Gastronaut

Next time you’re on Earth, take a trip up the battered pavement of highway 287, past the New York floodplain and the sunken skyline. Try to ignore the flow of traffic towards Utica, though the promise of that new city is admittedly hard to resist. Our destination instead, is a location that sees human foot traffic perhaps once a month, a great sprawling catacomb of containers, charging stations, and noise.

Welcome to Kenneman’s Grocery. It’s exactly as you might have pictured when you order produce online, but expanded to a scale the human skull can’t hold with any kind of resolution. Here, a person is surrounded by an impossible quantity of comestibles, but isolated from anything the senses would register as food. Absent is the hissing of pans, the wafting scent of spices, the murmur and shout of staff. Kenneman’s Grocery is dark, loud. The hum of electricity, the constant drone and crash of its mechanized workforce. Great automated trucks thunder past on airless tires, their cargo bays stocked by man sized quadcopters. Nothing here is still. Anything that could have a smell is in sealed pressurized boxes, or wrapped in great swathes of plastic like a spider’s meal. Commerce occurs silently and instantly, everything here has already been purchased, though the customer may not yet realize it. I’m here on my hands and knees, flashlight stabbing at the gloom between boxes, trying to find something ubiquitous.

In a few moments, with the assistance of a Kenneman’s technician, I’m staring at a self-refrigerating container of microwavable dinners. I convince the technician to crack open the container to get me a look inside at the contents. My journalistic credentials may be dead but with social legerdemain and bald faced lying, I can work some genial necromancy.

In my hands I hold the classic meals of lonely hearts and budget chefs, swaddled in colored wrapping bearing optimistic interpretations of their contents. Steak and baked potato with chocolate pudding. Rabbit ragout with finger-eclairs. Frost crusts everything, squealing under the slight pressure of my fingertips.

“We get shipments continuously,” my companion starts, attempting to ease the awkwardness of my silent rummaging, “typically the network identifies demand through the app and allocates production.”

I can’t find what I’m looking for. If every item here is connected to demand, whether current or predicted, where is the rush of Fairy Wraps? Of Pop Dumplings? Where is all the Le Straud Cuisine?

His fingers are busy at his tablet for a moment, padding gently at a scuffed screen. He leads me past the aisle rack, across a thoroughfare. He even extends an arm to prevent me from becoming a thin smear beneath the wheels of an automated loader vehicle the size of a bus. It’s so large that it wouldn’t even be slowed by my body.

We arrive at a series of racks, stretching to either side of where we stand. Each piled high with identical refrigerated containers, all marked with the image of a grinning white cartoon ferret, adorning a vibrant magenta background. The technician sniffs to himself, working a well manicured fingernail against the bridge of his nose.

“Le Straud shit so popular right now, the network assigned it an entire wing of the warehouse. Demand is crazy high.”

Crazy is right. The scale before me is monolithic, offering that out of body experience that comes with the realization of… well… of being so miniscule. But I will say, it’s the perfect explanation for today’s episode.

I’m Oscar Yasui, formerly a professional food critic, currently an independent food journalist, and you’re listening to Gastronaut.

Let’s talk about Authenticity. Obviously, we want our food to taste good, but we want it to look good, smell good, and feel good in the mouth. Authenticity, it’s the spice of our time. It’s the new vanilla bean, the saffron oil of our contemporary age of exploration. With the Rail system expanding ever forward, uniting the core worlds with those colonies, those worthy exiles we hurled out so long ago, dozens of new ecologies are open to us. Well, theoretically open to us. We are talking about distances incomprehensible to the human mind, distances that no amount of metaphors or thought experiments can possibly shrink. Diners have embarked on a quest for meals that are culturally, contextually, and flavorfully accurate. Chefs and restaurants alike are happy to feed this growing hunger, both on the grounds of personal pride, as well as an excuse to massage prices ever upwards. Can’t get real authenticity on the cheap, after all.

Now, before we get into the weeds on this subject, I do have to clarify that this isn’t going to be a discussion about machine produced foods versus what some have taken to calling “artisanal cuisine.” I… am not going to devote any time at all to this topic, and I’m not sorry for that in the slightest. I will say this: our modern food industry is impossibly entangled with machinery, and has been for so long as to make the line between chef and tool almost academic. Is your meal rendered inauthentic by a stand mixer? Is a computer generated recipe less tasty? Does a prosthetic arm invalidate the hours of work a chef may invest into a meal?

Enough! Please! I feel like we do this every two years! If you want a real example of inauthentic, then by all means travel down to a Nostalgia Air SCENTsuality Boutique and pay upwards of sixty credits for the pleasure of smelling your own first birthday party or whatever it is they DO there.

The question isn’t WHAT made your meal tonight, but WHO. Who owns the plate? Who owns the meal? It’s easy to understand all the packaging that makes a person grab a product, or a flashy sign over a door. Food may be commercialized, but even an alienated meal remains a great pillar of culture, the footprint and even soul of a people.

For this and future episodes… let's be bold and call what we’re working on here a season, I intend to follow a set of cultural footprints out into the stars. You see, when Mr. Ungerson and I were eating at Cloudberry that fateful evening, he and I chose bowls of pho for our meals. Yet, Cloudberry featured their own spin on those pillars of Le Straud cooking, the Fairy Wrap and the Pop Dumpling. As much as I hate to draw a comparison with that man, I can’t help but feel we both actively avoided those meals due to a sense of saturation: that their ubiquity had made them beneath us.

But that was just elitism, wasn’t it? Saturation does not lessen a meal in any form. I’m ashamed of that thought.

I departed Kenneman’s Grocery having seen where most individuals get their flavors of Le Straud, but it is important to remember that the cuisine of the colony of Le Straud has been circulating through street vendors and port restaurants for nearly a decade now. Only recently has Le Straud begun an inexorable advance into specialty restaurants, though often recontextualized for coreward palates through fusion cuisine. Likewise, the sudden rush of prepacked “Le Straud Inspired” meal kits represents the lumbering reflexes of food giants such as Kenneman’s finally catching on to public demand. The scale of production on display might be vast, but please picture these mass market products as a tidal wave. A tidal wave may be an impressive thing, but know that it is just the effect of a cause rooted deep below the surface, out of sight.

So from Kenneman’s Grocery I charted a path into the parks and squat apartments outside of the Utica Intersollary Terminal. Here, migrants and pilgrims alike finish their interminable journey by rail into one of the largest metropolitan areas on Earth. In many cases, most are so fatigued and financially depleted by the journey that they can go no further. Half-quarantine zone, half-refuge, the official term for this strip of city is the Utica Portside Spillways. With its great false stone claddings and rusty palette, the locals simply call it The Bricks.

Crossing the bureaucratic checkpoints into the Bricks is always something of a roulette wheel. The Center for Interstellar Commerce, as a branch of the United States Government, changes its policies seemingly on a whim. At various periods of my career, I have entered freely, required three separate proofs of identification, required that much and a one hundred dollar bribe, or simply have found the gate barred and the teller screen dark. I am fortunate this week, I get in with my expired credentials and a poorly delivered wink.

The streets are wide and open, mostly to discourage the formation of barricades, lit in stark blues to dissuade loiterers. Eyes follow the movements of outsiders such as myself, but without malice. The air goose pimples skin where it touches clothing, the sun of a June afternoon snuffed by the great shadow of the Utica Space Elevator. Complications with passports, conflicts with immigration, threats of extradition, people here can be scooped up by great hands and banished from the earth, becoming human jetsam out among the stars.

The farmer’s market I’m here to visit is built in a great communal space, large iron girders carry a vaulted ceiling, its surface adorned with a mural of ancient fishermen, pulling a haul from the waters. A time before the mouth of the Hudson devoured all of NYC. This awning was meant as a sunshade, but between it and the Utica Elevator, the interior is nearly freezing. Customer and salesman alike are undeterred by the climate. The air was a cacophony of languages both familiar and foreign, rising above the crooning of five different sound systems set to three different stations. Martian produce, fresh from hiberostasis passed from hand to hand, into hazy plastic bags emblazoned with slogans worn illegible by the frictive forces of commerce. Martian eggs and bacon, ranched from that world’s picturesque riverside plains. Martian pickles, in rows of wide bodied jars, swimming in peppers and brine. Elsewhere was hydroponic harvest from orbit and the Principality of Luna, hiberostasis caskets piled high with ripe apples, large bodied jackfruit, strawberries so flavorful, the air itself had become heavy and sweet. The produce of hives local to the Bricks, garden honey drizzled over whole wheat biscuits. But the greatest congregation came to the booths nearest to the street, radiating a warmth that drove back the unseasonably cold air. Naturally, patrons huddled around the market’s grills and ovens.

Here, you can buy Venusian flatbreads, piled high with fish pickled in limes and coarse ground salt. Among them there were dishes my research has not turned up a name for, originating from the farthest colonies. And across from those very unfamiliar creations, there was pizza by the slice, with heaping gobs of mozzarella and basil leaves, crust cracking, cheese stretched long into the air. There were lines of speared grasshoppers and mushrooms roasting on a silver spit. I asked the cook if there are grasshoppers out beyond the Sol system. The heavyset man scoffed as he worked a fresh spit through the thorax of another hopper.

“Not authentic enough for you, coreboy? Tough. They won’t let us bring Stellexs here. Order for Ecological Preservation and all that. Probably for the best.” He flashed a set of gloaming metal teeth. “I doubt your lil rockteeth couldn’t handle the shit we chew back home.”

Here, the wanderers, the children of explorers, gather to play Majong and dominos, to spar in the park, hands swaddled in simulation gloves or simple wraps. Yet, among the booths come the same symbols, the same structures, that same nose tingling scent of sugar, acid, and mild neurotoxin. Le Straud cuisine is everywhere, even here, at the edge of Earth and space.

Because this place, like all others, must cater to the culinary curiosity of the core. So it was that many of the kitchens here served the hallmarks of our most troubled colony. In one stand, its exterior blazing with the same fuchsia I saw in the distribution center of Kenneman’s, a woman in blue rubber gloves kneaded a bowl of twinkling, pastel pink gelatin. Her eyebrows were furrowed from the day’s labor, though she claimed that her expression was largely the result of a career working with toxic ingredients. She told me she was from Europa, having saved enough from ice mining to finally return home to Earth. She laughed from her belly as she described a time she rubbed a knuckle against her eyelid after work and blinded herself for four hours. I asked her about her sign and she shrugged. Everyone sees the fuchsia, thinks of Le Straud, if it ain’t broke, why fix it? Besides, it complemented the pink interior of a Jelly Pear.

I asked her if she might be confused. The Jelly Pear has a vividly green interior of lobed pulp, the color of an emerald. The stand owner’s face hardened. “Well, the interior is pink when it is exposed to air, '' she said, “of course it’s green at first, and besides, am I going to talk all day or make a purchase?” I decided to buy a water and kept my eyes on the counter, to avoid her gaze.

But it was this statement that got the gears in my head turning. My memory returned to this podcast actually, Gastronaut. I started paying attention during my short interviews, watching the hands and ingredients of chefs instead of their eyes and mouths. What I saw was… significant departures from what I had come to expect from Le Straud’s hallmark meals. One cook fried his pop dumplings in hot oil, a curious choice for a meal billed as self cooking. Another cook blended a strawberry banana mix, splashing in red food coloring. In stall after stall, I never saw the bright orange skin of a Savorflame mushroom. When I questioned an older man with a missing ear and a sparkling smile, he laughed in my face. “Those little bastards are explosive!” he said, “I’m not letting those things within ten feet of my hands, I might lose a damn finger!”

Losing my patience, I asked him how he could claim to serve authentic Pop Dumplings without Savorflames. He wiped a finger across his nose and shrugged. “Don’t need no Savorflames when I’ve got jerk and pepper.” Besides, he claimed his place was a fusion restaurant. He was born in Goldenrod, Mars, not Le Straud.

My day proceeded that way until I had visited every stall in the public forum of the Bricks. Here, on that faint line drawn between Earth and space, I could find nothing but fusion cuisine. Adaptations of Le Straud cuisine made to appeal to local palettes, substitutes intended to keep risks low for independent eateries. Almost everyone here has been born off-world, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find a single person from Le Straud. I collapsed on a park bench just outside the market, the sun having entered that narrow strip of sky between the rooftops and the great pillar of the space elevator. It’s glare softened by a film of cirrus cloud and pollution.

My notes did not offer any pathway forward. My baby blue Chorus 12S carried interviews with individuals who knew as much about Le Straud cuisine as anyone, which is to say, that it was alien and in-demand. With all my experience and connections as a food critic. Without my research team, my editor, my Palladium credentials… I had crumbled at the first wall I’d hit. I sat at that bench hoping that… Maybe some Le Straud ex-pat would see me, recognize me for my writing, and spirit me away to an undiscovered gem of truly authentic Le Straud cuisine. That probably sounds pathetic, right? Well, let me tell you, I kept that hope until the sun finally dove beneath the apartment complexes around me. I warmed that bench as children ran at the call of their mothers, as the vendors packed up their produce, side-eying me as a vagrant, or plainclothes migration officer.

Nobody came. I cupped my hands to my mouth… tried to warm up. I had done research before, back when I was an independent blogger, but only local, accessible places. I was liked for my personality and wit, not my talents as a culinary bloodhound. There was no recorded Le Straud restaurant here, and my leads were drying up. I thought about screaming, but I didn’t. Instead… instead an idea stuck in my head.

I might have left Palladium, but my research team certainly hadn’t. That young group of twenty somethings, each hoping for their own career in writing, why, they were still in the trenches, baggy eyes staring at article after article of food trivia. Hands shaking, half from the frigid air of the Bricks and half from excitement, I scrolled through my phone’s contacts. There she was. I had saved her as “Girl With the Sad Eyes.” The misspellings indicated I must have been drunk when I did. I dialed her up immediately.

She picked up after four rings. When her voice came back through the speaker, it was heavy with sleep. “Hello?” she asked. A second feminine voice grumbled something lightly behind her. Fabric rustled with a rolling body.

“Mr. Yasui! Great to hear from you, how have… uh… how have you been?” Even through the sleep I could hear her nerves. I asked her if she had any record or knowledge of an authentic Le Straud restaurant in the area.

“Uh, Mr. Yasui, sir, I… Well I would love to help you but… I’m sorry, didn’t you lose your job? Or leave your job, I mean, or I meant to say. Sorry.”

“Well, since you aren’t with Palladium I can’t…really…help you? And I want to help you, of course, but… Well we just had this meeting online today about… it was about security and sources and… Well I have a good job at Palladium.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose between my finger and thumb. A good job, what a joke. Basically, she was an intern. A glorified intern. They were taking advantage of her. The Girl With the Sad Eyes would be lucky to be salaried in eight years. I decided to change tactics. I asked her how her writing project was going, the one she told me about at some point when we met in the office together. There was always a writing project among the intern staff. She filled in the blanks for me, rather enthusiastically. My stomach began to twist.

Well I… I sort of remembered. Was it fiction or nonfiction? Fantasy? Romance? I remember it was very… rough. That counts as remembering. Or I thought it did, at the time. I asked her if she wanted me to give her a bit of publishing advice. I may or may not have offered to punch up some sections of her work.

Her response was non-verbal, but enthusiastic enough to peak the cheap microphone of her communicator. I could hear the woman in bed beside her complaining.

I made sure to remind her that I would have more free time after I finished the project I was working on. We could meet in person, perhaps exchange notes?

“Yes, of course! That would be… oh, that would be excellent. Let me… Let me get some information for you. This is a personal project, right? You won’t be posting this anywhere public, or trying to get this published? Am I right about that?”

I made a bearlike grunt. She took it as a yes. After twenty minutes of appreciation, she finally furnished me with a promise: tomorrow she’d have a lead for me. It would have to be enough. We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and I cut the call, eager to be out of the cold.

I returned to my hotel outside of the Bricks, spent but hopeful. That evening I stood on the balcony, the winds of the new coastline tousling the colonial flags on the walls that encircled that migrant quarter. I barely slept that night. My brain felt like it was full of silver threads, pulling me from my dreams and dragging me into the sky like some awful marionette.

The next day I returned to the Bricks, led by an update on my tablet from the Sad Eyed Girl pointing me towards an address across town from the common area. You know, in addition to my Chorus 12S, I carry a Twinnon Peregrine, all black frame, no stickers or decals. It connects me to email, the buffer, news, it functions as a journal or a phone. It’s okay. It has a scratch on its screen from the tines of a salad fork which makes it hard to read sometimes. I’ve been meaning to invest… invest in a Twinnon Hawk. A Hawk has a larger screen, which is good because web pages sometimes get a little scrunched on my Peregrine. If I got a Hawk, I’d get it in navy blue. Yeah. That’d be really very nice, actually. Twinnon Hawks. They can do three dimensional display at 8K, y’know. Really… Really great tablet.

I arrived at a ten story apartment. Its brick cladding was cracked wide in spots, with enough of a gap to stick an arm through and feel the concrete beneath. At the door, I slid my ID into a slot, withdrawing it at the sound of a single digital chirp. Sad Eyed Girl had done more than the bare minimum, and had told the tenet I had come to visit, to expect me. The door unlocked, a speaker blared the voice of a woman, vocal chords ever so slightly touched by a smoking habit.

“Oscar Yasui?” a timer beeped continuously as she spoke, backed by a hissing pan, “I was told to expect you! Let me just say that it is so great to hear from you, I’m making dinner right now but you can find me at unit I-21, it’s at the left from the stairs. That's ‘I’ as in ‘indigo.’ The elevator is out, sorry.”

I told her I’d be up in a moment and she disconnected. I recited the alphabet, ticking off my fingers as I did so. I stopped, grimacing, at my extended pinky finger. 9 floors.

By the time I finally arrived at my destination, my thighs had knotted into agonized cords. The door of the apartment read my face and presented it to the house’s occupant. A short while later, I found myself sat at a worn dining room table, sweaty and shoeless.

The woman worked as we spoke with each other. She was already busy preparing a series of small wheat flour dumplings. Each lay stretched out and raw on the counter, little pale squares. In a nearby pan she combined pork with salt, sesame oil, ginger, garlic, and wine. To her right, a small tupperware container was nestled near a fridge, brilliant orange mushrooms peeking out over its rim. Each the length of a thumb, with white flesh at their base. The woman pointed to them and smiled, but I beat her to the punch.

Savorflame Mushrooms. The real deal. She laughed, with the nervousness that came with guests, or perhaps, explosive ingredients.

“Sure are, Mr. Yasui. You prepare them last with Pop Dumplings. I’d show you how, but I’d be damned if I let a writer like you blow his fingers off!”

Her name was Wendy Rammlin. When we met, she was wearing a slightly baggy pair of jeans and a corduroy jacket, with an image of a snarling dog embroidered on the back.

“My husband’s” she said about the jacket, “he sewed it himself a few years ago, but I like wearing it around the house when he’s away.”

Wendy moved with focused attention, but what stood out to me as we spoke was how she projected herself. She had a habit of slipping into flowing sentences with clean, regular pauses at the period. The apartment was well-kept and simply decorated, the only clutter a great stack of worksheets on the coffee table. Grade school math, from where I was sitting. Nothing anyone could associate with Le Straud was present in the small space. In fact, one wall was notably occupied with the black and blue V, the grand core flag.

I asked Wendy if she taught in the Bricks and she nodded over her shoulder. “Mmhmm! Five days a week and a few hours for tutoring and make-up work on the weekends.”

The time passed easily as she prepared our meal. I watched as she opened the refrigerator and withdrew a tray of quivering aspic, which she diced into small cubes and mixed into the seasoned pork. All of this was heaped onto the dough squares, with a small crater in the center for, I assumed, some final ingredient.

I made a few attempts to assist in the kitchen, but she waved me away every time. When the Sad Eyed Girl told her about my exploration of authenticity, Wendy committed herself to offering me a real Le Straud meal. We talked about how cold the Bricks get beneath the Elevator. We talked about passport updates required of former colonists. She changed the subject to Savorflames. Perhaps her family’s status as offworlders was something of a sore subject for her.

“They’re tricky little things to spore,” she spoke of the Savorflames, “between the need for keeping the lights low and for keeping the soil moist, you also have to keep their microculture intact or they’ll putrefy from within. They’re two organisms, one helping the other. Soil composition is a whole thing too. You can grow em in earth soils, but they aren’t uh, well, explosive if they don’t get the right chemicals as they grow.”

I asked her if she grew them herself, and she shook her head in reply with a wry look of amusement.

“No, we don’t grow them here for a number of reasons. We get them locally from a hobbyist, a botanist I’d guess you’d call him. He isn’t even from Le Straud himself, I think he just likes the thrill of them.”

She waved me over, and I moved from the chair to the counter. Raw dough stretched out in little white squares, each with a filling of rare pork, undercooked pumpkin, and a great helping of savory sauce.

“A lot of vendors don’t carry Savorflame because of the risks.” She brought out a paring knife, and placed the luridly orange mushrooms on a cutting mat. She spoke easily, though a line of deep concentration began to form across her brow, the very start of crows feet near her eyes appeared.

“Sure, Savorflames are explosive, that’s sort of the thrill of them, but realistically there is a lot of legality involved in serving a dish that comes out undercooked. Score the mushrooms too enthusiastically and they willl burst, but hesitate and everything comes out raw. Ick, right?”

She scored each mushroom along with their caps, carefully measuring the depth of each knife stroke. Once cut, a mushroom would begin to whine like a miniature teakettle, steam rising from its surface alarmingly. With an urgent deftness, she placed a few stalks into each dumpling, then quickly wrapped and sealed them. As she moved to the next set of Savorflames, I observed the dumpling rising and steaming of its own accord -- it was being cooked from the inside out! The raw dough started to crisp and the ingredients broiled in their own juices. The aspic melting into something like soup, the pork mixture seared into edibility. The whistling continued, muffled, and I found myself stepping away from the little packages of meaty goodness. But my anxiety over being showered by burning hot soup never came to pass, and when the whistling subsided, Wendy scooped each dumpling up with a pair of tongs and plated them. Listeners, it’s easy to call this sort of thing a fad, but a Pop Dumpling really is a thing of magic up close.

Le Straud cuisine was unheard of in the core worlds before the Rail network caught up with the slow boat colonies… for a number of reasons. First, you can’t exactly order takeout when the restaurant is light years out, right? Likewise, transmissions from colonists were mostly status reports, long form queries, and… and the occasional sign off broadcast to signal colony collapse. Twinkling bursts of high power radio signal, screaming “I’m here” or “We’re all dead” in every direction, hoping someone will be around to hear.

Le Straud cuisine didn’t even take off when the Rails connected to the planet. Recontact was all about aid shipments, census and prospecting work, dignitary exchanges, lots of legitimately fascinating history as we reconnected with our distant relatives. Food studies were anthropological, academic, and lacked any broad appeal.

For the purpose of time, let’s just say Le Straud cuisine is broadly similar to many of its colonial contemporaries: generally you have a variety of core world dishes, typically their comprised of a spectrum loosely voted on before vessel departure, tuned for a high resource to nutrient ratio and hard coded into an extrusion array. Since then, Le Straud’s cuisine has undergone what food historian Jeremy Potempkin described as “the Landfall Explosion.” The Landfall Explosion is a pretty simple concept: take a population that has been forced by circumstance to eat from the same menu for entire generations, and give them access to terrestrial agriculture. The result is indeed a veritable explosion. Foods become more experimental, wilder, with chefs eschewing utilitarianism for flavor.

Wendy and I sat down to eat, two Pop Dumplings to a plate, a knife and a fork to take the savory little pastries apart. The flaky crust of the dumpling is so light, the knife glides through it effortlessly, leaving the sauce and filling to gently roll out of the cut. A forkful of Pop Dumpling, authentic Pop Dumpling, creates electricity across the surface of the tongue. The ginger and the garlic combines to elevate the salty bites of pork, the flavor of the molten aspic, it all creates something mouthwatering.

All of this is served at tongue searingly high temperatures: the heat of the Savorflame’s chemical process lingers in the dumpling, making it frankly a bit of a hazard to eat. The Savorflame mushroom itself is… bizarre. Once they catalyze, the mushrooms are rubbery and unpleasant to the tooth. Sulfurous and bitter to the tongue. Across the table, I was shocked to see my host scraping the mushrooms from the dumpling with her fork. She left them to the side of her plate, uneaten and unwanted.

“They’re an… acquired taste” she said “a taste I’ve never been um, really able to acquire. My husband likes them, but my kids can’t stand them.”

I asked her if this is how colonists on Le Straud enjoy their Pop Dumplings. She stared for a moment, her cheeks turning a bit red. I made a conscious effort to avoid asking if she had made some kind of mistake with the recipe.

I stared at her, and felt… angry, and a bit foolish. She continued as I remained silent.

“Pop Dumplings are a party trick these days.” She peered at the wizened body of a spent Savorflame on the plate. “And when people from Le Straud did eat them, they usually had good reason. Food shortages forced people to consider exploding mushrooms. Energy shortages made them convenient for cooking -- if very odd. This is all second hand you have to understand, I’m not from Le Straud, I’m from Veldia. My parents were colonists.”

It felt as if I’d been kicked in the chest. For a few moments, we pushed the food around our plates. Wendy was perceptive enough to feel the temperature in the room change. I asked her, after a moment, about the recipe.

“They adapted it for Earth products, then Earth tastes. A lot of the wildlife on Le Straud isn’t exported, there just isn’t any demand yet, so the ingredients are localized. And after the long Rail trip, most of what was smuggled through was the things that took too much work to eat conveniently.”

Jelly Pear, a neurotoxic fruit. Savorflame Mushrooms, tiny chemical grenades. My feelings of anger began to fade. I asked her why, in her own opinion, these dishes became popular in the first place. She smiled, standing with her half eaten plate, moving to the kitchen to wrap it as leftovers.

“I mean… it was fun, right? Seeing the mushroom cook a whole dumpling? I hear Fairy Wraps make your tongue tingle too. People want an everyday Le Straud stew like they want another massacre or bombing report.”

I thought for a moment about my meal with Mr. Ungerson. The light I made of Le Straud’s current troubles. I’m still thinking about those jokes even now, listeners. I can’t… I just can’t seem to shake their memory.

We talked for a bit after that, and she produced a copy of The Lion of Kalou Bay so slickly, I can’t imagine she didn’t rehearse the gesture. I gave her my signature, and we said our goodbyes.

Fun. All this search for authenticity, all this effort, and it really is just a value added. Fairy Wraps, Pop Dumplings, they're just… fun. This idea buzzes around my head the entire evening, as I compiled my notes, and as I assembled this podcast.

Listeners, consider this: The assertion that there is no demand for a Le Straud stew. These foods, these little commodities of Le Straud… aren’t indicative of their cuisine at all. What do we fail to see behind the glitz and the hype? If what Wendy Rammlin said was true, then that leaves an entire planetary history of cuisine out there, waiting to be discovered.

Well, discovered isn’t the word. Not at all, considering the colonists of Le Straud put these recipes together themselves. But it is my belief that the Core remains ignorant of a wealth of culinary techniques, ingredients, and stories in our distant daughter colony. We do a great disservice to the colonists of Le Straud by reducing their fare, the meals they created while surviving an alien world, to these little fads. Pop Dumplings and Fairy Wraps, they’ve taken over public consciousness so thoroughly. But listeners, a Le Straud stew is just as valuable.

As I upload this episode of Gastronaut to the buffer, I hold in my hand… Well, I have the file uploaded to my Twinnon Peregrine… I bought a ticket to ride the Extrasolar Rail Network. One of the longest Rides anyone can make in our age. I’m heading for Le Straud to see what they have in store, in person.

I’m Oscar Yasui, former licensed food critic for Palladium, current food journalist for the independent podcast Gastronaut. Thank you very much for listening.