---
name: food
slug: food
type: substrate
status: unstable
version: 0.0.666-alpha
released: "~3,800,000,000 BCE (best guess, logs corrupted)"
maintainer: "@entropy // formerly @evolution // formerly @someone's-mother"
dependencies:
  - "[the sun](/the-sun)"
  - "[water](/water)"
  - "[death](/death) (of something else)"
  - "[hunger](/hunger) (demand-side dependency)"
  - "[fire](/fire) (optional but recommended)"
license: "Eat-or-Be-Eaten Public License v∞"
tags:
  - sustenance
  - ritual
  - argument
  - pleasure
  - grief
  - fuel
  - haunted
---

food

What it actually is

Temporary matter that delays death by becoming part of you, at the cost of something else's existence.

How it works

A living thing grows, accumulates energy, exists.
You interrupt that process.
Optional: apply fire.
Insert into face portal.
Body runs extraction daemon. Useful bits retained. Rest discarded.
hunger signal clears. Timer resets. Go live your life until it doesn't.

The cycle is approximately 3 to 5 hours depending on configuration and whether you are sad.

"I wasn't even hungry. I was just in the kitchen." — every user, always

Features

Caloric delivery across 4 canonical macronutrient channels (fat, protein, carbohydrate, and desperation)
Cultural encoding: each dish carries compressed generational data. Estimated payload: one grandmother per serving
Mood modulation: bidirectional. Can induce joy, grief, nostalgia, or a specific shame that has no name
Social synchronization protocol: eating together forces temporary peace. Works on enemies. Mostly.
Umami: still not fully documented. Treat as magic.

Known bugs

Texture mismatch exception: the thing looks correct but the mouth rejects it. Cause unknown. Reproducible in children, persistent in adults.
Portion estimation overflow: humans are genuinely terrible at this. Consistent across all builds.
Emotional dependency leak: food gets coupled at runtime to events it should not know about. your mother's lasagna should just be lasagna. It is not.
The refrigerator loop: user opens fridge, finds nothing, closes it, opens it again 40 seconds later expecting different results.
SIGFAULT when ingredient is described as "a handful." What is a handful. Define handful.
Expiration ambiguity: best before and use by remain semantically distinct but users treat them as noise.

Error codes

ERR_001   HUNGER_UNRESOLVED       nothing sounds good
ERR_002   TEXTURE_REJECTED        gag reflex veto, no appeal process
ERR_404   FRIDGE_NOT_FOUND        you need to go shopping
ERR_413   PAYLOAD_TOO_LARGE       you knew before you finished
ERR_000   NULL_APPETITE           grief build detected, seek [comfort food](/comfort-food)
WARN_999  NOSTALGIA_BLEED         dish cannot taste like memory. it never will.

Edge cases

fasting: food defined entirely by its absence. Spec still loads. This is disturbing.
Food offered during grief operates outside normal nutrition logic. It is not about the food.
The dish you make at 2am alone, standing, over the sink. No cultural encoding. Pure.

WARNING: section ## Changelog failed to load. History of agriculture is 12,000 years of unresolved merge conflicts. See civilization.

FAQ

Q: Is food just fuel? A: No. Anyone who says yes has never been handed soup by someone who loves them.

Q: Why does it taste better when someone else makes it? A: Labor is an invisible ingredient. This is not documented elsewhere. Now it is.

Q: What about taste? A: Separate spec. Deeply entangled. Do not attempt to decouple at runtime.

drafting spec…