Quorn: When hypothyroid is it ok to eat quorn... - Thyroid UK

Blame this on the fact that I used to be a cook in a restaurant, ok? But I thought a lot about food and availability in a CP Red setting, especially with regards to my GM setting our game in a flooded London and where characters are getting their eats, especially if they don't want to eat kibble.
- Ersatz foods. In a time of scarcity, people develop substitutes. For example, the most British thing I can think of is a hot cuppa tea. But tea comes from the leaves of a plant, Camellia sinesis, and I'd imagine there aren't that many tea plantations left post Red. So what's a choomba got to do for his cuppa? WWI austerity led to the development of ersatz goods. Substitutes that were like but not as satisfying as the real thing.
- Famine foods. Did a semester in Finland on exchange and learned from one of my Finnish history classes that in famines people stripped the inner bark of pine and birch trees and ground it into flour. The resulting block of bread was about as appetizing as a plank, but it kept folks going for just a little bit more.
- Chopped and formed foods. Neuromancer makes reference to chopped and formed krill patties, and Asian cuisine has surimi, or fish minced and pounded into starch to make krab legs. In this case there'd be both animal origin protein (easily farmed fish, bug proteins) and vegetable origin proteins (textured vegetable protein, fungus-based fake meat like Quorn) formed into meatlike substitutes.
- A lot of us urban and many rural folks don't really think of brownfield ecology. Brownfield ecology is a study of what grows and lives in abandoned/disturbed land. eg: Raspberries and blackberries easily colonize abandoned urban land, as do nettles. You can make an ersatz tea from dried blackberry leaves (just add caffeine!) and eat nettles like spinach. If you want to go even further, the nettle stems can be soaked and pounded, then spun and woven to make a linen substitute. You can get an awful lot of food out of edible weeds if you know what to look for, and perhaps subtly encourage to grow.
- Urban farming. There's bound to be an enterprising tech or three somewhere who's kept tinkering with an efficient and compact water-circulation setup. Put greywater in a top-down vertical gardening setup and the plant beds filter and purify the water and fertilize plants. Or do the reverse, keep fish with a high nitrate tolerance in a tank, and then run the dirty water through plant beds for aquaponics. Sure, there's still the heavy metals and potential industrial poisoning in the water, but some folks might not live long enough for the accumulation to kill them... they get shot instead.
- 3D Printing Food. A bag of mealworms or grubs Blade Runner 2049 style is visually unappealing to most people, whose cuisines don't contain much entomophagy. What's someone to do with a bag of grubs that people won't eat? Dehydrate the fuckers, mill them into protein flour, and then 3d print them into innocuous looking snacks! Deep-fried protein puffs, 100% black soldier fly protein. My crested gecko eats fruit shakes with bug protein in them. Can't get rice? 3d print the next available carb into rice-shaped pasta. (We already have that one, it's called couscous. Or orzo.)
- Fun guys from Yuggoth. Or, mushrooms. Vernor Vinge's space opera A Deepness In The Sky has people in a space habitat farming a wood-alike with mushroom mycelial cellulose. Mushrooms, being a fungus and a decomposer, are easy to grow on waste materials. Shredded and de-inked paperfax as a moisture absorbent for composting toilets + mushroom spawn? Sure.
What does this mean in practice? Say my Tech Boots has had a whole night staying up working on a rebuild/custom that involved a lot of parts fabrication. He's been polishing up sintered metal 3d print parts and soldering and doing a bit of spot welding here and there. Choomba's ravenous.
Well, he spent the whole night up drinking mugs of builders' tea — sweet, hot, milky, strong stuff. Not particularly expensive or classy. In his case it'd be a tea blend made from toasted and dried blackberry and raspberry leaves with synthetic flavors and caffeine added, plus soymilk, plus sweetener. Maybe, when his hands are clean in between assembly jobs and he just has to watch the 3d printer go, he has a couple biscuits, made from cattail pollen and cattail root starch.
That's not enough to keep a 6ft tall guy going for the whole night, so he wants breakfast. He locks up the workshop and staggers out the slip (he's got his workshop set up in a houseboat) and out into the mean streets of London. He's a regular in this neighborhood, and he does good, professional work, so the local gangers know him and just let him pass with a couple comments about scheduling appointments.
He makes it to the local greasy spoon (diner, basically), and orders a full English. For those who aren't in the know: a Full English is a meal made up largely of grease and sodium with a couple vegetables so you don't feel entirely bad about it. It usually contains bacon, sausages, baked beans, fried tomatoes, fried mushrooms, fried bread, or buttered toast. You can also get black pudding (blood sausage) and bubble and squeak (cabbage and potatoes fried with leftover meat) with it. The usual beverage is tea.
In this case, they haven't seen a real tomato in months, unless they want to heist some urban farmer's tomato plants, and the last time someone tried that they got ventilated with a turret and needed some emergency medical treatment. Not worth it.
The tomato slices in this breakfast are pickled crab apples. The mushrooms are real mushrooms, at least, grown in a blacked-out room somewhere. The bacon's a soy-based Fakon (tm), the sausages are mostly starch filler with some bug protein. The black pudding's got 3d printed grains of barley in it, and real blood, just don't ask where from (non porcine origins). Cabbages have been scarce, so instead of cabbage in the bubble and squeak it's blanched nettle leaves. No meat in that. The baked beans are real beans, but the tomato sauce they're served in is an ersatz made from vinegar, minced beets, and mucilage.
You can't have eggs without hens, so the "eggs" in this case are just slices of soypro (tofu).
The fried bread is a non-wheat sponge made from seaweed gels and starch, frozen and then baked to give it the holey texture we associate with yeast-risen bread that contains gluten. It's a little stiffer than regular bread, a bit crumblier, but it soaks up the grease pretty well.
He gets a cup of tea to go with, and they use a different herb blend than his supplier does. In this case it's chopped, dehydrated dandelion roots + caffeine and toasted acorn flour, in soymilk, with sugar.
After this breakfast, he goes back to the boat, pleasantly full, and notifies his Fixer that he's finished the package for the client, they can hit him up at his input's clinic for installation, since she's a street doc. And then he staggers into the tiny cabin beside the actual workshop, folds out the bunk, and sacks out for a couple hours.

Hi all,
I am doing a trash audit and have found that my biggest source of plastic waste is meat alternatives. I have trouble digesting beans (the easiest zero waste, vegetarian protein) if I eat them daily so I buy roughly one each of the following items on a monthly basis to get enough protein in my diet. If you could share no plastic or zero waste recipes for any of the things below, I would be so grateful!

• Gimme Lean breakfast sausage
• Quorn chick'n cutlets
• Tofurky celebration loaf
• Field Roast italian sausage
• Gardein or Quorn meatballs (this is probably the one I buy most!)
• Beyond Burgers (I used them like ground beef to make meatloaf)
• Lightlife Tempeh

A note about making my own meat alternatives:
I have tried making my own seitan. It was tasty! However, the only place I can find bulk vital wheat gluten in my area puts the product in a plastic container in the bulk section (wtf!).