19130825

Owing to its rapid development in recent years relative to its humble roots, /ag/ has gone through a number of stages of evolution in its citizens' diets, though tradition has mostly stayed intact throughout.

What crops do your people grow for consumption?
Do you have unique delicacies?

Prior to industrialization, the island's staple crops were corn and soybeans. Despite their isolation and otherwise lack of scientific background, generations of cultivation experiments led the former to becoming a juicy, sugary mess of calories, well-liked by young women of bridal age, while the latter was mostly reserved for feeding livestock and fish. Excess was stored in large huts at the centers of villages for later use in their frequent parties and ceremonies (and thus rarely remained "excess" for long), though this practice has largely died out along with the island's soil.

The real bulk of the people's nutritional value, and something that's persisted to the modern day albeit with reduced availability, was it's extensive animal husbandry operation, the central unit of which being an indigenous freak of nature found nowhere else in the world. Some thousands of years ago, a pod of Antarctic seals must have somehow drifted leagues off-course and encountered the island's ancient inhabitants, whereupon they were captured and bred for food despite being laden with far too much insulating fat to survive naturally in such a warm environment. Through generations upon generations of assisted evolution, they overcame this limitation through a variety of homeostatic processes without becoming any less fattier, resulting in the most decadent marbled meat to have ever graced the planet.

Following the island's modernization, crop farming is mostly a thing of the past, though its legacy lingers on through a variety of customs that will later be expanded upon. Meanwhile, tropical seals are still farmed by the island's elite as well as wealthy restaurant owners, driving up both the meat's cost and caloric value as it's increasingly refined into a tourist-trapping delicacy by the year.

What about food you import, and from where?

Unfortunately (or fortunately from some more depraved citizens' perspectives), the ongoing harvest of /ag/'s bounty of rare metals has resulted in the near-destruction of its old food culture. Farmland is razed to establish mines and travel routes, local food available for seal and fish breeding grows more and more limited, and the habitable parts of the island are pushed nearer and nearer to the coastline as its internal regions are picked apart with increasing voracity by big business.

In the early stages of industrialization, this actually caught the island's people off-guard in a rather severe manner: inexperienced with overseas trade and too blinded by the incoming profits to be alarmed by their food sources dwindling, there was a period of a couple months where they were in danger of starvation, of all things. As an emergency measure, a slew of newly-appointed diplomats were sent out with the nation's freshly-earned fortune in-hand to plead to anyone who would listen for as much food as they could spare.

As they quickly found out, though, trying to transport all the parts of a balanced diet between continents for weeks on end simply isn't viable, even less so in quantities large enough to feed an entire population. As a result, what most envoys ultimately ended up returning with was a slew of snack food laden with preservatives. Dried jerky, wrapped cheese, chocolate desserts, grain pastries, alcohol... things developed more for pleasure and recreation than staying healthy and fit. Nevertheless, it was all that was available to feed the people, and so feed them it did.

And yet, even as crisis measures started to stabilize and ensure that demand for essential food items could be supplied (if no longer in excess), curiously, the snack import didn't slow down. Far from it, foreign purchases actually increased quite a bit, the reason being simple: the citizens preferred this diet of empty calories to what they'd been eating prior. It tasted better, it was easier to store, offloading the burden of food production onto foreigners allowed them to spend more time on personal pleasure, and most importantly... it made people start fattening up at an unprecedented rate, a trait they'd long-admired. An explosion of obesity swept through the citizens as they rested on their laurels (and they COULD afford to do so as the mining profits continued to pour in), in a period of just a few months transforming the nation from an island of pleasantly plump, but hardworking tribesmen into a populace of hedonistic lardball tycoons that only grew fatter and greedier by the day.