Earlier this week, pizza chef Denis Fisher turned his breakfast into Chunks—an unappetising, but efficient food option from Starfield. Chunks are, as you might assume, chunks of food—processed cubes that’re about as appealing as they are inevitable in our eventually tech-swarmed world.
Fisher made a valiant effort, but there was just one problem—the beans weren’t chunked. PC Gamer’s own Tyler Colp spoke with the visionary, who laid out why he didn’t want to commit to bean cubing: “I don’t really want to eat cold jellied beans.” Fair. This has not stopped Reddit user MediumStrawberry7985’s bold exploration of the food frontier, however, who has created something torn straight from dystopian nightmares.
Saw someone else do it on here so figured I’d try to make everything chunks lol from r/Starfield
Mercifully, they didn’t jelly the beans, instead they were “compressed in [an ice-cube mold] then plopped out”. I’m impressed by the ingenuity, but the verb choice—plopped—really sucks to have sitting in my brain. As user Akatotem comments: “The treatment you subjected those baked beans to could be considered sufficient cause for revocation of your citizenship.”
Starfield’s focus on food is one of its more charming elements, taking inspiration from the freeze-dried astronaut meals of today. We’ve paid deference to the Chunks egg before, but there’s genuinely been a lot of love from Bethesda’s art team in imagining the diet habits of future spacefarers.
But Great Serpent help me, I do not feel a sense of wonderment when I look at the truly repellent Chunks advertising you can find in game. The sauces in particular somehow make everything worse, like someone tried to make ice cubes out of meat and they’re melting in the sun. Do Starfield’s foodies even heat those things up? I can’t decide whether Chunks-brand spam would be better cold or lukewarm. Both options feel bad to me.
That still kinda rules in its own way, as the issues of space travel would present food companies the challenge of making meals that keep for long interstellar hauls. In Starfield’s future, Chunks clearly went for the ‘manufacture cheap, direct the budget to marketing’ strat, and judging by the ubiquity of Chunks vending machines in my playtime, it apparently worked. The culinary future is cube-shaped, and I could not be less psyched.
