Our cuisine has enough spicing so it doesn’t taste like the very same thing every day, though we all know that the bases number only a few, our old agricultural staples plus some new plants that have entered our diet since we took to humanity’s second set of inhabited worlds. All manner of effort is spent in keeping those varieties healthy and resistant. We already lost a few overbred species before leaving the Original World.
You don’t think space renegades and plant breeders in the same thought, not if you don’t hail from the Outposts, but all sorts of things prove useful that aren’t obvious at first glance.
All specialties are precious, but we try to diversify. So my gene mother Laila-Istvan also bred plants; there’s a variety of bean named after her. Istvan’s legume, it’s called: round and fat, rows of them in edible pods. Roasted and salted in the pod, they’re delicious; you pop the beans out the end of the husk and eat it last.
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The narrator is Taryn the Outlander. From character interviews for the Ship’s Heart universe.
Weekend Writing Warriors offers a selection of eight-sentence excerpts from many different writers. For the full selection, see here.
E. P. Beaumont 
A perfect example of elegant world building. Thank you for sharing.
I love your attention to details like this!
I love the vernacular you use here… and now my stomach is growling haha Great snippet!
This is the kind of detail that you do SO well, and it’s endlessly fascinating. Of course the food would be important! and I love the details of how they go about maintaining an interesting diet. Terrific excerpt!
Nice mixture between gardening and cooking. I like how it all makes sense.
I studied enough history to know how democratically most pirates were during the “high seas adventure days”–renegades and artisans would not be strangers to each other. The words we picture are so often laden with centuries of propaganda and contempt without balance. For these people, survival matters… and they’ll do what they have to to survive.
Yes! I had in mind a whole lot of influences here, including pirates and maroons, various North American indigenous structures, anarchism of a variety of flavors … all the good stuff from real history that’s been sadly lacking in space opera. I mean, emperors and kings are all very well, but what about the rest of us?
Not to mention, people gotta eat, and there is simply not enough sophisticated Food in Space discussion.
I like how you put that “Sophisticated Food In Space Discussion”. I mean, there is, actually, but only on the barest of survival scales most of the time. Though Food in Space was a pretty big theme in Babylon 5….
This snippet evokes both curiosity and the sense of taste. Well done.