GURPS Magic: Create Food

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Be careful when you say, "chalk". Many will assume the inedible calcium sulphate of classroom chalk rather than the calcium carbonate of limestone antacid chalk.

I've never heard calcium carbonate called "chalk". I'm talking "cliffs of dover" here, annoying squeaky noise on the blackboard.

Pika/pica is a disorder of the metabolism caused by mineral deficiencies (most commonly iron). It causes compulsive eating of inorganic substances, as the body frantically tries to find a source of minerals - in a "natural environment", this means eating earth, sand, and clay, for the most part. Earth/clay eating, if the earth is relatively iron rich, does treat iron deficiency, which is why the compulsion is so overwhelming.

I can say as a human that it's surreal to know full well that e.g. the chalk is not food, and the yellow school chalk even tastes terrible, but still be so compelled to eat it that you're scheming how to steal a piece when the teacher isn't looking.

But, like I said, they put me on iron tablets finally and it stopped. Now I take multivitamins and eat a lot of blood sausage, so my pica isn't coming back any time soon. But when I had it I was driven to eat a lot of weird stuff - which is oddly why I don't like chewing-gum today. "It's not food. I've got over eating not food, I'm not going to start again."

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by Bruno

But when I had it I was driven to eat a lot of weird stuff - which is oddly why I don't like chewing-gum today. "It's not food. I've got over eating not food, I'm not going to start again."

They could never successfully scare me into not swallowing the stuff.

[MIB.6361]

Thank you all for your input on a truly tasteless subject!

[simply Nathan]

To weigh in on the poop vs rocks thing, it's already supported that it takes more magical energy to turn a rock into food than to turn poop into food. And between the two, I and probably everyone I've known would rather eat the magical food that had once been a rock than the magical food that had once been poop.

I'd expect the rock-turned-food to have the hardest texture possible while still being edible, somewhere a little harder than jawbreakers but less so than most actual stones.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by simply Nathan

I'd expect the rock-turned-food to have the hardest texture possible while still being edible, somewhere a little harder than jawbreakers but less so than most actual stones.

Hard tack, aka ship's biscuit, is too hard to chew without serious risk to the teeth if made to last, but softens if soaked in hot liquid, or can be ground to return it to flour.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Hard tack, aka ship's biscuit, is too hard to chew without serious risk to the teeth if made to last, but softens if soaked in hot liquid, or can be ground to return it to flour.

Or pounded into pieces with a rifle butt. Then if you're lucky enough to have bacon fat you can mix the hardtack with water and fry the resulting product in the bacon fat into a sort of cake.

You may ask why you're screwing around with hard tack if you have bacon and the answer is that you don't have enough bacon. Sometimes the US WWI field ration was 16 ounces of hard tack and 12 ounces of bacon. The rest of the time the bacon was replaced with canned corn beef.

Without yummy stuff to fry it in you could still cook the hard tack bits into hot mush

A point in favor of magical hard tack is that it probably comes without weevils which mundane hard tack usually didn't before it started coming in cans. If you had weevils soaking in water or coffee served to drown the weevils.

What the _smart_ mage does is spend a few more pts and learn Essential Food. It's delicious, perfectly nutritious, compact and never spoils. Then you can stay home and make Essential Food for adventurers (or even ordinary travelers).