this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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Worldbuilding

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Local flavor is something that can very wildly between different regions and adds a ton of detail to build with. What do the folks in your world eat?

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[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

I haven't differentiated the various regions of Focus in terms of diet, but I have defined a few things about yinrih cuisine and a few foods or snacks.

The yinrih gustatory system is less senative then that of a human. Cooking emphasizes texture and temperature, overall mouth feel, rather than taste. They CAN taste, and dishes do incorporate flavors, but it's far less sophisticated compared to human gastronomy.

The most common livestock bred for meat is the wormcow. Male wormcows grow what are called trophic limbs while the female gestates the calf. The calf eats these trophic limbs while it grows before assuming a herbivorous diet as an adult. This process is not harmful or even painful to the father, and he can regrow the limbs the next time a calf is expected. These limbs are harvested without killing the animal. The meat is naturally spicy as it contains large amounts of capsaicin (or analogous compounds) to deter insects from eating the wormcow's technically dead legs. Humans compare the meat to beef, though it keeps better, not acquiring that rancid flavor so quickly.

Most yinrih dishes, including wormcow, are served in bowls in a state somewhere between salad and stew, always prepared such that utensils are not needed, with the food already cut into bite sized chunks. Cultures very on whether the bowl is brought up to the mouth or whether the diner lowers his head to meet the bowl on the table, but yinrih eat, as the shape of their heads suggest, like dogs, directly from the bowl.

Snacks, or "tail food", are meant to be eaten casually while standing. Since all four paws are occupied in bearing the diner's weight, he must use his tail to grasp the food and bring it to his mouth. These foods include the same sort of processed empty calorie laden junk food familiar to humans, often salty or sweet in flavor, crunchy or gummy or creamy in texture.

There is a cream cultivated from certain plants that fills a role similar to butter. The flavor is too subtle for yinrih but they do enjoy using it as a binder or a base to add other flavors to. The Commonthroat word for this cream (which I don't have to hand) is the "butter" used in the profane expression "cloaca butter" meaning nonsense or BS.

Spacers have a very different way of eating since they are in microgravity and can use all their paws to grasp now that they don't have to hold their weight. I haven't detailed much about how they eat other than that there's a hydroponically grown meat substitute called "leasemeat" (the word "lease" coming from an archaic English word for "false"). It comes from a fungus and is often gussied up to approximate the texture or flavor of other meats, but it's a poor substitute, and real meat is an expensive luxury.

On the tidally locked planet Hearthside there is a "snack" of sorts called "cooling bark" ("bark" referring to a strip of tree bark). It's like those dissolving mouth wash strips that used to be so popular. The difference is it's really, really, REALLY minty, like a reverse Carolina Reaper. It's potent enough to cause pain and even fainting in humans. It's meant to provide relief from the heat of the nightless desert rather than to freshen the breath. It effects the entire body rather than just the mouth.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

To eat: Wheat based foods like bread, pastry, pasta, cake. Beans of all kinds, fish, meat (pork, chicken, game), olives and its oil, Mediterranean fruits and vegs. Lots of cheeses, mostly goat and sheep based. A garum like sauce, usually combined with a sour component like lime juice.

To drink: Beer is rarely drunk in the cities, it's a rural, very low status drink. Wine is the drink of choice of the rich, watered wine and vinegar stirred into boiling water is for the commons.

Cooking: Anything from gruel or bread with olives and figs to elaborate multi-course meals with birds tongues, mussels, and multilayered sweet puddings.

[–] IndigoGollum@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

Food differs between places and between the four people species (humans, gnomes, ornad, bantalsa) that inhabit my world.

Ornad cuisine often involves spicy peppers as a filler and preservative, since they can't taste capsaicin. Aside from that it's palatable to humans and gnomes.

Gnomic food is mostly plants and mushrooms because gnomes are very small and hunting is hard when everything is bigger than you. They can taste starch as a basic flavor along with sweet, salty, etc.

Bantalsa aren't even part of the animal kingdom and i have yet to consider what they eat or how they taste (transitive). All i know is they use gastroliths.

Humans have the most fleshed out cuisine.

  • Dwarfs, who live in a big underground city called Plagioclase, are big on root vegetables and garlic in particular. Fish from the river Lumbek that runs through Plagioclase are a minor luxury. Mostly though it's root vegetables, often pickled or in sauerkraut, and dairy from domesticated giant moles. Beer is made from some of these vegetables, usually potatoes, and is often flavored with ginger. Water comes from the river or from cisterns filled by rain.
  • Toth is a city built in shallow water in the ocean. Staple foods here include fish, kelp, the fruit of the saltbark tree, and mareyze, a saltwater grain kind of like rice.

Other places also have cannon fruit, craproot, leiti, seecorns, acaba, steelwolly, and plenty of real world stuff too.

And vampires, no matter where or what species they are, have to supplement their diet with fresh blood because they can't produce their own red blood cells.