I was looking for the prices of genuine non-ersatz foods in Shadowrun and found myself unable to find them.

I understand that most food available to the general public are clever (or blatent) forgeries made with Soy, Krill and Alge such as Soy-Caff but is there any actual rule behind how much a Real Apple would be versus Soy mixed with apple-flavorant number two and condence-pressed in an apple-shaped mold and given a coating of Alge-based red Skein number six?

I mean should we just make it simple and say Four times the current prices for Fruits and Vegetables and ten times current prices for Meat or is there an acutal chart or something I missed?

Food prices aren't stated outright, because that's all covered under lifestyle. A high enough lifestyle and you're having real food instead of scop, at lower ones you might be able to spring for real once in a while.

Things like food are covered by your Lifestyle costs, and left purely as an abstraction.

Some years ago I did an estimate based on the SR3 extended lifestyle rules in Sprawl Survival Guide and arrived IIRC at about three times today's prices. I guess you could adjust that by type of food: robust staples close to today's prices, others like meat more expensive.

This is also highly dependent on the way the GM sees the universe. According to some sources, real meat is extremely rare and expensive, according to others, you can get real meat for less than 10:nuyen: in some restaurants and you can grow organic food in your backyard.

"A 280lb pig will result in two halves, each weighing 110 or so lbs. Each of those 110lb halves will result in approximately 75lbs of cut-and-wrapped meat. If you ask the meat shop to do it, they'll also cut and bag the back fat. Otherwise they'll dispose of it (probably into other peoples sausage. Why not eat it yourself? ) There is nothing like lard to make pie crusts flaky and for deep frying and so on. More on lard later.

So the 75lbs of meat from each half will be:
2lb ham hock
13lbs pork chops*
7lbs of bacon
10lbs ribs
20lbs shoulder or sausage**
11bs sausage***
12lb ham****"

A pig costs 250 nuyen 150lbs/pig so pork is 1 2/3 nuyen per pound so cheaper than soy

That's the price for a live pig, that you buy at the farm/ranch/whatever. And not necessarily a big, 280-pounder either. (Also, I think that's grossly underpriced, given the presumptions of the SR setting.)

If you buy it from a store, you hve to add in all kinds of markups: transport to the slaughter house; slaughter and butchering; post-slaughter refrigeration; secondary butchering (to turn those 13 pounds of pork chop into two dozen or more individual pork chops); packaging (in those nice sterile, shrink-wrapped styrofoam tray things).

IOW: If you can butcher it yourself; if you have the refrigerator and freezer capacity to store 150 lbs of meat for as long as it takes to consume that much before it spoils; ifyou have a vehicle capable of transporting a pig from the ranch to your home .... then, pork may be cheaper than soy.

But if you can't do any one of the above steps? You're paying someone ELSE to do it for you. And that means the price goes up.

Farms also now have to deal with Paracritters being born from regular stock.

Nothing ruins a chicken farm faster than a Cockatrice being hatched and farmhands being turned to stone.

LOL, that's why you have DRONES handling the baby chicks, until you're sure they're CHICKS, and not cockatrices-to-be.

Come now: Orks with skillwires are much cheaper, and more expendable!

Now you're thinking like a Corp!

Of course we've been using drones to raise chickens in the real world for years. Corps would probably just make factory farms larger and even more inhumane.

In Shadowrun real meat is expensive because it's a conceit of the game world. Toxic waste, para-critters, evil future diseases, and an uncaring unregulated corporate food industry make it that way for no better reason then it's dehumanizing and cyberpunkish. The rules don't really back it up directly. And to me a reality check on the nature of agribusiness suggests that a corp run dystopian future would probably have more meat in it then less.

Hmmm...

Well my current character has Hydroponics as his hobby skill so he probably could start a grow-op in his basement... *Snicker* and sell his wares on the Black Farmer's Market.

"Can I interest you in a pound of gen-you-ine Alma Green? No? How about a few ears of Kansas Gold?"

That "grow-op" thing you mention, Ryusukanku? Would be the Advanced Lifestyle Quality Homegrown Farming, which improves the Food aspect of your lifestyle by two entire steps (squatter becomes Middile, low becomes High, etc).

Yep; consider that having enough food to eat requires a remarkably large area. Hydroponics makes it smaller, but it's still bigger than most lifestyles can't support that without an additional quality.

One place you might be able to is, paradoxically enough, the Barrens. A big enough gang might well have turned parkland into farmland. Looking at Redmond on Google Maps shows a lot of green there that might have been preserved with enough guns.

That's what happened in the Plastic Jungles. But I think it's more the exception that the norm when you consider that you have to deal with:
- Getting seeds. By 2070, most if not all of the crops are going to be GMO with "rights managements" like the "Terminator" gene used by Mosanto today. With the disappearance of bees and other pollinating bugs, pollination is going to be limited.
- Finding a soil that's rich enough to grow crops and not polluted/irradiated enough.
- Being able to fight the diseases and parasites
- Protecting the crops from (para)critters and looters
- Being able to stand against the mafia that will gladly "collect" your natural food to sell it on the black market.

I'm not saying it can't be done (the Plastic Jungles are an example), but it's not as easy as one might think.

Seedless Crops are one of the worst travesties ever performed by Corporations IRL, in my mind.

Yeh; DRM for food, blech.

Yeah, and if something happens to traditional seed stock, and all we're left with is seedless...

All it takes is one major plague, and we're out a major staple.

Bananas are heading that way at a much faster rate than people realize. The variety of banana most people purchase at the grocery store is facing a major plague in two of the three major areas that they're grown. There are other varieties of banana that aren't affected, but they all have different tastes, sizes and/or consistencies that will result in a change in what people think of when they think of bananas. This has actually already happened once before, bananas we eat today aren't the same species as the ones people ate 30 or 40 years ago.

Food for thought.

The impending extinction of the bananas I've grown up with makes me a sad, SAD man.

Happened with potatoes not too long ago, too.

Please don't compare the starvation deaths of a million Irish to the increased price of a dessert fruit.

Speaking as an Irish-American, some of whose ancestors probably were among the dead?

He wasn't comparing anything. Only pointing out what happens when the disease hits a STAPLE crop rather than a luxury crop.

Second generation American here, all 4 grandparents were off the boat Irish.

The potato famine was a political death. If the English had stayed on their own fuck island and left the irish to themselves, maybe a few hundred thousand irish wouldn't have faught lincoln's war, and we'd all have more rights.

Yeah, something terrible to add to the list of things humans should feel bad about. Now can we please avoid the impending flame war and get the thread back on topic?

are there any seedless "staple" crops?

most staples are grains, which would not really make much sense to cultivate to be seedless

now there's the notion of "terminator" genes, but that's not something on the market today (it fits very well with SR flavor though)

the other thing to consider about "real meat" is that overpopulation (and thus a need for less resource/land intensive food sources) and the existence of "closer" meat alternatives (like in vitro meat (why does it feel like 50% of my posts so far have contained the term "in vitro")) would tend to push meat out of the market.

No impending flame war, not one involving me anyway.

The potato famine is an important element to the topic, at least as far as "disease wiping out a staple" is concerned. The Sixth World is something of a monoculture, in terms of food crops: THE SOYBEAN. Imagine if something like the Potatoe Famine were to happen to the world soybean crop ...!!

...

That could be a huge campaign-arc idea, actually. Introduce a Soybean-killing plague, on a global scale. At first, existing stocks would be enough ... but as supplies of healthy soy declined, tensions would rise. Eventually you'd see food riots - like the very ones that prompted the extraterritoriality of the megacorporations!

And with that as a backdrop ... the PCs doing the usual runs, every so often with one tied right to the metaplot: the disease is engineered. They may or may not find a CURE. They may or may not set that cure free on the matrix. They may or may not discover who (or what)is behind the plague's creation, and/or release. Maybe some fragment of Deus survived after all; or maybe one of the Greats so resents metahumanity, it's decided the lot of us need a severe "pruning", and global famine seemed a good way to do it. Maybe it was supposed to be a cure for the common cold that went very, very badly wrong. Maybe it's all a hoax, as a smokescreen for something bigger.

So very many possibilities. So very many layers of paranoia and conspiracy-theory to smother the PCs with.

**BLISS**

soybeans are a surprisingly fascinating plot hook!

Windup Girl paints a compelling picture of a world after such a "plague"

and there's plenty of soybean-related hullabaloo going on right now in the modern corporate world

Well, more pointing out what happens when you're growing Only One Kind of a particular crop. What happened to the Irish (which was terrible) was because they could only grow one kind of potato. What's happening today with the banana is because it's one kind of banana.

What I was pointing out is that as we move towards GM crops and "copyright" crops, if disease hits it'll be devastating as we grow only one kind.

That's not always true. With GM crops, for example, the transgene will be introgressed into a number of different varieties. They will all be "Magic Soy" brand soybeans, but that only demonstrates that they contain a single transgene. The rest of the germplasm will vary from region to region and among different distributors. You might have a varietal that grows well in drought conditions, or shorter days, or high salinity ground water (not to mention different transgenes - "Magic Soy" now with "Nutri-Boost" and "Bug-B-Gone" genes!)

So (right now at least) it is not like bananas where everyone is planting the exact same banana (genetically speaking).

Man, that was a great book. Not cyberpunk, but has a similar dystopian feel to it.

I am skeptical that soy would make a good famine crop, though. Infecting so many types of soy seems unlikely, and you know the agri corps would have safe guards protecting against this kind of thing(not to mention seed vaults and the like). I can see food shortages as a definite possibility, but I assume the slack would be picked up by krill and mycoprotein until someone fixes the soy.

Awakened Locust swarm. Toxin-resistance, maybe Regeneration ... scary.

Or a more prosaic approach: an awakened mold, that preferentially grows on (and kills) soy bean vines, but isn't exclusive enough to that one plant host to be easily wiped out.

You could always make it a plague that attacked something other than the crops themselves.

For example, a single transgene might be used in a number of different crops (the gene that makes "Magic Soy" is probably also used in "Magic Corn" and "Magic Sourgum" and "Magic Wheat" - might even make "Magic Krill") odds are all the growing and processing facilities are designed around that trait, so if you find some way to silence it or even to make the product of the gene go haywire (say introduce another gene into the food processing chain that, when it comes in contact with the enzyme expressed by the "Magic" gene, metabolizes into a toxin or even just an allergen)

You wouldn't even have to "infect" the entire crop, because crop storage and processing plants aren't diversified by the crop varietal. You get one bushel of the "trigger" crop into a grain elevator and now every other transgenic grain is effectively poison.

A retrovirus would be good for that, Darksong.

or just the same transformation vector used to create most transgenic plants today.

To sum up, seeds you'll have to buy from the Megas, and they charge for them. And it's not the "regenerating garden" we'd think of today.

The early editions gave examples, but middle lifestyle you had some real food mixed with the other stuff. In our world there is pretty much food like today unless you're in the barrens. The Soy/Krill stuff was in the earliest editions because that was big in the whole cyberpunk world- how to feed the massive population. But we realized that VITAS had killed such a large part of the population that at least in the north American, European regions and Japan that real food should be as available in 2072 as it is in 2012. We can be fed now, it is areas like India and subsaharan Africa that would be starving but would also be hit hardest by VITAS.

Depends on your location. The Tir's aren't too likely to tolerate fucking with nature. NAN are likely in the same boat.

as we see today, you don't need terminator genes to prevent people from saving some of their harvest for re-planting, it's part of the technology agreement you sign to get the seeds in the first place.

you can try to "pirate" the seeds, but it's hard to hide your crops and by this point corps will have almost a century of experience enforcing those licenses.

also by this point, GM crops will have been around for almost a century. who knows if people even consider it "fucking with nature" as opposed to "ensuring that our farmers can stay competitive in a global market"

we're seeing the risks of over fishing now, BUT there might be a marked increase in shellfish and salmon. They are high in protein and farmed shell fish especially is relatively easy and actually create fish faster with more meat than natural/wild shellfish.

If one does include a soybean plague in their campaign, that's a perfect opportunity to include a run against either the Svalbard Global Seed Vault or the Millennium Seed Bank Project.

If they're going to hit the former, keep in mind that it's going to be just as cold inside as it is outside. They keep those seeds at like -3C, and even if the power fails, the mountain's natural temperature is cold enough to keep the seeds preserved for months if not longer.

In my latest campaigns, the PCs were told they'd find something interesting in the soy processing factory. They discovered that it was a pretty empty automated factory with only conveyor belts and maintenance drones. The conveyor belts transported "soy bricks" that were generated by a big magical sphere. All the crops around the factory were actually "fake" (simple plants that grew easily but didn't produce anything nutritious).

Since the soil wasn't good enough to feed the population, the "secret cabal ruling the world" just used magic to generate "soy" out of thin air. They went on to learn that Gaia should be dead and was only surviving because that small but powerful magician cabal has done something similar to the Cyberzombie ritual to keep Gaia inside the Earth.

I wonder who you have to 'run for to get seeds for this.

http://cheezpictureisunrelated.files.wordp...ees-letucce.jpg

Aztechnology fills the role of Monsanto and similar for Shadowrun, and, yeah, safe to say that they ruthlessly push the corporate court to lay claim to "their" bio-engineered crop seeds when they pollinate other areas.

In terms of bananas, the move from Big Mike (Gros Michael) to today's form killed off the banana cream industry, such as what used to go into Twinkees, forcing some big changes in wht got sold in markets. It also might be why society flipped how to eat a banana as the old way was to open the tip, using teh stem as a handle to eat it with, rather than today's method, where the handle is used like a pop-top can to pull ity open. The switch happens in the same time frame, but we can't figure out *exactly* why it changed.

Shadowrun, meanwhile, has had food issues in the past, since the writers in the late 80's had read scifi in the 70's, which used overpopulation and food shortages as a framework for CYberpunk Dystopia. The Seretech Decision of Shadowrun '99 is based on workers fending off food riots, after all. From there, we can assume that a staple or two got hit with a disease (Let's say North America's monoculture wheat and corn both get plague ridden in the same year) which did massive damage that still hasn't been fully overcome today. Add in a push for crops to be recognized as corporate property to kill off backyard farming and bingo bango bongo, we get the Shadowrun of today.

The Azzies aren't the *only* food manufacturer, of course, they're just the biggest name. Puerto RIco's the main site, IIRC, having been semi-sumberged and coated with tasty alge and fungi, which let to NatVat. I need to dig out CYberpirates again and have a read of that section.

Horizon is slowly changing that, actually contesting and fighting against AZT's tight fist on food-like substances.

While every Mega is diversified, they all have their areas of expertize. AZT, being a former Drug Cartel, is in Agriculture. Horizon fighting them on that fact is another reason to wonder what the hell they're up to...

Horizon and Axtechnology just don't get along. Two huge PR firms with a lockdown on intellectual property, now getting into a foodfight, and they would have shared a border if the PCC hadn't jumped so fast ...

Ahh, natural rivalries.

Yep, Horizon is one of the newbs on the scene, and already taking on one of the big boys. Honestly, they are up to something!

CanRay, they're all up to something.

Yes, and we know, something, about what the rest are up to.

Horizon? Attempting to do things with the JackPoint. Which is major in and of itself, because, well, FastJack built it and it's his baby, but still...