eating the daily recommended amount of protein, fiber, carbs, sodium, healthy fats, etc. it takes like ice cream, but not hand churned with high fat cream, sugar, real vanilla beans, etc.
Something that I find very cool about our present day food science is that even though we know so much, there's still an incredible amount we don't understand.
Soy sauce is a good example — brewing of it using traditional methods involves fermenting in large barrels over the course of many months. There aren't many places that still make it that way nowadays — most use chemical hydrolysation to cut the process down to a few days. The taste of the traditionally made stuff is much better, but it's expensive enough that I can't justify buying it. I am glad I bought a bottle and got to try it, but in most cooking contexts, it's not really worth using because the nuances of its flavour will be lost or overpowered in the process. I used it sparingly, and I relished it in those contexts, but I also needed to make sure I wasn't too reticent in using it, lest I lose it to time. Since finishing the one bottle I had, I haven't bought another one (though I've been tempted).
I like your speculation about nutrition, but I find the idea of replicated food being nutritionally complete to be too implausible to believe. After all, sci-fi works best when it builds on top of established science, and the taste of food is so intrinsically linked to its chemistry that I can't imagine replicated food being able to even approximate the taste of things without being faithful to the underlying chemistry. I agree that the taste is likely only an approximation, but I imagine that for most people, this is good enough — just like most people would find a £30 bottle of soy sauce absurd.
In the 2300s, we have Joseph Sisko; today, we have Yasuo Yamamoto. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, eh?
I guess if the replicator forces the components of the food to have certain nutritional requirements that makes sense, but it's also kind of fucked up if it changes the taste so much from what you actually want that you can tell the difference.
You can tell the difference between regular candy and sugar free candy, between regular white bread and keto bread or gluten free bread. Or regular pretzels and gluten free free pretzels. Yet they're close approximations with different health traits, some of which people tolerate better than others
But they're also made with completely different materials. A replicator SHOULD be able to make anything that tastes like anything since it's working at the molecular level.
It's an AI food generator. All of its food is just a little bit bland, because it's the average of everything. They aren't storing entire patterns for a tomato for example, so they have to be recreated each time, and the replicator prints a homogenized food-shaped item, with all the same components, but none of the random environmental conditions and uncultivated genetic traits that lead to a flavorful fruit. Then that compounds further when you get into processed foods, or whole prepared meals. There's artistry there, that a computer can't match.
Maybe, to mitigate this, there are some recipes where they do save an exact pattern of real food a chef made, so the replicator can make a few things that are particularly good. The Lower Deckers do make a big deal of the mac and cheese with the breaded top.
You see it in the way they treat the holodeck too. When it's new, they have some fun with the computer generated scenarios, but all the best programs are the ones that they get from outside the ship, or that are made by a member of the crew. And they're a sought after commodity. Data is still trying to figure out art. The Doctor seems to have managed it, but the Federation is slow to acknowledge him. Maybe the answer is replacing replicated meals with food prepared by holographic chefs, using replicated ingredients with higher fidelity patterns, that you have room for, because you're no longer storing complex dishes