Trope-a-Day: Food Pills

Food Pills: Well, actual food pills don’t exist, because of all those inconvenient mass-and-volume constraints, the more so with high-energy metabolisms that need to support all that symbiotic nanotech, and suchlike.

In terms of other things listed under this trope, though, there’s everything from traditional waybread (not a light and sweet bread; more like a heavy, syrupy, boozy fruitcake with extra fruit – again, to support fast metabolisms with lots of sugars) to everyone’s non-tasty delight, the utterly bland yet nutritious algiprote/mycoprotein/nutriyeast ration bars.

I’ll also throw in a quick mention of the ubiquitous tins of species-specific nutritional supplement pills, because even when you’re visiting the occasional planets where you can eat the local food, the chances are you’re just begging for some interesting nutritional deficiencies in places if you don’t watch this sort of thing carefully.