Talita's just a little bitter about how many dietary options humans have...
Avoiding meat is easy for humans in spacer cultures like Jovia's, since most of their protein comes from staple yeast cultures and invertebrates. Meat from livestock like goats (found on Nexus Jovia, none in Shikaviil) and chabbits (small flock in Shikaviil) is mostly a byproduct of egg and dairy production, and is considered a special occasion treat by those who include terrestrial vertebrates in their diet. All of these animal products are a great deal more expensive than their synthetic yeast-derivative and cell culture equivalents, but are generally agreed to taste better... or at least, they have the appeal of being a more limited commodity. Large livestock meat like pig and cow is not a common feature in spacer diets and is usually only available as synthetics or ludicrously expensive frozen exports.
Transcript
Gillie gives Idrisah the stick PC, a chocolate bar sized rod with a plug on one end, and she plugs it into a port on the side of Talita's TV screen. The rear casing slides off, becoming a handheld remote. The trio sits down on Talita's massive couch, Gillie opening a box of prepared food.Talita: Do you two mind if I have your gift now? I haven’t eaten yet today…
Idrisah: Go ahead!
Gillie: (ASL) We brought meat too! And not mealworms— I struck a deal with one of the animal ag guys…
She holds up what appears to be a breaded and fried rabbit leg, grinning cheekily.
Idrisah: I feel so bad for the chabbit, though…
Talita: Must be nice to have options. Being a carnivore is SO expensive in space…
Talita pops open the plastic shrink wrap on the smoked meat with sharp beak-like front incisors.
83 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 48”
LiliHarps
Is Gille an obligate carnivore like a regular cat?
Jay Eaton
No, but her gut is shorter than a typ human’s and some plant-based that other humans can eat no problem give her indigestion. She eats them anyways because she’s stubborn.
Cobbington
Omg chabbit
Darth Biomech
I bet chabbits are as delicious as they are adorable. … Wait, why did they made them adorable, again?
Jay Eaton
They were engineered as pets first, then found to be useful as livestock as well.
the namely namester
i seriously love the way the fabric folds are drawn in this page
AnormalADN
I just noticed the default avatars for commenters being rtts aliens profiles. Is that recent or was I blind. Anyway it’s delightful
Guest
I wonder what the ASL sign for chabbit is…
Blorboson
Something so depressing about the fact that they have the ability to grow meat, but choose to still kill animals (also, the amount of resources animal ag in space must take…whuff). Hopefully our own timeline will be smarter in that aspect, especially since lab grown meat is advancing quickly (though who knows how good it tastes…the stuff made of soy/mushrooms/whatever already tastes great imo). Good(?) to see that our HDMI cables would still be useful in space though.
Jay Eaton
Animal ag is in some ways more resource efficient because it turns stuff in the ecosystem humans can’t eat directly into food or compost, like grass and roughage, which are byproducts of maintaining park spaces. I’d argue humanity’s habit of breeding “cute” body shapes into pets that give them a terrible quality of life is worse ethics than the quick and effective dispatch of livestock with a good quality of life, but there’s plenty of people who would argue your side in this setting. Jovia’s got a lot of people who don’t eat real animals larger than insects.
Fhrgggsjen
I can’t help but wonder if centaurs ever get weird comments from certain vegans about being obligate carnivores, like the people who want to genetically engineer carnivores to eat plants.
ShadowW
Tho tbh, in realism terms the “good quality of life” bit is a very weight -bearing qualifier. Animal industry doesn’t really have a good track record on that. Though in RttS they might as well gmo the livestock animals to be incapable of experiencing pain.
Jay Eaton
It’s quite load bearing. There is a lot of modern animal keeping that has crap welfare practices, from factory farming to unhealthy pet breed standards to wildlife collectors that treat non-domesticated animals like pets. I don’t think engineering animals that can’t experience pain is a great solution to that, it’s a very complex problem (and pain or stress are often useful traits for among other things, diagnosing illness and avoiding self-injury). In terms of agriculture I think generally wealthy countries eat way more meat than can be provided for while also maintaining good quality of life for livestock, but death (followed by becoming food for humans, or other animals, or plants, or microbes) is far from the worst thing that can happen to an animal. RttS isn’t my ideal future or a prediction for the real human future, but in-universe space nations like Jovia tend to have pretty low animal agriculture production compared to modern nations of comparable GDP.
Blorboson
I may agree, if ‘quick and efficient dispatch’ was a thing (though I’d also disagree in principle simply because we can’t justify killing someone who doesn’t want to die). The thing is, animals know when they’re going to die, they can often sense it, and the terror that precludes their death is horrific to watch. I say this as someone who grew up in the countryside in a family who raised and killed animals (as quickly and ‘humanely’ as possible): people who live in the city, away from this process, tend to have naive ideas about how ‘humane’ animal ag is capable of being, even while criticizing factory farming (which accounts for almost the entirety of animal products on the market). No animal ag is humane, no matter how small scale it is.
I agree with you that breeding animals in a way that gives them a terrible quality of life is cruel (I’d personally use a stronger word, but I digress). However, that doesn’t make any other type of mistreatment, including death, any less cruel.
I’m also leery of the idea that animal ag could ever be more efficient, as that’s really never the case on earth. Animals require far more resources than just compost, grass, and roughage, and consume a huge amount of water. Even if animals would be raised primarily on byproducts, we have to consider that those byproducts could be used far more efficiently to grow other forms of protein, or could be used to create various other products (e.g. biomass such as mycelium which can be used to create textiles). And in a setting like this, they’d also need to be kept in a large amount of space for it to be considered even remotely ‘humane’, but of course it would be far more efficient to keep animals in as small a space as possible, with no regards to emotional wellbeing. In that case, even if the animal were to be killed instantly and without knowledge of their own incoming death, what matters is their quality of life, which would be terrible no matter what if they had very little space to live.
Anyways, this is all of course just conjecture on my part about a world that is, maybe thankfully, not our actual future. I’m certainly not suggesting the big bone chomping, meat crunching, flesh flailing alien species become vegan. 😋 Sitting next to her as she cronches bones must be…quite an experience.
ReLessThan1
i want to preface this comment by saying: I don’t want to start an argument or a slapfight, so please take this kindly.
just like how you say people who live in cities don’t understand animal agriculture, people who don’t work with microbes don’t understand how that works, either. growing pure cultures of whatever you want (be that yeast, mold, plants, or meat tissue) requires a lot of water, harsh sterilizing chemicals, single use plastics, and logistics. animal agriculture became viable at first because the animals could digest foods that people couldn’t, and then at the end of their life could provide important nutrients that humans weren’t getting elsewhere. death is a part of nature, and while i think the conditions of factory farming are horrendous, i don’t think that lab-grown meat will ever fully supplant animal agriculture. there’s just so much more that has to go into it than “take cow cells and grow them on a petri dish”.
additionally, one of the ingredients in the media for lab-grown mammalian cells (be it human, mouse, rat, or even cow) is fetal bovine serum. you know, baby cow juice. lab grown meat is not the almost-vegan ethical win that people think, because vast quantities of this ingredient need to be produced to grow the meat in the first place. while yeast and mycelium are possibly a viable alternative, they still require sterility (yeast) and purification (plastic-digesting mycelium) to make them suitable for human consumption.
i really want to emphasize this – large scale waste is inherent to ANY global food network, regardless of whether it involves animals or not. lab-grown alternatives are not exempt from this, especially when it comes to water and single-use plastics.
Joysweeper
chabbit questions!
when they want to book it, do they jump like rabbits, or do they rear up and run like chickens? I feel like chickeny back feet would hamper rabbit-like hopping, but then so would extra, decorative limbs. Given that they’re livestock made to produce eggs and be slaughtered now and then is it thought to be okay if they’re not as mobile as ancestral wild chickens or rabbits? have they naturalized anywhere the way catfish dragons have or are they more strictly dependent on humans? are they tweaked to be less fearful? given the rabbit urge to burrow and the chicken urge to scratch I bet they like kicking dirt around even if they don’t do it for food. do they dust bathe?
Do their eggs taste and look like chicken eggs or is there some element noticeably different? like, how duck eggs have clear albumen and more of a gamy flavor. when they hatch do they have that translucent larval look of newborn rabbits, or do they develop to a more mobile cute stage in the shell?
chabbit balut: is it good? I mean I’m sure the squeamishness people who don’t eat it have still exists but spacer filapinas presumably do too, and that’d be a way to have some kind of meat a little more often.
do chabbits have less fragile skeletons than rabbits bc that’s the scariest thing about rabbits tbh they can injure themselves so easily when picked up.
hal9000
i would imagine their movement ability wouldn’t be prioritised during their design because of lack of predators in artifical enviroments. In fact, restricted/limited movement would probably be ideal due to space limits. also now i’m slightly worried for these creatures’ bones because a hollow-rabbit skeleton sounds like a nightmare to move. then again, maybe another point towards their designers not wanting an overly active animal
Koguri3108
Their hind legs are more similar in structure to rabbit legs than chicken, so they still move very much like rabbits and yes, they hatch a bit further in development than normal rabbits are born, this was recently answered on a stream.
Nice to see someone else curious about chabbits! I like them very much!
Qwertystop
Why gengineered chabbits for domestic spacers instead of chickens, what does the rabbit portion contribute as livestock? No way it’s milk… is it for wool, is the rabbit component Angora?
Jay Eaton
It’s the entirely herbivorous diet and lack of constant daily screaming.
GreekCeltic
You put so many relatable things into your character’s choices and body language. See: opening plastic with teeth
SeveredNed
A datastick you have to pull out the opposite direction you just pushed it in?? Technnology will always be full of some frustrating design.
Origamigryphon
According to the transcript, the piece that was pulled out was a remote!
arf
At the risk of spoiling a plot point*, synthesised meat proteins are nearly here now (George Monbiot wrote about it in ‘Regenesis’, and, while he thought meat texturing was still a ways off, was subsequently stunned to discover that it’s almost here as well!)
Anyway, I hope the girls enjoy their brunch (Hmm! If manners allowed, could Talita talk with her mouth full as well?)
*Boo! But this is a festival day, so…
zaratustra
Always relevant: https://xkcd.com/678/
Origamigryphon
Her esophagus is completely separate from her breathing/speaking tubes! But I guess there is the risk of chewing with your mouth open, anyway..
Quillpaw
Y’know, it must be really nice to be able to use your mouth and still be able to talk coherently at the same time. Centaurs can have whole intelligible conversations around the dinner table and never have to worry about a badly-timed comment making someone choke! Honestly other sophonts lost out on that one.
Jay Eaton
Learn sign language and you too can talk with your mouth full 😉
Mica
Well now I need more hands to shovel even more food in!
B
I understand bugs are like. Actually full of protein and such and make total sense for living in space but God could NOT be me
Jay Eaton
Cultural standards for food have definitely changed a lot in this setting. The staple carbohydrates for spacers are powdered algae and yeast flours, the flavors of which are generally disliked by humans who grew up on grains.
Fishbones
as i read this i am eagerly awaiting the delivery of some fish jerky i got myself as a treat. i sympathize with the difficulty of getting good meat for yourself
SIGSTKFLT
do they still use HDMI in the future? I hope the HDMI consortium isn’t still up to their nonsense.
Jay Eaton
I’m sorry. Is there some dark HDMI council I should know about? Do they meet at night with black hooded cloaks?
SIGSTKFLT
Yeah; they keep the HDMI 2.1 specs secret. DisplayPort or death!
Curona
It was mentioned or inferred on previous pages that Talita’s apartment is on its own water and septic circuit. I assume this is so that her water is not “contaminated” with non-compatible organic molecules (and the other way around too). How strict does that separation have to be? Could she drink from a human or avian water fountain and still be okay? Do Earth-origin foods just taste awful to her, or are they effectively poisonous for Talita? And added on to that, do humans/avians smell bad to centaurs (smells = organic molecules) because of the aforementioned biological/chemical differences between them?
Jay Eaton
She could probably drink from a human or avian tap and be fine. The separation is enforced mostly because the processes needed to recycle the water are different, and because if something’s gone wrong with recycling it’s less likely to hurt the corresponding aliens. Also, sometimes the mineral content of the taps varies (like fluoride in human tap water to maintain tooth enamel health, which has no benefit to other aliens).
Human food is Russian roulette to Talita. It could just taste bad, taste like nothing, poison her, just cause indigestion, trigger anaphylactic shock… this is why eating alien food is not advisable.
Smells are a similar mixed bag. Some things that smell strongly to humans, or smell very different, aliens can’t detect or tell apart (and vice versa). Food smells tend to be… either undetectable, nonsensical, or unappetizing. Eating hot food in co-species spaces is often avoided. BO isn’t an issue if everyone’s cleaning regularly, but it can cause problems too. Alien living spaces will smell a little like their unique funk. Centaurs have the most sensitive olfactory system of the known sophonts, but Talita’s very used to human smells and hard to bother. She is used to her food bothering humans though, that’s why she asks permission to start eating here.
Curona
Thank you for sharing your world with us! The art, societies, sciences, and stories you’ve created with this comic are fascinating! Also, really appreciate the time and effort you put in to engage with your readers and I especially love the extra details you give us. Thank you for your imagination and hard work.
hal9000
good thing whatever they’re watching will be subtitled because Talita’s about to destroy the silent sanctity of cinema with those crunchy bones. snap crackle pop. if you thought the guy eating popcorn and rustling crisp packets was bad enough, prepare for the sound of alligator-level bite force on large bones
hal9000
ive just realised im a green centaur now! wow! and looking back i’m consistently one. clever bit of coding there.
Ruby
Bon appetit!
The fact that chabbits are a thing to begin with is impressive. They’re not just rabbits with some chicken traits, they’re almost a 50/50 hybrid.
Thylacereal
Boy I want to sit on the giant couch and eat the yummy meats.
Fallingfeather
Yooo, I love the randomized(?) lil profile pictures for the commenters now. 😀
theplushfrog
ikr? They’re cute!
PineCat
Does Gillie/other cat people have to eat more meat then non-gmo folks because cats are hyper carnivores too?
Jay Eaton
Not really, but she does have more difficulty digesting raw plant matter and some foods typ humans broadly tolerate hurt her guts, like chocolate and onions. She tends to stubbornly eat whatever she wants anyways and then suffers consequences a couple hours later.
Belladonna
Hey Jay gillie signed Mealworm while talking about her chabbit drumstick but the transcript said cricket. ???
Jay Eaton
In the drawing she’s actually signing “meat” but the dialog text didn’t match. Fixed.
Belladonna
Thanks Jay
Pathfinder
Y’all think Chabbit taste more like rabbit or chicken, so something pretty different from both? I bet it’d be great in a stew.
Jay Eaton
Mostly rabbit.
oh6
“Crunch” is an alarming sound when plugging in a gadget.
Jay Eaton
Idk what else to call that noise. Plugging something in sounds and feels like a crunch to me. Even when the port IS clean, lol
Zuorai
I always interpretted it as just “click”
Greenjoe
An ethernet port clicks with the little latch, but other types of ports don’t really make a notable sound tbh
Arcstone
Yeah I kinda wanted to say this too. I’ve seen you use the “crunch” effect before and it’s kind of made me worried about how much force youre applying to your poor usb devices.
I’d say it’s more of a slinding noise though. Like maybe a shhakh or something.
Arcstone
maybe a shhik if it’s something small.
Internet Stranger
I woulda thought it’d be a sorta “clp” sound or perhaps “clk”
Pathfinder
Now you got me wondering what Chabbit wings taste like, wonder if they’re more on the rabbit side or chicken side, or something else entirely. I’m assuming they’d be great in a stew.
Kite
Love that it’s The Future and they’re still using HDMI
Mica
Nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution.
Peter Jensen
One thing about Talita’s diet I’ve been wondering about: What’s the source of the bulk ingredients for her food printer? Some sort of chemical synthesis? Or for some of the more complex molecules, perhaps microbial cultures? With so relatively few starchaser centaurs compared to the spacer populations of the other sapients, there can’t be much infrastructure in place.
TheMushroomInside
Id imagine there is a nutrient paste sort of technology that can be fitted to create nutritionally viable “ink” that food printers can use. The source of origin nutrients being “soy” equivalents whose proteins and ammino acids are separated to recombine later into semblences of edible foods. The result is always extremely processed but it can mimic things like sausages well. Talita has esnetially been living on food printer sausages her whole life until she came to Ixion, it shall be mentioned soon (SPOILERS) but Gillie and Idrisah helped Talita to setup a “invertebrate” farm to increase the amount of variety she gets in her food which produces larva, eggs, and adults which significantly increase her food variety, the smoked meat expressed shipped from the centaur homeworld is a cherry and icing on top of all of that.
Curona
Invertebrates seem to be the go-to source for non-synthetic protein, but is fish farming a viable option? Probably quite expensive to get set up initially, but I bet the benefits would quickly outweigh the costs.
Jay Eaton
It was Ixion’s agricultural crew that helped Talita set up the invertebrate farm, Gillie and Idrisah are office workers. But yeah Talita has been eating food printer sausage with the occasional treat for most of her life, from her perspective she’s been eating pretty good at Ixion.
Jay Eaton
Nexus Jovia has dedicated replicable food sources for any aliens who visit, since if you’ve invited ambassadors over and there’s a disaster that cuts off trade and they starve to death it’s a bad look. This is the reason Talita didn’t starve to death when she was abandoned as a baby in the Garriton Cylinder, lmao.
Food printer bulk ingredients can have all sorts of sources, for centaurs they are produced from a mixture of centaur native unicellular cultures, human-origin bacterial and yeast cultures trained to produce specific chemicals, various raw minerals, and optionally some imported centaur flours and powder goods. It tastes… ok, and won’t kill you (if you keep the machine’s tubes clean.) You can fry the goop patty to make it slightly less sad, but bugs are definitely better.
Peter Jensen
Figured it would be something like this. It makes sense that some molecules would be fine to source from Earth-derived biology. Like, fatty acids for example. The principle of metabolizing those is basically chopping the chain up bit by bit, and there’s not all that much difference in how it works for different fatty acids. So as long as the fatty acids are transported in a way that they can be liberated for digestion, it should be OK. A human example where digestion is hindered is Olestra, where instead of esterifying with glycerol for tryglycerides they used sucrose and attach 6-8 fatty acid chains which makes the bulk molecule too large to be absorbed through our intestines.
Feather
Gillie looks so delighted by her chabbit legs! I wonder if chabbits taste more like chicken or rabbit? Although thinking about it I’ve only ever eaten wild rabbit, the difference probably isn’t as noticeable with farmed rabbits.
(Also, the transcript says crickets while the comic says mealworms.)
Jay Eaton
Transcript fixed. Chabbits taste more like rabbit because their physiology is closer to a rabbit with wings pasted on than a chicken, they got the dense bones and everything. I’ve only ever eaten locally farmed rabbits but my suppliers are usually able to get them quite fatty! I suspect that, tenderness, and less gaminess is probably the main difference with wild rabbits. They don’t taste like chicken anymore than, like, “white meat” pork tastes like chicken. At least in my opinion…