In modern America we have a mix of different coffeees and foods from all over the world. I remember when my grandmother visited from Francein the summer she would bring her own cigarettes because she hated american tobacco.

So i wondered if in your world there's still that mix available. Does Starbucks have many varieties? supermarkets or are we more isolated?

I figure that unless you are super rich or grow your own stuff then everyone eats the same tasteless goop with the ultra cheap flavoring.

Or your smart and you take Homegrown Farming for your lifestyle and the dependent flaw as a live in girlfriend who gardens. At a low level lifestyle, you'll be eating real food, milk, and chocolate. At a middle level, you'll be eating quail eggs, peacock tongue, and drinking 50+ year old wine.

Dependent, being a negative quality, just begs for the GM to fuck you if you are actually getting a benefit from it.

Gf that cooks and gardens and also is a former national martial arts champ?


""mob boss:: I have your girl friend MWHAHAAHAHA

::Runner:: Really? I'm sorry..where should I send the flowers?

You're quickly moving away from what SR considers a dependent.

Beyond that, most national 'martial arts champs' don't do well when jumped by three mob guys using pepper punch and tasers to lead the way. The bad guys won't exactly be playing by the rules your martial artist is used to having in the nationals.

Yeah also a 'dependant means that kid sister or aunt May you have to help even open a jar of pickles, not wild uncle bill with the banshee panzer and a mage trohpy wife.

Yeah also a 'dependant means that kid sister or aunt May you have to help even open a jar of pickles, not wild uncle bill with the banshee panzer and a mage trophy wife.

With the disapearance of the middle class, things go back to, say, the 1700, where you have rich aristocracy and poor slobs. The poor slobs certainly aren't drinking rare coffee, but the rich class, all by itself, sustains an economy in luxury items.

So while the sprawl citizens make do with soy everything and get their "luxury" out of VR as simulated experiences, the rich class go for the real shit. They most likely do not shop at the same stores. The store Joe Common shops at does not have Kenyan coffee. The boutique Mr. Boss has his stuff delivered from has coffee beans from a rare Awakened plant from Congo-Brazzaville.

Also given the state of the enviroment in the Sixth World you aren't going to be doing any outdoor gardening so I would say a Middle Lifestyle is the very least you can use to get any ammount of real food out of a garden, with High Lifestyle prefered.

For those people middle and above, sure, why not? The price of transportation and globalization have dropped precipitously. The one limitation is price. In fact, most likely it'll prove cheaper to make Turkish coffee in some camp in Siberia, and never touch a Turk, or your Kenya tobacco from a plant in Kentucky, where some product is stuffed with enough chemicals and colorings you can hardly tell the difference. The higher your lifestyle (the more you pay) the more likely it is that your international flavor actually comes from the country it's named after.

That's true. There was a scientific study not very long ago that I read about in The Economist, that discovered that people actually enjoy things that are more expensive - quality not withstanding. So say you have a wine, given two samples in a blind test but told one is a 10$ wine and the other a 50$, your brain will actually react with more pleasure from the 50$ wine.

All that to say, those that can afford it in Shadowrun will actually pay for the team of 5 runners to go acquire the rare coffee from a shaman in the middle of the african jungle and bring it back, because the excentricity will actually result in more pleasure.

IIRC most of the food products in the SR universe are made from either soy, algae, or some unidentified chemical mixture. This is because you can feed billions on a relatively limited farmland. In some cases (algae being an example) you can even stack your crop. Real food is very hard to get unless you are willing to pay for it and your not guaranteed that it will be fresh, as nutritious, or tasty then the general soy crap (well it may taste better).