Dining Under the Stars:
Gustatory Adventures Across the Nebula
Food Writers: Twisk Twinkum and Thaery Tiddiltwask
Gourmand’s Log, Stardate 1:15:3020
Having only just barely survived a few substandard restaurant experiences on strange worlds at the Nebula’s edge, we have decided to turn our attentions in this edition from culinary cliffhanging to the everyday concerns of the Nebula homemaker. So, for this issue of the Nebula Network News, we have chosen to rate that most common of kitchen appliances, the food replicator. For our study we have chosen top brands commonly available across the Nebula, choosing to pass by models either not available to most of our readership, and/or models that per the intent of their originating races do not produce meals that most other inhabitants of the Nebula would recognize as food.
Our survey has been conducted over the course of a week in the test kitchen of Space Station Laputa; no representatives of any of the involved companies were allowed on board to possibly influence the outcome. Our first criteria was convenience of use – why own a food replicator if it’s not convenient? This was a no-brainer. Cost and reliability, likewise, were a given. Replication itself is a bit more subjective, necessarily: Did the food look/smell/taste like what we programmed the replicator to produce? Since replicator food is obviously not going to be high cuisine, we allowed some slack here – consumers do not use food replicators in the expectation of 5-star meals.
Rating scale: ★★★ good | ★★ fair | ★ poor
Cost: $ cheap | $$ moderate | $$$ expensive
Chowhound De-LuxeProduced by: Chewy Goodness Inc. |
Convenience: ★★★ Cost: $$ Reliability: ★★★ Replication: ★★ |
| The Chowhound is our top pick – fast, easy-to-use, and, during our week of heavy use, completely reliable. Sold in most outlets across the Nebula at a very average price for appliances in its class, the Chowhound is a real deal. Its food replication abilities were decent – all of the food we made with it looked more or less like what we would expect, there were no off or misleading odors, and the food produced was generally palatable – flavor and texture were usually on, or close. The only exceptions to this were the deekadillers in the soup, which were quite dead, not squirming around in the broth as is normal for this dish, and the goot-root whiskey, which, given the 12-year age we programmed in, could have been a whole lot smoother. Concerning the deekadillers, we didn’t really expect a food replicator to create the spark of life as well as our daily meals, so we didn’t dock big points for this failing. Recommended. | |
Gourmet-O-TronProduced by: Swilliam Donoma |
Convenience: ★ Cost: $$$ Reliability: ★★ Replication: ★★★ |
| This fussy unit had an eye-popping price tag, so we were waiting to be amazed when we fired it up. The instruction booklet was the size of a Garthian-Platz dictionary, and it took a considerable knowledge of its huge programming panel to use – not the sort of replicator you’d stagger up to at 2:00 AM in the morning for a late-night snack. On the other hand, the meals it produced were unexpectedly good – almost better-than-real in appearance, enticing to the nose, and with delectable flavors and textures. Even the deekadillers seemed to twitch feebly, even if not actually alive. This complexity comes at a price, however; a couple of times the unit apparently became confused, and the meals in these cases were definitely subpar – for instance, on one occasion the chicken came out with six legs, no wings, and tasted distinctly of Krat; on the other occasion Thaery found a dead hummingbird in his slice of chiffon cake. Malfunctions such as this amounted to about 5% of the unit’s usage – so once again, not the replicator for the bleary-eyed late-night snack, nor dependable enough for a dinner party with guests. Recommended with reservations. | |
Mmmm-Tasty3000Produced by: BonkomaticBonko |
Convenience: ★★ Cost: $ Reliability: ★★ Replication: ★ |
| Ewww-Pasty is more like it. Great price, but not worth the money, with replication abilities so limited that we had difficulty rating it for reliability. (“What’s the intended result here?”) The output overall tended to the subpar; it seemed that no matter what we programmed in, quivering, varicolored glop with undecipherable flavors was all too often the result. Even when the food had something like an expected shape, often simply inserting a utensil into it caused it to collapse into a heap of chunky goo. The Bonkomatic was the catalyst of many a hair-holding session over Laputa’s sparkling 0-g commodes, usually due to food texture issues. It wasn’t long before we began to dread our scheduled Mmmm-Tasty3000 repasts, and would program the Gourmet-O-Tron for goot-root whiskey in advance to help us choke down these loathsome meals. Not recommended. | |
Omega Instant Food SystemProduced by: Omega Corp |
Convenience: ★★★ Cost: $$$ Reliability: ★★ Replication: ★★ |
| Easy to use and clean, although you pay a bit for this convenience – too much, if the meals it produces are taken into the equation. Sloppy image programming of the Instant Food System is probably to blame; all of the food we produced with this replicator had gentle, imprecise contours – more like abstract renderings of food than the real thing. The chicken was particularly disconcerting, with only gentle mounds where its limbs would normally be, and a fairly bizarre skeletal structure that made it difficult to eat. Worse still, when we carved it we found a perfectly formed miniature chicken embedded in the breast meat like a cyst, which pretty much put us off the rest of our dinner. Strange deformities such as this aside, all the meals smelled good, though the flavors, while more or less on target, seemed washed out and didn’t live up to the promise of the olfactory elements. Still, this was all palatable stuff, and, if served under appropriately dim mood lighting, the impact of the food’s appearance would be somewhat reduced. Recommended with reservations. | |
Repli-MealProduced by: InSmel Inc. |
Convenience: ★ Cost: $$ Reliability: ★★ Replication: ★ |
| What to say here – the control panel is hard to clean, the user’s manual is in 12 languages and inscrutable in all of them, and the replicated food it produces is shockingly bad. Not only were the deekadillers in the soup dead, they left gray slicks on the surface of the broth as they decomposed before our eyes. Regarding the Repli-Meal’s cake, Thaery’s comment, “I can’t believe it’s not plastic!” is fairly descriptive, if a little over-generous. No matter what variety of steamed vegetable we coded this replicator to produce, they all looked more or less like limp, gray members of the rabe family rescued posthumously from someone’s wastebin. In short, more goot-root whiskey from the Gourmet-O-Tron, and more fleeing pell-mell to the sparkling 0-g commodes. Between this machine and the Bonkomatic, we probably should have rated the commodes as well for efficiency’s sake; we certainly spent enough time heaving over them. In this vein, it may be worth noting that having one’s face, hair, and besmirched clothing cleaned by millions of sanitary nanobots intended for service in one’s nether regions was a bit disconcerting, though we do now have really clean teeth. Not recommended. | |
Grandma Zinger’s KitchenProduced by: MagicZing Technologies |
Convenience: ★★★ Cost: $$ Reliability: ★★★ Replication: ★★ |
| The Dark Horse of this product sampling, we were uneasy about this replicator’s name (Sort of like seeing a diner named Mom’s and/or Eats at a deserted freighter stop in a backwater system) , but our fears were unfounded. Grandma Zinger’s Kitchen Magic was easy to use, completely reliable — performing consistently day-in, day-out, no matter how often we used it or how hard we punched the buttons – and its food replication abilities were reasonable. All the meals we had from this replicator were palatable and pleasant, if mild-tasting; the caveat is that after a while they all subtly began to taste the same – almost as if Granda Zinger was using the same six jars in her kitchen for all of her family recipes. Apart from this quibble, our only word of caution is in regard to the deekadiller soup – when Thaery opened the unit after it announced that his soup was ready, a swarm of very alive deekadillers leapt from the broth en masse and attempted to mate with his face. Perhaps not a complete surprise coming from Zing Technologies, ever on the bioengineering cutting edge, but we’re sending them a letter anyway to alert them to their latest breakthrough, and to Thaery’s claims of emotional damages. Recommended with reservations. | |
In sum, the best cost/quality compromise on this list is without question the Chowhound De-Luxe. After that, it depends on your personal risk-taking profile: While the Omega Instant Food System isn’t worth the money for the performance, the Gourmet-O-Tron just might be, if you have the disposable income, lots of leisure time to figure it out, and don’t mind the occasional surprise. Grandma Zinger’s Kitchen Magic is probably the strongest contender in the Recommended with Reservations category – decent price for a rock-solid appliance that turns out decent, if somewhat uninspired, meals.