Chacteristic foods of your campaigns?

[Flyndaran]

I've sometimes looked for weird things my delta living small but powerful nation people might enjoy.
Palolo worms' reproductive sacs and some other polychaetes make for lovely horrifying imagery of what real people already eat.

[Dalillama]

In a recently ended game I was playing in, my character had an inordinate fondness for fermented catfish with a spicy sauerkraut equivalent.

[Flyndaran]

Strong preference for strong smelling food or merely that which is uniquely detectable from B.O. could count as a kind of cultural quirk.
Trackers/scouts know they're near an encampment of Kahokians by way of their latrines' odor of imported palolo.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I consider it an amazing form of adaptability, not a call for some silly back to nature veganism.

It's more the other way around. Meat takes much less of a digestive system than plants do, so it is much easier for a herbivore to become omnivorous (and indeed many "herbivores" are known to occasionally consume animals) than it is for a carnivore to do the same.

It's also useful to remember when somebody tries to derive an ideal diet from human anatomy that for more than long enough to matter evolutionarily - at least the last few million years - humans have *cheated*. Knives and mortars and pestles mean your teeth don't need to change even if your biochemistry does. Cooking and containers that allow pre-soaking replace changes to the digestive tract. Lately we even keep some of our symbiotic digestive micro-organisms in sourdough starters and brewing vats instead of in our gut. Without processing technology most of our food crops are barely edible. Chewing on wheat kernels and dry beans might be enough to keep you alive, but I wouldn't bet on it.

[Flyndaran]

Our weakly acidic stomachs render us unusually susceptible to meat borne toxins and pathogens.

Humans have eaten very "unnaturally" since the agricultural revolution switched us to a mainly grass diet.

I know about how common occasionally eating off-vore type is. But I think we can identify 95% of species' diets from biology unless they prepare foods in unusual ways.
And our ancestors have prepared food for easily a million years muddying all attempts at pinning down ancient diets regardless of hypothetical optimums.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by malloyd

It's also useful to remember when somebody tries to derive an ideal diet from human anatomy that for more than long enough to matter evolutionarily - at least the last few million years - humans have *cheated*. Knives and mortars and pestles mean your teeth don't need to change even if your biochemistry does. Cooking and containers that allow pre-soaking replace changes to the digestive tract. Lately we even keep some of our symbiotic digestive micro-organisms in sourdough starters and brewing vats instead of in our gut. Without processing technology most of our food crops are barely edible. Chewing on wheat kernels and dry beans might be enough to keep you alive, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Excellent point. Humans are to some extent adapted to have tools as well as being adapted to making tools.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Excellent point. Humans are to some extent adapted to have tools as well as being adapted to making tools.

Our bodies really suck at digging, eating, and digesting raw tubers despite their nutritional use for hominids since Australopithecines.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Our bodies really suck at digging, eating, and digesting raw tubers despite their nutritional use for hominids since Australopithecines.

But our mattocks and cookpots are the best in the Animal Kingdom!

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by cbower

Eel and kidney pie. A pasty of fresh eel and pork kidney in a fishbone jelly.

That sounds a lot like the sort of dish my immortal NPC might prepare and eat just because she knows it would freak out her middle-class American mate and offspring. Not nearly the worst, but that sort of thing.

(Her family won't even eat sushi voluntarily. Survival situation, yeah, otherwise, not gonna happen.)

[Flyndaran]

Sometimes all it takes to disgust is combine normal foods.
I knew a family that all mixed their applesauce with their spaghetti and meat sauce.
Dairy products are, for the most part, carefully spoiled milk. Isn't it odd that most of us don't find it gross?