Forbidden Snacks

Riddle for the ages, listeners: “What makes a passenger ship a passenger ship?”

A smartass would say “the ability to carry passengers” but c'mon, that’s kind of a broad brush to paint with, right? Most vessels, whether they’re looming Railships or ponderous slowboat freighters or zippy atmo shuttles have the incredible ability to move people from place to place. If I lock someone in the trunk of my car, that doesn’t magically make it a taxi cab.

An economist would say that a passenger vessel makes most of its money off its travelers, plying the Rails between worlds on the value of their ticket sales. Before I started Gastronaut I would have had the same answer, but my current accommodation, the Goodenough Kanemori has proven you can multitask garbage hauling with people moving. And look, I’m never going to claim this hulk is a passenger vessel, so get that nonsense out of here.

I’ll spare you the suspense listener. In this humble food journalist’s opinion, what makes a passenger vessel is how much of its hull is devoted to entertainment. To giving people something to do while they travel between the stars, during the months of acceleration and deceleration. There isn't anything out there--I don't care how much cosmic horror tells you otherwise--and true passenger vessels are well aware of this fact.

So because there isn’t anything to engage the senses outside the ships, the interiors are veritable wonderlands of things-to-do. Thousands of movies, audiobooks, travel simulations, historical accounts, video games, all pre downloaded into shipboard venues, viewable in the comfort of your own cabin or in dozens of configurable entertainment centers. There are gymnasiums, saunas, fisheries, rock climbing centers with simulated wind, I heard the Forward Olympus had a petting zoo, but only for a year before lawsuits closed it down. And the food, you’d be dizzy from all the food and drink available to a passenger. While I rode my previous ship, the Singular Devotion, I ate at four different locations.

Realize listeners, that represented 8% of all eateries on the vessel, and of those eateries that was just a miniscule fraction of their total menu. I- I had a whole meal plan written up folks. The plan was to do themed episodes of nothing but luxury food. It was gonna be amazing. Sorry that I can’t show you that.

So for the rest of those out in space, there aren't nearly as many options for meals. Passenger vessels are common, but they also don’t account for all point to point traffic. This means a lot of boredom, a lot of samey lunches, a lot of life lived under contract stipulations that aren’t as much negotiated as they are… imposed. And with all these restrictions, sometimes you get some atypical behavior on the margins, where boredom turns to appetite.

Yeah, that’s right. Today, we’re going to talk about food that isn’t food. The things people eat that they absolutely shouldn’t.

We’re going to talk about FORBIDDEN SNACKS.

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

Let me just say, this is an exciting topic for me, and one I’ve been dying to have an excuse to cover. Back when I worked for the internet publication giant Palladium, I floated this concept dozens of times, under dozens of different names. My editors found the idea cute, but they’d always say “Oscar, this isn’t where we need your talents” or “Oscar, this really is content suited for a younger writer” or “Oscar, please, it’s 2 AM just go back to sleep and work on what we tell you to work on.”

Well! Now that Palladium doesn’t get to choose what I do with my time and since I don’t want to review bulkheads and bunk beds for a whole episode, we get to talk a little about this. Take that Shannon! Reject my drafts now, Eric! My unemployment has made me invincible.

Ground rules, then, listeners. What exactly is a “forbidden snack” anyway? A forbidden snack is something a person categorically should not eat. It isn’t a triple decker burger dripping with three kinds of sauce and six kinds of cheese. It isn’t that last slice of chocolate cake, tempting you to break your analog diet. It isn’t a second, second helping of salty, greasy fish and chips. Look, as an excessive person, I can’t sit here and shame other people for excess.

We’re talking long hauls between planets in-system, voyages to boring, unmapped regions of Sol and beyond. These are the meals of the deprived, of the desperate, of the craving.

However, and I’m sorry to disappoint some of you, but we aren’t talking about cannibalism or pet eating. Yeah, sorry, sorry, but I have my reasons. First, most of those horrible events are widely publicized anyway, novelists love them, film studios love them, anonymous media conglomerates love them, at this point, you’ve heard all the gory details. Second, they’re boring. Starvation, real desperate end-times starvation, plays out the same way every single time. And the way it plays out, it’s absolutely miserable, listeners. Circumstances that make mine look like a basket of kittens.

Forbidden snacks are restricted foods. Restricted by policy, like how a warehouse operator can’t chew on high end graphics cards. Restricted by decency, like a co-worker’s cuban sandwich sitting in the fridge. Restricted by biology and common sense, like… uh… bleach I guess, I think bleach is a good example of that last one.

So all of that aside, let’s dive into my collected notes on Forbidden Snacks. We’ll keep it simple for this first part, to ease all of you into the culture of the not-food of deep space. Let’s talk about the Case of the Smoothie of Shame.

Listeners, what drives a person to snack on cherry flavored lip balm? To drink a milkshake of anti-wrinkle face cream? To carve a swath through a sealed container of spearmint toothpaste?

We’ve established that as magical as Rail travel is, what with breaching reality and all, it can actually get pretty boring. So imagine how the shipping lanes in the Core Triangle (that’s Earth, Mars, and Venus) how do they feel with their large volume slowboat spacecraft.

For the few humans who still work on these ships alongside the drone fleet, there isn’t much to do as you cross that three month gap between planets. Four years ago, I caught up with a crewman, who will remain unnamed, who once served aboard a vessel traveling between Earth and Venus. They hauled almost everything you could possibly think of in that massive freighter, a freighter whose scale dwarfed that of the Railships I ride on. In that cargo hold there were land and air vehicles, electronics, tritium in heavily shielded containers, comestibles, consumer products, this was an entire national economy bolted and wired to a fusion thruster.

Now my source, let’s call them “A” , was something of an epicurean. They prized the food of their home in Lyon, the wines, the salted pistachios, milk from actual farms. So when they boarded their vessel, A was starved of flavor. Their extrusion array, it was always on the blink. Everything it made tasted a little bit like everything else. Textures and consistencies weren’t at all what they imagined. There were meal kits aboard the vessels, but they were emergency rations sealed by the interior intelligence aboard. Crack them open, and that could mean an infarction charge from corporate.

So they got it in their heads to do some cooking. They needed ingredients, but see, ingredients those aren’t all that easy to come by aboard a vessel in interplanetary space.

But back in the wild west of space trucking, it was a total free for all. Crew had the knowledge and drive to crack open cargo for personal use and even resale. My source couldn’t confirm for certain, but the general belief was that companies tended to build some level of miscellaneous loss into their profit margins.

he crew stole food as well, entire product lines of sugary cereal or tins of smoked salmon, it was all just a whistle and a walk away. A assured me that back then, back when they were a young starry eyed crewman who still found space travel exciting, crews would hold feasts in the common area. For birthdays, for anniversaries, or just for the hell of it. Imagine a cake that, in gravity, could only be transported by forklift. Imagine that cake split among four to six people. Imagine a sandwich like something out of a buffershort, long as 30 people fingertip to fingertip, drifting in a spinal corridor. Imagine a glob of tapioca so vast that, if my source can be believed, two grown professional spacers almost drowned in it, coughing on those little pearly lumps.

My source said they’d call each other rats, what with all the scratching and gnawing they did, as a little self deprecating joke, but you see, from the heady description they offered of these meals, these rats lived like kings.

It didn’t last. And if you can believe it, the sunset of those great years emerged from food. It didn’t last of course.

This is the part that you might remember, listeners, assuming you’re old enough or maybe you’re just paying attention. The Giardia duodenalis media craze. For my younger audience, Giardia duodenalis is a parasite of the intestines. Let’s just see here, nausea, abdominal bloating, vomiting, and uh… you get the idea, it’s nasty stuff. Survivable, but the kind of thing you remember.

There was an outbreak of Giardiasis that was traced back to a freighter, the public got frightened, and then all of a sudden you got these accounts going around the buffer. Reports of freighter crews doing nasty things to the food. Strangely timed and inescapably viral stories of the terrible escapades aboard the vessels, escapades from people who joked about being rats. Not a good animal to be associated with during a disease scare. The crews of freighters felt a bell tolling for them somewhere, and four months later, the security on food cargo was so tight, the punishments for skimming so high, that the feasts went the way of the cetaceans. Extinct.

“A” found this darkly hilarious. JUST the food, listeners. They still skimmed nonperishables. And it was those nonperishables which gave A an idea.

They had this terrible craving for a berry smoothie, the kind they’d whip together at home from their own garden. They loved the feeling of opening their door, plucking strawberries and blueberries, still wet with morning dew, feeling the weight of a cupped handful. To A, this summer ritual was the single greatest way to start the day, and without any access to the produce that was shipped aboard their vessel, A took an… Let’s call it an “alternative route.”

They donned a pressure suit and walked among the crates. They tracked their craving through the walls and gantries of items, until they came across an industrial cargo container marked with Kenneman’s interstellar logo, that K & E beneath an arc of shimmering metallic stars.

What they wanted in that container was packed together in abundance, swaddled in plastic like something carelessly precious.

Kennemen’s Quick-Lip Doc Brand, Summer Strawberry. Scented chapstick, listeners.

This might sound completely insane, but let’s spare a thought for A’s point of view here. They explained that we eat almost all the chapstick we lather over our dry lips anyway. They illustrated that, if it was safe to put on the lips, it had to be safe to ingest. And what’s more, flavor is almost entirely scent anyway, right?

It isn’t. We both knew it wasn’t, but olfaction is an important part of taste, as anyone with a stuffy nose at an upscale steakhouse will grimly, and repeatedly, tell you.

After gathering enough for their needs, the rest of A’s crime was fairly straightforward. With a paint chipper and a sculpture’s precision, they gathered condensation that had frosted across the coolant cells of the vessel’s life support system. Cream was added by stealing flavoring agents from the already faltering extrusion array.

The concoction, when it was complete, was a awful. Horrible. Chapstick is a viscous and slick substance, and though it’s engineered to smell sweeter than the berry itself, it doesn’t really deliver on the taste front. Couple that with a cream facsimile that tasted a little like chicken curry, and you’ve got something truly wretched here.

A drank it down in two long pulls, pausing only to gag into the crook of their elbow. They described it as a beverage that rebelled against the very act of being swallowed, a retch worthy slush of ice and cream that tasted of meat, clotted with strawberry scented bergs of paraffin and petrolatum. But drink it they did, with tears welling at the corners of their eyes, wrestling their own esophagus, a victory of pride over muscle.

Afterwards, A found themself cleaning their glass with wet wipes at a zero-g station, throwing a look over their shoulder in fear that someone would stumble upon their crime against human decency. But nobody ever stumbled on it.

When A painted this picture to me, they did so while twisting their fingers but also giggling like a schoolchild. They told me that it was a nice thing, getting all this off their chest, that it wasn’t the kind of story that ever felt right to tell.

A, their cheeks still flushed, leaned across the table to tell me one final secret.

They went back for more.

Listeners, despite what you’ve heard from this podcast, I do try to keep a level of courteous professionalism during interviews. But on being told A’s experiment had become an ongoing staple, my eyes goggled, my lips parted, my eyebrows broke for my hairline like geese in autumn. And let me tell you, A loved my reaction.

Terrible as the beverage was, it beat the slop from the extrusion array, and it gave A a sense of agency in what they chose to eat. Traveling to the cargo containers became something of a ritual for them, which they likened to picking berries in their garden back on Earth. And the craving didn’t stop there.

“Sometimes I’d bust open wintergreen shaving cream containers and foam it into my morning coffee,” A told me, “or I’d crack open those little phone keychains and pull the tiny scented fruits off them to chew during my shift. I couldn’t stop myself, at this point I was tearing it up in the cargo bay once or twice a week. Nobody questioned what I was doing, I mean, we were all stealing a little, yeah? It only got out of hand when I set my bag of coffee down and someone grabbed it to take a closer look.”

“At that point, I’d been eating this for two years.”

A’s crewmember urged them to get psychological counseling. A was diagnosed with Pica, a relatively rare psychiatric condition where an individual feels a compulsion to eat things that are firmly outside the category of food.

“And I’m not doing that,” A said, “Not anymore. I managed to wean myself off the stuff over time. Now I just uh, just budget a bit more for commercial dinners while I’m on hauls. Lightens my pockets every paycheck, sure, but my innards have really thanked me for the decision.”

“A” might seem strange, listeners, and while I’m not giving chapstick and shaving cream the Oscar Yasui stamp of culinary excellence any time soon, we do have to view their story with a fisheye lens. There are stories like this hovering at the margins of every community that spends its time largely in space.

Which brings us, listeners, to the Case of the Airlock Snackpack.

So this story comes to me from another source, who naturally does not want to be named, and is confirmed by their fellow crewmen. Let’s refer to these individuals as B and C.

Now, according to B and C, for a ship to be a functional piece of transportation infrastructure, that is to say, usable in a capacity beyond “art installation:” there needs to be some way to get inside the thing.

Enter airlocks, emergency pressure gates, and the foamed composite gaskets that enable their function. B and C offered me a technical breakdown on modern door construction, just enough jargon to leave me dizzy and impatient. But for the purpose of editing I’ll give you the short and sweet version: gaskets are flexible sealant materials that keep atmosphere where people can breathe it, and vacuum where it can’t hurt anyone. That better be good enough for all of you, because I can’t add any diagrams to this audio podcast. Look, I’ve got a great voice, I’ve got a talent for description, but I’m not a wizard.

If I was a wizard, you’d think I’d think I’d dispel all this debt hovering around me. Alakazam! Mm. Yeah.

So, B and C were surveyors for a governmental body that, you guessed it, I can’t mention for the podcast. They rode a reconnaissance parasite vessel, linking up with specialized carrier ships during Rail passage. Their recon craft was an old, bulbous thing with six great trailing solar sails. A golden winged dragonfly with a meteorite scarred exoskeleton, peering at rocks and dust that hurtled far and away from anything that mattered to anybody. The two of them were the only crew aboard the whole ship, the only company they’d have for months at a stretch.

So it wasn’t much of a surprise that B and C had a habit of interrupting each other. Well, no, interrupting isn’t exactly the word. They were like two wings on a bird, or two cogs in a watch.

B twirled a digital pressure meter in his hands as he spoke, a look of focused solemness on his face.

“I think we first gave it a shot out near--” he began, but C chimed in, always in motion, always with B’s hand clasped in hers.

“Ugh, Zetta-Toni-7, the rock that was shaped--”

“Like a banana, ha, I swear I don’t understand how--”

“Anyone could get into the rock cracking business. It’s all just one big gambling racket, like--”

“Like panning for gold, yeah. Scan a rock, roll a dice, scan a rock--”

“That's where we started eating the little tears and scraps of gasket insulation.”

A moment of silence between the three of us. I hadn’t exactly expected them to admit the habit directly. B elbowed C, and C let out a wild cackle.

“Cmon, C, we didn’t just start stuffing it into our mouths, and we never swallowed, for us it was--”

“Like chewing gum! Just like eating chewing gum! Sweet and tangy with just a little burn--”

“Yeah, burn in the back of your throat. Addicting. Probably bad for you.”

The two of them laughed, but I found myself racing to keep up, my pen flying over my notepad, a habit I learned after a nasty recording error nearly cost me my first journalist job. It was my inability to keep up that seemed to embarrass them, making them aware of their own blistering pace of dialogue. I found this a bit surprising, considering they already admitted to using industrial sealant as a masticulatory treat. C piped up first, all smiles, all pink blush.

“Sorry about the barrage, we’re selected--”

“For compatibility! To avoid any kind of mishaps out there, yeah? This is just--”

“Sort of how we talk now. You sort of get used to it!”

The two of them explained that it happened during one of their many, many dare nights. Despite all the talk of modernization, most of the asteroid belts still lack buffer connection, and the Hilda asteroids and Jupiter Trojans are almost entirely untouched.

So an enterprising couple of prospectors has to get creative to stay occupied. Ghost stories, exercise competitions, sex, low stakes gambling, and dare night.

“The gasket had come loose, so B dared me to take a bite of it--”

“I was joking--”

“Yeah, you say that NOW--”

“C just reached out and grabbed a pinch of the stuff--”

“I peeled it right off the wall!”

“And popped it into her mouth. Done and done.”

“We both thought it was super gross, but I won the dare and got to advance.”

“You still lost.”

“It was a MORAL victory!”

But it didn’t end there. C started taking nips of sealant throughout the week. Chewing it again and again, appreciating its springiness, the bad chemical sweetness of the grayish white mass, the feeling of it dividing and recombining between her teeth. She kept at it. The habit wasn’t hard to hide from B, despite the cramped quarters of their little scout craft. She’d flick a hand down to peel a bit from the lining on the airlocks, she’d reach over B in bed after he had fallen asleep to snag some from the ventilation work. It was an old ship, so all the gaskets were already flaking and peeling. C had chosen the perfect snack food; accessible, inconspicuous, and ubiquitously available. After they finished with their work at Zetta-Toni-7, the two of them moved on to their next zone of operations, but C couldn’t stop herself.

“I was like a little termite, and I was having a ball,” she said of her habit.

I asked them how B caught her, and the two snickered in response, grinning ear to ear.

“It was some like, Gift of the Magi shit.”

“B didn’t catch me, nah, I caught HIM.”

“I had been snacking on sealant for a bit by then. C beat me there, but we uh, kind of had the same idea in our head around the same time.”

“Compatibility!” C crowed.

It was a kind of bonding exercise for them, something they couldn’t tell anyone, a fun little secret they’d laugh about, an inside joke. They only slowed their nibbling when a surprise inspection got them in trouble, the biggest concern being the ragged quality of the gaskets all around their vessel.

“Maintenance didn’t have a problem with the gaskets when they were aging out on their own--”

“But the moment we start chewing on the stuff it’s suddenly an issue? Ugh.”

“We switched to gum instead.”

“We buy the stuff in bulk! I guess you might say we have um… what’s it called…”

“An oral fixation, C.”

And the two of them shared a look and laughed.

Listeners, this is a widespread practice, more widespread than typically receives attention. In many cases, as you will no doubt notice later on in this episode, society only picks up on these little habits when things turn messy. But those are just the stories that are guaranteed to get the most headlines, the stories with a negligent spacer, an inexplicable appetite and sometimes, a body count.

But dig a little deeper, take a look beneath the surface stories, and you start encountering this behavior all over known space, wherever there is a lonely crewman or isolated workforce. There are salvage reports, blurry with artifacting from repeated duplication, listing damaged terminals in old spacecraft. Terminals with little voids where candy-bright diodes and fixtures once rested. Medical reports of crew complaining of stomach maladies, indigestion, vomiting, and cramps. For example, here’s a snippet from an interview with a tug pilot stationed around Uranus.

“I mean, yeah, yeah I’ve eaten the buttons off the flight terminal. I can forward you the doctor’s records to prove it too. Why did I do it? Uh, well, I used to pry them up off the board, the ones that didn’t really do much, the ones I didn’t need immediately. I’d pry them up and pop em into my mouth to just… feel ‘em. And then one day I had a pressure alarm, a false reading but loud as all hell, and I just swallowed the lil blue light I was rolling around my teeth. Was an accident then, and I kept telling myself it was an accident when it uh… eh. When it kept happening.”

There are stations hanging above the stark white and fissured surface of Europa, where liquid water is drawn up from the icy crust of that world and used to grow salmon and trout and snapper and anchovy. These ecological analysis, they’re funded by the same interests that are hoping that the next big colony project isn’t out there. It’s right here in good ol Sol.

Now, the researchers there aren’t supposed to eat the fish in the tanks, due to policy, but if you can believe chatter from Savage and Podesto, you’ll hear about fish fries and sashimi contests and these awesome little cook-offs held furtively where security doesn’t roam.

But on these stations, you also see people sometimes grabbing a glass aquarium marble or two. That's those little blue, green, or clear things at the bottom of the tank. They take these and swallow them. According to disciplinary and maintenance reports, they disappear from the tanks all the time, and researchers again have those stomach issues that, if you look at the larger pattern, seem to be so prevalent among long haul small population vessels. If you don’t believe me, there are actual audio files of microphones being pressed up to the bellies of these employees. If you listen closely, beneath the gurgle of chyme through piping, you can even hear the little clack clack of glass on glass.

On low voltage cabling, the kind of wiring you use to charge pads and phones and some augments, you’ll find molar marks divoted into the plastic sheathing. Gnawed on by haulers and long hop shuttle craft pilots. You folks at home can check this one out, ask to borrow one! You’ll see it for yourselves in moments, nips and bites and dents all over.

And it isn’t exclusively a Sol System thing. Ships that are hauled in all the way out from colonies show that exact same telltale wear: the missing keys, the toothed wires, the inconsistent inventory reports, the stomach issues, all of it.

This is why Palladium totally canned this story. And no, let me stop you, it’s not because THEY don’t want you to hear it. There is no THEY, listeners, the people in control have offices and receptionists and… ha, podcasts.

Palladium canned this story because it’s unbelievable. It’s the sort of thing you disregard. It reads like a work of total fiction, a fabrication by someone desperate for a word count, but no, it’s real. Hey, I didn’t have to write any of this down! I could have just toured another cake expo! Listeners, I’m absolutely crazy about cake expos! Did you know that there are 578 different types of cakes that are eligible for entry, that at these expos you can taste ALL of them for FREE? Do you realize that the concept of eligible cakes implies an exciting world of illicit dessert???

Look I’m… I’m getting excited just thinking about it.

Back on the subject of forbidden snacks, no major outlet is reporting on them, so somebody has to say something!

It’s real and it can have some serious consequences. Consequences that go far beyond an upset stomach and an ulcerated intestinal tract.

Let’s talk about The Case of… Nah. This one doesn’t get a cutesy kid’s mystery novel title. That wouldn’t be funny or… ethical. Nineteen years ago at dockyard module Zero Nine of Tella Fortuna, the Martian station was experiencing its busiest period of shipping; a lot of cultures love the twelfth month of Earth. Holiday season, end of fiscal quarter four. Close your eyes and you can picture it, hell, maybe you’ve lived it. Passengers disembarking onto the station, hurrying to catch a connecting shuttle flight, or meeting family, or taking a rest from the trip. Cargo moving in all directions, baggage on mag trains, sitting in storage waiting for crew to remember them. And lights on everything, twinkling on little plastic trees, or strung in great winding constellations of microdrones. It’s magical. It’s always magical.

And then there comes this shadow, pretty common on a busy dock, shuttles and freighters are coming and going at all hours. My dad used to bring me to shuttle spot on Earth, and those were wonderful memories. On Tella Fortuna, a handful of scattered people see the shadow coming. Light cargo freighter, planetary lifter for areas with less surface to space capability. Backlit by the sun, so it’s just a silhouette. Can’t make out the details around the halo it’s dragging behind it.

Only a scant few people know something is wrong. In a traffic control room, a group of men and women are speaking calmly and very urgently, fingers flying across keys, pouring signals at the incoming vessel. It has all the effect of rain on a mountain. A threshold is crossed, and the mood in that small room shifts gears. A finger crashes against a button whose surface is dusty, free of scrapes and scars.

Great big alarm on the promenade now. Everyone’s running from dock Zero Nine, pushing and shoving, trying to work their way around anyone moving too slow. A few people fall, lift their arms to deflect as many boots as they can. Tella Fortuna, it’s a big ring station with spin gravity. Keeps your bones from decaying, which is nice, but the downside is that you can’t really be trampled in micrograv. On Tella Fortuna, you can. There is a grinding of metal and the long low whine of heavy duty hydraulics. The view of the incoming ship, now much larger, narrows, then disappears as the exterior doors slide shut.

Then there’s a noise like the end of the world, and the lights just… cut out.

Nineteen years ago the light cargo vessel Periwinkle, while attempting to dock with Tella Fortuna, failed to decelerate and enter cargo dock Zero Nine. Without any way to contact the vessel successfully, flight control opted to shut the exterior cargo doors and weather the impact. The Periwinkle blew right through those doors, but lost enough energy to only wreck the interior of Zero Nine. The lives lost in the collision included the Periwinkle’s crew of five, as well as 13 holiday travelers who died during a stampede for the concourse exits. That and a long list of injured.

What happened here? Well, though the Periwinkle lacked the speed and mass to destroy the Tella Fortuna, the vessel was greiviously damaged when it burst through the cargo bay’s doors. Forensic studies and blackbox rips were released a few months later, but held by the ship’s contract corporation, Courier Jinxing until only two years ago. The crew were present at their seats and they were attempting to control the Periwinkle right up to its collision with Zero Nine. Was it an issue of experience? No. Had the Periwinkle docked, it would have been their thirtieth successful landing at Tella Fortuna alone.

The blame lay with an ordinance passed down from Courier Jinxing. A far-reaching alcohol ban across all of their vessels, with enforcement methods ranging from mandatory counseling services to suspension from duty without pay. And this wasn’t for struggling individuals, either, this was a complete zero tolerance policy.

The crew of the Periwinkle had complied with these new orders, but their compliance was a bit more creative. Aboard the Periwinkle, after inspection had cleared their vessel alcohol free, the crew drank something that gave them all the kick they needed during long months of boredom. They broke out stashes of dextromethorphan. Courier Jinxing was looking hard for alcohol, but they weren’t looking for alternatives.

Cough medication isn’t inherently bad, but down enough of the stuff without any regard to dosage or warning labels, and you’ll get yourself into trouble fast. Trouble like nausea, fast heartbeat, seizures, and symptoms of intoxication. It’s right on the label, “Do not operate heavy machinery.”

We don’t have records of what occurred on the Periwinkle, the crew did their drinking in secret. But to go full OpEd here, I don’t like the mental image that they drank furtively, all flasks and spiked drinks. I like to imagine they gathered for little drinking ceremonies, chatting and laughing, trying to make the long trip pass faster.

They shouldn’t have done what they did, but I think they’ve already paid as much as anyone can for their mistake. But from what we understand, they weren’t malicious people, the crew of the Periwinkle. I guess there’s gotta be nothing wrong with hoping they had a bit of levity before what happened, right?

Yeah, listeners. You can probably tell that some of these aren’t as cute as others, and that trend isn’t slowing down for our fifth and final story of this segment on Forbidden Snacks. The Case of the Seeing Talismans. It’s a dramatic name, I know, but it’s fully justified.

I don’t have a personal source for this one, no one on one interviews over lunch or in a starport waiting room. In this particular case, I’ve pulled my information from a variety of accounts from other journalists, both amatuer and professional.

In vessels across the Sol System and beyond, from Mercury to Le Straud to fucking… Yalda, on shuttles and freighters and junkers and trawlers and tugs and cruisers and yachts, and all things that exist in between. In this reality, you can find people who eat eyeballs.

Yeah, yeah I know, I know listeners, I told you that I wasn’t going to talk about cannibalism. Well I’m not, okay? I promise!

These aren’t actual eyeballs. They aren’t lab grown flesh structures, they aren’t pried out of animals, and they certainly aren’t human eyes. These are small balls of cast resin, filled with glimmering shards and streaks of a reflective red metal, shavings of defunct spacecraft. Their makers fashion them about a hundred different ways. Sometimes the pupils are almond shaped, or a felinid slash. Sometimes they’re a W, a V, or a triplicate for the trinity. Many are manufactured in great presses, but fundamentally the practice is still artisanal, it’s handmade. That means that these thousands, possibly millions of eyes are sailing through space, and they’re all a little bit unique. All a little bit different from one another.

There are spacegoers who take these little spheres, hidden like charms in their backpacks and pockets, and they swallow them. I hear you can drink something to make them go down easier, like little chunky pills, or you can grease them up with something tasty. Some sources have claimed they can be slipped into another person’s food but… ugh, I dunno, listeners, they would be a hard thing to just… slip into something. They aren’t that small.

Then once you’ve gotten them inside yourself they gently settle into your stomach, and pass through your body. Twisting and turning with your plumbing, rapping and tapping against the interior walls of your intestine. And uh… I’m not going to draw you a picture, you know how this story ends. It comes back out.

Why? Why would anybody swallow resin and metal? That sounds wild, right?

Well listeners, let me answer that question with another question. Isn’t the modern age a little wild? If you told the people of three hundred years ago that we’d be out in the stars, slipping between reality and another unknowable notspace, they’d put a watchful eye on you.

And that is exactly what these little resin pills are. They’re literal “watchful eyes.” See, for all the advancements we’ve made in spaceflight, radiation is still just as scary as it's always been. Detection systems have shrunk and improved, you’ve got your little pentagons that you clip onto your front pocket, your little styluses that you can wave tentatively at suspect gas leaks. But you’re still playing hide and go seek with death. You’re trusting your systems won’t fail, you’re trusting that scientists got their theories right. After all, if any of your sensors get it wrong, then you could get sterilized in a heartbeat. You can get cancers that are costly to treat, everyone knows this! Or if you’re not wealthy, a death sentence. At higher doses, you don’t have to worry about cancer; you could die in minutes. Not even enough time to get out of your suit.

An invisible killer. We think about it like people think about brain-eating amoebas. One in a million, but what if you’re that unlucky idiot? What if your number is up?

Because when conventional wisdom is no comfort, we always can turn to ritual. Double safety. When you badly want to see your family again, when you don’t want to experience a death by radiation-induced cerebral hemorrhage, one layer of protection won’t be enough to help you sleep at night.

These eyes, which go by names like “Seeing Stones” or “Little Lookouts” or “Nazar” if you’ve got a taste for the classics, you can find these at any station. Exit at the docking port and shift past the claustrophobia and noise, the step-and-wait rhythm of customs, the flash of advertisements and safety bulletins. Just inside the entry gate, or maybe a hundred yards away if the station is plagued by an overenthusiastic security force, you’ll see street vendors. Walls of colorful snack packaging, bottled water, wireless appliance chargers, chocolates in cheerful tins. And beneath it all there will be little eyes, staring up at you, glimmering beneath lights like jewelry on display.

Go deeper in and you’ll find them peering up at you from baskets in convenience stores, maybe nestled into a little plastic bin at coffee shops. Down an alleyway, or pinched between a bookstore and a boutique, you might find the office of a “counselor.” A little two room shop that smells strongly of incense, that is lit by flittering mechanical fireflies in vibrant pinks and purples, or lush with easy-care plantlife. Here you can purchase supposed speciality versions. You can receive a consultation to have one produced, at expense, to synchronize perfectly with your “inner light.” They work best that way of course.

The theory of these talismans is simple enough, easy to swallow, so to speak. Our bodies have immune systems, but our immune systems are only capable of attacking invaders that they can identify. Radiation, anathema to most life, is the ultimate invader, but our body has no way to detect it. We need an extra eye to see inside ourselves. An eye carved from a sacred and natural resin, formed around shards of radiation shielding that have already weathered the worst of the void. Then we become resistant to radiation, our bodies can repair the gradual cellular damage exposure incurs, even identify and silence tumors. That’s the sales pitch, at least.

Yeah. Some of my audience might laugh at this, and it is a pretty out-there concept, but I urge empathy. It’s easy to laugh at when you aren’t surrounded by radiation at all times, or when you fully understand and trust the equipment at your disposal. And the eyes are cheap too! 60 Nu for one at a peddler’s booth, or 400 Nu if you specially commissioned to be in tune with your spirit. Anti-radiation medications, advanced radiation negation systems, high-level training and education on radiation safety, detection equipment, healthcare. All of that costs more than 60 Nu. Much, much more. And it can be difficult, painful, or worst of all, it might just not work.

In each of these talismans is a promise. A promise that you’ll be safe. Sure, it’s silly to swallow a carved eye, but desperation can lobby any magical thinking into a sound argument.

In each of these talismans is also the scrapings of modern radiation shielding paint, or chippings from ablative deflection paint. The substance is called Zycolian 15D, it’s traded as Red Chromium on the open market, even though it has nothing to do with Chromium the metal.

Red Chromium is only mildly toxic if you eat it. It struggles to pass into the bloodstream through the gut and intestines. Breathe it consistently over five years, say if you’re a chemical worker, and it’ll scar your lungs with tumors and lesions. But stick it in a little sphere of protective resin and swallow it down and you’ll be okay. Relatively speaking, you’ve swallowed a foreign object. But this is sort of where the logic of these eyes falls apart for me, where my suspension of disbelief gets shattered. If you eat radiation shielding then your body becomes shielded from radiation. I’ve eaten one hundred entire Oscars worth of fish in my life, but try as I might, I can’t breathe underwater.

These eyes join the ranks of plenty of other alternative medicine curatives. Your hyper-diluted hemlock, your ground up alien fauna, these items, they feel close enough to sound theory that our brains just shrug and drop them in the same bucket as aspirin and cough drops. Here’s a dinosaur of thought for you all, listeners, “The Doctrine of Signatures.” That’s a belief that a caring and benevolent universe has filled itself with things to help out its favorite children. Lungwort looks like lungs, so it’ll treat your lung infections, supposedly. Walnuts are kind of like heads so they’ll fix your headaches. Little resin eyes in your belly will help your body see where you can’t.

But they aren’t medicine, not at all. I’ve talked about plenty of upset tummies over the course of this episode, but the eyes have it. Almost one eye out of every thousand dissolves in the stomach, leaving shards of Red Chromium behind in the gastrointestinal tract. Imagine little tiny knives, Red Chromium is VERY sharp when you flake it, like the eyeball makers do, and these knives are passing right through some of your softest sections. Red Chromium isn’t poisonous if you eat it, right? But get it into your bloodstream, and it’s a potent poison; neurotoxic, causing palsy, seizures, and much worse. Your shit turns black from gastrointestinal bleeds. It stinks bad enough to choke a career healthcare professional. You lose control of your body, and all of this typically happens in flight far away from dedicated healthcare facilities.

A lot of people get very, very sick. Some die before anybody can give them the help they need.

It isn’t entirely clear why the eyes dissolve, there is still plenty of ambiguity on that front. But there are theories. One possibility is that the resin varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. Some resins survive a stomach acid bath with more aplomb than others. Another theory is that existing resins might break down in conjunction with certain food or drink. To cherry pick the least savory school of thought, it has been posited that some buyers, wanting to save cash on a deliberately expendable product, might try to ah… reuse them.

Look, reuse means that they… after they pass you give them a hopefully extremely thorough wash, and then send ‘em right back through. Recycling, listeners. But the washing and repeated passes through the digestive system might do a number on integrity. Two or three passes, maybe not so much, but six or seven… They explicitly aren’t built to last.

So what, if anything, can we glean from all these forbidden snacks? That human appetite trumps all reason? That people in space are crazy?

No, of course not. I’ve done enough research, heck, I’ve spoken directly to some of the people eating what they shouldn’t. They aren’t crazy. They’re fairly normal people with abnormal appetites. But they have something in common, don’t they?

Deprivation. They’re all deprived. My contact “A” was forced to eat lousy food, trapped with a broken extrusion system that their company refused to repair. B and C? They were out in the middle of nowhere for months at a stretch, assigned and reassigned to new missions with barely a chance to stock up on supplies. The crew of the Periwinkle were instructed to forgo all drink, so they turned to something else for their kicks. And the people who swallow little resin eyeballs are fucking scared. Scared of things they can’t see, things they desperately want protection from.

Yeah, I don’t think anybody out in space should be eating what they eat. Anyone can tell you that keyboard keys and lights aren’t food. But the people out there between worlds, between stars, they know that and eat the world around them regardless. They pick and scratch and nibble at the vessels that keep them alive, keep them sheltered from a place where nothing can possibly survive.

Huh. That’s… that’s sort of why people on Le Straud started eating poisonous fruit and Savorflame Mushrooms in the first place, isn’t it? They didn’t have better options. That’s what this whole trip has been about. Getting to Le Straud and figuring out the origin of their meals. But the origin of Le Straud’s cuisine comes from these stories as much as they do from the surface of that distant world. The place I have to go. War can make strange bedfellows, and desperation can lead to even stranger menu items.

I should probably hide Ernest’s growth pod from people. Don’t want anybody trying to eat my lil mushroom friend. I’ll do it after the podcast.

If you ask me, a person who’s devoted their entire life to writing, studying, and speaking about food. Someone others have called an expert. I say it’s rebellion. No, no, rebellion’s not quite… it’s not quite the word I’m looking for.

Look around a city sometime, or on older ships, rusted out water towers. There’s a slogan that “the youth” are into. “Eat the World.” You can’t eat the world of course, the concept is deliberately absurdist. But it’s an act of imaginative fantasy violence. It’s a cute, impossible dream.

The people eating these things are changing their situation, changing the most fundamental rules of their lives. It’s escapism of a sort, right? If you don’t pick your paycheck and you don’t pick your schedule and you don’t pick what they serve in-flight. Then all that’s left is scratching and gnawing at the walls of your little prison cell in the stars.

I dunno listeners. Maybe, collectively, we all get a kick out of sticking something shiny in our mouths.

Until next time.

I’m Oscar Yasui, former licensed food critic for Palladium, current garbage sorter and food journalist for the independent podcast Gastronaut, and ah… I have a confession.

I gnaw on my stolen pens. A lot. Don’t tell anybody.