156
votes
Why would a berry have a slow-acting poison?
It slowly kills the animal in order to spread over larger distances across soil with poor nutrients.
So if your fruit kills the host 1 meter away, not much gain. Let the host migrate for days.
Now ...
- 5,866
128
votes
Accepted
Lembas bread (2000 kCalories per bite)
It just doesn't add up if you only consider real world nutritional chemistry.
The most calorie-dense food available is fat at 9 calories/gram. That's 220 grams to hit 2000 calories, nearly a quarter ...
- 3,322
122
votes
Accepted
Why do the aliens buy Earth whiskey instead of just downloading the copy and creating it themselves?
Status symbol. Plain and simple.
Doing a carbon copy is easy and cheap. But if you can afford the original one it means you have a huge load of moneys at your disposal. And those moneys are no good ...
- 277k
116
votes
Accepted
How do I begin to explain that my orcs may survive by eating soil?
Starting from the ground up: how much caloric energy even exists in the things orcs eat? Energy metabolism for aerobes involves combining oxidizable with oxygen - in essence burning them. One can ...
- 304k
112
votes
What could cause sugary rain?
The rain is actually the blood of billions.
A species on a nearby planet is being harvested by a technologically advanced alien civilization and the specimens are drained of all their internal ...
- 2,790
90
votes
What sort of beak would a bone marrow eating bird have?
Just like so many of our creature-design questions, the answer to this one is: "nature beat you to it."
Presenting the Lämmergeier, or Bearded Vulture, a species of vulture that specializes in ...
- 10.9k
88
votes
Lembas bread (2000 kCalories per bite)
In the books there is a bit more wiggle room : (Farewell to Lorien; last few pages)
'Cram', he [Gimli] said under his breath, as he broke off a crisp
corner and nibbled at it. His expression ...
- 3,015
85
votes
How to butcher your dragon?
It is a common misconception (likely spread by crafty, older dragons) that only young dragons are tasty. Much like their avian relatives (related via the dinosaurs), mature dragons develop a depth ...
- 7,242
83
votes
Accepted
How can Dwarves produce honey underground?
The dwarves can keep the bees in the caverns, but provide them with suitable exits.
You have your beekeepers on the upper levels of the cities. You'll need ventilation somehow to allow for your city ...
- 11.5k
79
votes
Accepted
Does a hexagon-based bread loaf make any sense?
The hexagon is an efficient way to mass-produce identical loaves
Following a period of widespread bread alteration (think allum) the king has given a list of decrees to control the bread market. ...
- 65.6k
79
votes
What could possibly replace beer?
Water
The idea that medieval people drank beer because they did not have access to safe drinking water is a complete and unfounded myth.
To quote Steven Harris and Bryon L. Grigsby in their book ...
- 1,374
69
votes
Designing an animal that wants to be eaten
That's not too hard. There are plenty of real-life animals that want to be eaten. They're either parasites, or the hosts of parasites, whose behavior is modified by the parasite that they carry.
Of ...
- 41.5k
67
votes
Can a creature sustain itself by eating its own severed body parts?
No.
To regenerate requires more energy than the part itself will supply.
To eat the part you have to break it down chemically and then those chemicals are transported through the body and recombined ...
- 23.2k
66
votes
Accepted
Farming after the apocalypse: chickens or giant cockroaches?
Cockroach Farming is the future!
They feed the roaches wheat shavings and vegetables for four months. Then they're boiled, dried and some are crushed to put into pill form, which is much easier to ...
- 56.1k
65
votes
Accepted
How long could a person survive on nothing but water, salt, and sugar?
Warning: the links go to medical Wikipedia pages and they show bodies that look quite ill. Follow with caution.
Just isotonic sugar water will likely lead to death by scurvy, beriberi, and kwashiorkor,...
- 15.9k
64
votes
Why do the aliens buy Earth whiskey instead of just downloading the copy and creating it themselves?
This is the basis for the real world economic theory of Comparative Advantage.
The aliens can produce any of a large number of products with their industrial capacity. Similarly, Earth can use its ...
- 2,061
64
votes
What could possibly replace beer?
Brew a nice cup of tea.
People all around the world found and used all kinds of herbs and other plants with antibiotic properties since prehistoric times. Popular examples for Europe and North ...
- 15.5k
63
votes
Accepted
A food item only made possible by time-freezing storage?
There is a huge number of delicious fruits that are rarely eaten outside the regions they grow because they either don't transport well or go bad way too fast or both.
Examples
Cherimoya : a fruit ...
- 80k
62
votes
How does Santa eat every cookie?
Santa and his reindeer have to move at fantastic speed to fulfill their yearly duty, this has been solidly established.
Moving at that fantastic speed requires a lot of energy, and all the cookies ...
- 277k
61
votes
Accepted
How often must carnivorous grassland eat?
I think for this we'll need to look at real life.
Carnivorous plants tend to be adapted to grow in places with high light where the soil is thin or poor in nutrients, especially nitrogen, such as ...
- 26.3k
61
votes
How to not starve gigantic beasts
The creatures eat rocks. The excreta from this is fertile loam that is ideally suited to farming.
They can be trained to eat from rock formations in such a way as to create walls and fortification.
...
- 49.3k
59
votes
Selling food to the enemy
It makes no sense, as the attackers will obtain all the gold of the besieged anyway, as soon as the defense has fallen. Selling food to the defenders is the worst possible action, as it increases the ...
- 5,559
59
votes
Why would a berry have a slow-acting poison?
The simplest answer is that the delayed poisonous effect is a secondary (and from the plant's perspective, inconsequential) effect compared to the primary evolutionary purpose of the compound in ...
- 16.9k
58
votes
Accepted
How would a society isolated by monster attacks get food?
Fungiculture
Below the buildings and streets of your beset cities, farmers cultivate fungi in tunnels, basements, catacombs, and mines. Organic scraps and other biological waste is sent here to feed ...
- 13.1k
58
votes
Can you make a meal in a cemetery?
As a Matter of Fact, You Can Survive in a Cemetery!
Definitely don't eat the corpses, but...
You carry a blunt, heavy metal object. Cemeteries, especially in relatively urban areas, are frequented ...
- 39.5k
57
votes
Safe way to eat zombies?
In all cases, suppose that cooking properly will take care of infection.
But the skeletal muscles are rotten in the classic zombie: Perhaps you harvest just the (high-calorie) bone marrow, which is ...
- 69.2k
56
votes
Accepted
The first McDonald's restaurant on Mars
A (local) population of about ten thousand people should be enough. In my opinion there are three factors here.
Is there enough need for a restaurant? There seem to be around 14.000 McDonalds ...
- 1,293
55
votes
How can I make the food of my (fantastical) culture believable?
Food in war-oriented organizations tends to be nutritious, reheatable but can be eaten hot or cold, is neither too bland, too spicy, nor too pungent, is portable, and can be transported and eaten one-...
- 28.6k
53
votes
What could cause sugary rain?
Your world has much more of an airborne ecosystem than Earth, including a large number of floating photosynthetic aeroplankton. These little plants float about turning sunlight into sugar and are ...
- 24.4k
51
votes
Accepted
Would a carnivorous diet be able to support a giant worm?
Your worms are ambush predators. They very rarely move.
https://www.bbcearth.com/blog/?article=snapping-death-worms-can-hide-undetected-for-years
These giant polychaete marine worms
(Eunice ...
- 304k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible