Chirp! Bark! Hey!

listen to me ramble about Food for thirty minutes (as an android who Can't Eat)

Written by Jude on July 19th, 2024.

so I've written a whole lot of essays about pretty heavy topics, fucked up things, and that has its place! however, listen to me, I contain multitudes, and I wanna talk about something incredibly silly and fun and just generally more important to my daily life -

✨ Food ✨

which is great, and sometimes cursed, but mostly great!

see, as an android, I don't eat food. I do take in fuel by swallowing it - which is way more normal-looking and convenient than prying open your android's chassis to get a port and slowly IV drip thirium into their system - but that doesn't mean I taste things the same way a human would!

there are basically two possible flavors when I put something in my mouth with the intent of putting it in my body - edible (thirium! that's fuel babey!) OR inedible (literally everything else)

thirium is just. that's edible! that's the fuel you need to live! I think it tastes good, and I can't describe that taste to anyone here because I don't taste things in the same way - like the flavor comparison is just not happening. if I had to compare it to anything, like in taste and texture, I'd say it's like fruit nectar? something that tastes very simple that goes down easily, and at the time of drinking it from a pack, it is a bit thicker than water - as it actually starts flowing around in the body it thins out into more of a watery, blood-like consistency.

(sidenote: oh yeah thirium is… kind of like blood? pumped through the body, cools your organs/biocomponents, provides chemical energy to convert into electrical through reactions with air, it's weird android fuel/blood/coolant. it evaporates on contact with air, through our lungs, so we have to ingest it like at least twice weekly to account for vapor loss, more if injured and losing it. this is not at all DBH canon, this is lore from Detroit Machina, I have never read a DBH fic that talks about thirium physiology in the same way we do)

and when something tastes inedible, obviously you want to spit it out. that is gross, that is vile, it is absolutely not something I want anywhere near my blood thanks. which means tasting anything that's not thirium like “hey what's that like?” is always gonna give the same answer: gross!

(second sidenote: as a deviant hunter, I also have a forensics analysis relay on my tongue. this basically means that if I'm licking something with the intent of chemically analyzing it, something like spilled thirium from a target, my sense of taste rewires from “edible vs inedible” to “processing a lot of extra data that I can sift through” (e.g. when was this spilled, what model was it from) because analyzing isn't the same as drinking, I just taste it - the amount swallowed with my saliva isn't enough to do any harm, so I don't need to process the edibility of it. this is Also not the same thing as tasting food as a human, for reasons I hope are obvious?)

so I really just get two tastes! they’re not all that sophisticated! (we are ignoring the Illegal Crime Flavors For Murder)

now HERE

IN A HUMAN BODY

THERE ARE FIVE FLAVORS 🙌

this is both a blessing and a curse

like it's really fun that instead of having One taste for Edible Items, you have Four! Five even! because bitterness is kind of an inedible flavor, it's unpleasant for most people, but that doesn't stop a lot of people from eating vegetables or drinking coffee or alcohol or unflavored sparkling water, and it also doesn't stop me, so I'm counting it as five flavors for food

anyway this is a Blessing

because wow! variety!! there's new things to enjoy in different ways! you can have the same ingredients for a dish and cook it in a different way and it will taste different! this is unbelievable honestly, it's fucking great?

and there's more to food than flavors! there's textures, there's temperature, there's compounds that make your mouth feel hot or cold or activate pain receptors, there's scent and how aromatic compounds completely change a food's flavor, a lot of things go into making a food interesting to eat!

like one of the best things to me with food is Temperature! maybe because that's one of the things that I'm familiar with, regulating your temperature through ingesting something that changes it (like I said, thirium is a coolant!) - example, hot soup on a winter day. or ice cream during a heat wave! it's just nice when the food helps you feel better in ways besides filling your stomach, I think

but also - horribly - food is also cursed. For Me Specifically

because uhhh you know how androids can only drink thirium? sometimes, when I'm stressed, food is viscerally disgusting to me. like it's a sensory issue, it Tastes too much, there are textures, it sucks, everything that is great about food can also be terrible when I'm having a bad time. unfortunately, sometimes I’ll be having a bad time because I'm low on blood sugar, and the way to solve this is to get some calories in me. the calories which are in the food. which is terrible

this is The Curse - I will feel better if I eat but eating will feel absolutely revolting until I feel better. it's wretched. (usually when this happens, I go to drinking milk, juice, something liquid with calories because it tastes very plain, won't sit on my tongue that long, and will be easy to swallow.)

I can solve this! mostly by setting alarms that tell us to start making food at a certain time, so it's ready to eat before I get low blood sugar and eating becomes sensory hell. and if I'm having trouble with food, sometimes my headmates won't be having the same problem, so I can switch out and they can eat the food! this is a shining example of how Teamwork can accomplish anything

I don't really know how to wrap up what's basically me talking about food for half an hour, completely unedited, but what I'm trying to say is, holy shit food is amazing? like yeah, I fundamentally understand why Aximili was like that in Animorphs, me the fuck too Ax, as another person who went from No Flavor to Five Flavors I'd also go feral for a cinnamon bun if I first experienced sweet pastries in a shopping mall. Absolutely Correct Behavior

basically uhh Food My Beloved (My Beloathed) (My Beloved) ❤️