Quote:
Originally Posted by William
I'd be worried that a meal's worth of it would only provide one (or three, or however much your ratio goes for) meal's worth of the vitamins, though, albeit in correct proportion. I.e., one could live on Essential Food indefinitely but would be deficient if it was only one meal a week and the rest of the diet was deficient in something.
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Would that not make the Essential Food less nourishing than many normal foods?
Quote:
Originally Posted by William
Note that among the Plant spells is Body of Slime, which specifically mentions algae and slime mold -- this suggests that the GURPS default for "Plant" is broader than the scientific classification and the magic can reasonably encompass other "vegetable" lifeforms such as mold and fungi. That being the case, a scientific reader worrying about B12 in the diet could perhaps be assuaged by the inclusion of several yeasts and molds used for beer, bread, cheese and the like, with some specific yeasts or molds culturally noted as being important for a healthy local diet. Modern vegan B12 is commercially produced from bacterial cultures. The Mature spell could thus be useful to produce staples of this sort.
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I don't think yeasts or molds will do. Purportedly B12 is
only produced by bacteria (and archaea, but to most people those are also bacteria). However, slimy bacterial cultures probably aren't categorically different from slimy eukaryotic cultures from a magical perspective. (And algal slime might work, algae aren't supposed to directly synthesize the stuff but some do accumulate it.)