I don't think it will be snobbery, though I think it will be psychological. WE anticipate variation. And exactly the same thing too often will produce a psychological reaction.
Actually, wasn't there something about that in the early days of ready meals, where people went off them very quickly because they were absolutely identical to one another - and they introduced a certain amount of variation to allow for that?
I would rather someone else made the meal. And cleaned up after it, come to it. While I am keenly interested in eating food, preferably while reading and without having to socialize, the attendant busy-work preceding and following it would be very usefully disposed of.
They wanted to take the perfect out of Star Trek. I prefer the Next Generation take on the replicator-it makes wonderful tasty food. The food is so good that you can even feed it to snobby diplomats at a social function. You can tell the computer to make any food that people know of and it will make it.
There are scenes in TNG where replicated food fails to taste authentic. Relics comes to mind. Scotty is disgusted by replicated scotch, and he and Picard obviously prefer genuine whiskey over the replicated swill.
Maybe in the later episodes, but in the first few years, they all loved it. Part of the Utopian Star Trek future is that people have food and if that food was disgusting shit, along with the other replicated stuff, then people would still be fighting for "the real thing" as opposed to the garbage.
People loved tv dinners for the first few years, too. Besides, TNG isn't a proper indicator to begin with. Of course replicated meals are the primary diet of a Starship crew. It's a simple matter of efficiency-- not storing several years' worth of food stuffs in the cargo bays when replicators take up far less space.
Interesting choice of words here, given that waste matter on the Enterprise was reconstituted by the replicators into food. After the first few days, it literally was shit and garbage.
Weren't these Cardassian replicators? That's the answer. Sub-standard replicators, constantly cobbled together by the likes of Rom! Good night.
Actually, Scotty doesn't get "replicated Scotch". He gets synthehol, which is some sort of an alternate product and not a Scotch at all. Possibly synthehol isn't even an alcohol-based beverage. AFAIK, Scotty in "Relics" makes no complaints over anything replicated. He would probably be highly satisfied with the Scotch that the replicator in his guest quarters can make - but he doesn't realize that the device can do that, and probably doesn't even realize that the device exists, so he wanders off to Ten Forward instead, and gets disappointed with synthehol. Timo Saloniemi
They had food slots on the Enterprise (no bloody A, B, C, or D), though. Remember Kirk getting the plate of food with Tribbles on it? So Scotty's probably already used to what amounts to replicated food. And, this IS Scotty we're talking about. He probably wouldn't be content with replicated Scotch, and his Enterprise seemed to have several unofficial containers of real alcohol, and he likely thought the D was the same when he went to Ten Forward.
The jury's out on whether those slots used a technology comparable to replicators, or a technology with a smidgen of early replication tech in it, or perhaps a completely "conventional" mechanism where "handmade" food was delivered by transporter or even by a mechanical dumbwaiter. I'm not sure it would have prepared Scotty for the experience of replicated Scotch, especially considering that we never saw the slots produce alcoholic beverages in TOS. Also, if nobody told Scotty his Scotch was synthetic, would he really be able to spot the difference? Timo Saloniemi
I prefer the idea that TOS food slots were indeed primitive replicators. They were far less advanced than those in TNG era, which would explain the strange appearance of the food.
Or then the strange appearance was a culinary choice, the haute cuisine of the 23rd century. After all, the colored cubes were usually accompanied by perfectly realistic-looking celery! Timo Saloniemi
How would that be done? Do the food slots have little harvester robots that go to the ship's celery garden to pick that stuff for each plate? I'd think cultivating celery would be just as difficult as growing, say, carrots and beets from which real/realistic boiled vegetables could be made for each plate, or tomatoes, or soy for plausible-looking meat facsimiles. No need for the colored cubes unless they are what these people actually want to eat. And why wouldn't they? We sure want to eat the most repulsive-looking, unnatural things today - French fries, little white balls of mozzarella cheese, awfully colored candy, disgusting wobbly jelly... Timo Saloniemi
People paying for replicated food is just one of those things that makes no sense on DS9. Like with Odo's combadge; the Founders always looking exactly like Odo; the Feds on DS9 having money even though they allegedly don't use money in that century etc. etc.
Food dispenser transports celery from ships kitchen, where there is small selection of real foodstuff. But yeah, it really could be either way.