QUOTE (Snow_Fox @ Sep 23 2012, 11:43 AM)
look in your own fridge, your own panrty and there you are. I know the distopian outlook says soy and krill and that was put in in 1st ed because it was common in cyberpunk but I've said in the past that the VITAS outbreak actually should have relieved that becasue it killed off a huge chunk of thep opulation meaning that in modern countries in North America, Japan, parts of China, Korea and Europe food should be prentiful like it is today.
Actually, the issue with VITAS and all the other random tragedies that seem to happen every year in late December that kill millions (seriously, if you get transported to the Shadowrun world, STAY THE FRAG AT HOME EVERY CHRISTMAS EVE!!) isn't to fix overpopulation so much as make it plausible for the world to contain about the same number of people as now. Population estimates beyond 10-20 years are typically all over the place. I remember one estimate from the mid 90s putting the population as of now at 10 billion yet we've only barely topped 7 billion.
What would cause the food shortages would be the ecological problems with growing food. Due to magic, weather patterns all over the world have changed. Many areas that used to be some of our biggest food suppliers like the Midwest and West Coast are either subject to random manastorms or are in a very tense political environment to the point of all-out war every couple of decades. Other countries aren't faring that much better either. And that's not counting what megacorps are doing to the environment after basically getting carte blanch to tell the EPA where to stick their regulations. A lot of areas have become too polluted to grow food suitable for human consumption. And don't forget, every time in history you see some major disaster like a massive plague or drastic upheaval of society (like VITAS or the Awakening), you see every single time a massive loss of technology. Education falls by the wayside when you're just trying to survive. The Black Plague and shift from the Roman Empire to feudalism caused us to lose the ability to make concrete for something like 1500 years.
Also, corporations would want to make the most money for the least investment. Did you know that sawdust is a very popular ingredient in processed foods in the United States? I'm not kidding, it's called "cellulose" and it's literally virgin wood pulp. Read the ingredients on a lot of frozen or processed foods and you'll see cellulose high on the ingredient list. It's a dirt cheap filler that lets the manufacturer make health claims, especially about fiber content. We've also experienced a lot of change in popular tastes in the United States over the past 50 to 100 years or so based on marketing by large corporations. It's why corn syrup is in damn near everything because we've been programmed to like things that are sweet, even things that shouldn't BE sweet like hamburgers (seriously, there's corn syrup in hamburgers).
There's very little doubt that, with crop and livestock prices rising due to VITAS, the Awakening, Goblinization, the Crash, the Great Ghost Dance, etc. etc. that corporations would push hard to use items that can be easily farmed in controlled environments - krill, algae, seaweed, soybeans, etc. Once things stabilized - or as stable as they get in the Sixth World - somewhere in the 2040s, people are going to have a taste for that type of food. And why should corporations bother cutting into profit margins for agricultural products that can be iffy to bank on - one bad season and you have to raise prices and everyone starts getting your competitor's product instead.
Need another argument for stuffers? What has always been the most evil corporation in Shadowrun? Aztechnology. What has always been Aztechnology's core market? Consumer products including foods. What does Aztechnology excel out besides blood magic? Public relations. They're squeaky clean and friendly as far as the average citizen thinks. And yes, this is based again on real-life situations. Look up the sort of shenanigans that companies that inspired Aztechnology like Walmart, Kraft, Pfizer, Unilever, etc. all get up to. Should be common knowledge, but the best you'll get is a protest websites, articles on Page 19 of the newspaper, or a couple of episodes of Leverage.
TL;DR: Food substitutes make perfect sense in Shadowrun, even if the world isn't technically anymore overpopulated than our own.
