What is the odd food in "Journey to Babel"?

What is the odd-shaped, brightly colored food in "Journey to Babel"... the shapes that come in bright colors?

I'm thinking, if I ever have a "geek party", I'll use melon and food coloring

 

There is a Lucky Charms thread already going in Miscellaneous.

 

If I remember right, I think I read an article saying that it was food-color-dyed tofu. Because one of the extras was joking that everyone would be eating tofu (gag) in the 23rd century.

 

it's Soylent Green!

Spoiler: What's Soylent Green?

Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!!!!

 

It wasn't just "Journey To Babel"; the Day-Glo food cubes show up in several episodes, including "By Any Other Name", and "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", where they're being served in some kind of gravy.

 

I've always theorized they're a compromise food of sorts...synthetic, brightly-hued cubes of artificial food protein that you could program the food synthesizers/resequencers aboard the ship to taste like whatever you prefer. That way if you are a vegetarian but don't like the salads and greens on the ready menu you can program the food cubes to taste like whichever vegan dish you like.

 

In the episode "The Corbomite Maneuver" when Kirk sees the First Federation bouy: I'm hungry, you hungry Mr. Spock?

Spock: Yes, suddenly I'm hungry too.

Robert

 

Can't the Fisher-Price-colored food squares be fancy candy? Ever see some of the crazier shapes and colors of Choxie?

 

That's what I was thinking. Either that, or Jell-O.

 

Soylent Green is Tellarites!!

 

The attendees will take their protractors from their pocket protectors and measure the precise angles of your geekiness.

Can I come over?

Joe, green cube

 

The mirror crew in IAMD Part II ate that kind of food on the Defiant.

Apparently nobody can COOK in the 23rd century. What other explanation could there be for eating crap like that?

I mean... Would it have killed the props department to whip up a plate of real, recognizable food for maybe one smegging scene?

 

^ TOS had a really tiny budget so no real food....

However IAMD could have used real food with their larger budget, but then you'd have folks screaming about continuity, canon and a bunch of other things....

I always thought that the colored cubes were some kind of soy product based from Kirk's lines in Charlie X about the thanksgiving meal on board the Enterprise....

- W -
* But that's just me *

 

but there were chicken sandwiches..
who knows the ship could have been featuring the food of a delegation each night.

 

Like salads, or like chicken sandwiches and coffee?

By the way: I'm going to go out on a wild limb here and guess that just maybe with three hundred years more history behind us and contact with a thousand worlds that what is considered regular food and what is considered fine dining will have evolved slightly.

For example, if you were to go to the colonists at Plymouth in Massachusetts Bay in the mid-17th century, you could very well shock them by eating with this new-fangled concept technology of a fork, or something as bizarre and alien as a sandwich.

And finally, they're trying to show this scene is set in the future. How better to do that in a method not requiring exposition or optical effects than to include things which from context are obviously ordinary food but which aren't easily identifiable?

 

Well, we know they're indisputable canon now since Mirror Universe Phlox was seen eating some aboard the USS Defiant on ENTERPRISE, and they looked exactly the same as the old late '60s set props. So we still need to come up with a halfway definitive definition for them.

 

Even the occasional TV dinner would have worked.

That one scene in "Journey to Babel" gets a free pass, since there were lots of aliens there. Some of that could have been alien food, I suppose.

Normally, OTOH, Spock is the only alien crewmember on the ship, so there doesn't seem to be a lot of reason to make the food look that weird. (Vulcans are vegetarians anyway.)

You have no idea...

 

Re: What is the odd food in "Journey to Babel"?

I have the impression now that the odd food was gristhera - an Andorian hors d'ouevre -
it's in Memory Beta or Memory Alpha I think, look that up.