I just threw away several pounds of potatoes.  I have a lot of trouble with potatoes.  I’ll buy a bag intending to make them, because I enjoy them; but then I’ll put it in the cabinet, and by the time I get back to it enough of them have gone bad that I don’t want to deal with them.  Sometimes I’ll have the sense to make a batch of potatoes from the bag as soon as I bring it home (although who wants the hassle of making potatoes immediately after the hassle of buying groceries?), and sometimes I’ll rummage through the mess to salvage what is still edible, but I’m always sending potatoes to the trash.

  I have similar problems with most fresh produce–carrots, celery, and lettuce particularly, but I’ve had broccoli go to flower and cauliflower go to rust in my refrigerator.  It has come to the point that I don’t buy fresh anything.  It’s too disheartening to toss out the strawberries I would have loved to eat but never found time to clean, or the peaches I was saving until I could get some heavy cream.  Produce is such a mess when it spoils anyway, and despite my practiced skills at cooking, organizing refrigerators and pantries seems to be outside my abilities.  So I generally pass through the produce aisle without looking, unless there’s something I know I’m going to use when I get home, or rarely if there’s something the kids will devour if they see it on the table.

  This doesn’t save me, though.  I don’t make all the purchase decisions.  Others in the household who do not understand the hazards of fresh fruits and vegetables are constantly putting them in the shopping cart and bringing them home.  I try to convey to these people that I will not be responsible for the preparation of such foods, nor for their disposal, but I’m pretty sure there’s a cantaloupe in the refrigerator even now that has passed its unlabeled expiration date long enough ago as to make removal of it problematic.  I wait in the most probably vain hope that someone will take responsibility for this, but soon it shall fall to me once more, and I shall be scraping up goo which can’t elope because it’s wedded to my refrigerator shelves.

  Of course, it isn’t just fruits and vegetables that spoil.  I keep my dinner meats frozen until I need them, thawing them early only if I need to marinate or otherwise prepare them overnight.  Still, I’ve had lunchmeat go bad.  Leftovers get discarded left and right, as many of them are ignored by hungry scroungers who would prefer chips and cookies over mashed potatoes and cold roast chicken.  Sometimes I can’t keep milk in the house, and sometimes I wind up pouring it down the drain.  Much the same can be said of bread, which sometimes vanishes as if trained by the local ninja clan and sometimes winds up adopting heavy military woodland camouflage, too moldy even to consider tossing to the ducks.

  The reason for this constant losing battle against spoilage is evident, if we consider it.  Anything we can eat can be eaten by other creatures; whether those creatures are mice gnawing through boxes and bags to reach food we’ve put away, bugs trying to crawl into our hiding places, or microscopic organisms devouring the sugars and proteins in our intended dinners and replacing them with toxic waste products, they are intent on finding food, and we have the food.  Thus we compete with mice and molds and microorganisms for our grub, and they have to win at least some of the time.

  This effort to protect our food from spoilage involves a fair amount of our modern technology.  We have frozen foods and canned foods, bakery products with preservatives, refrigerated transports, and vacuum sealed plastic and metal packages.  Efforts are constantly underway to cause food to last just a little longer before it is unfit for human consumption.  Even so, our packaging is marked with expiration dates, freshness dates, and last dates of sale, telling us that nothing we buy will keep for very long.  Even the Twinkie™, rumored to have enough preservatives to survive the Millennium, actually doesn’t last longer than half a year, according to its manufacturer.

  The problem was complicated historically by the lack of such technologies.  Preservatives are by and large twentieth century discoveries, the long term effects of which we’re still evaluating.  Refrigeration was developed at the dawn of the twentieth century, perfected by Australian and New Zealand sheep producers seeking ways to ship their abundant mutton to starving British ports half way around the world (a story we recounted briefly a few years back in discussing Edison).  Canning was developed to support Napoleon’s armies in Italy; it was he who said that an army travels on its stomach, and who made solving the food delivery problem a priority.  The answer came in the form of soup boiled and stored in wax-sealed wine bottles which kept not forever but long enough to deliver it to the men.  The next wave in preservation seems to lie in genetic engineering, creating new versions of old products that are resistant to their most virulent enemies.  We can only wonder whether quatrotriticale could have been made indigestible to tribbles and yet still be nutritious for humans.  That seems to be the efforts of current practice.  I understand that the engineered L-sugar, an artificial sweetener which was a mirror image of the sugar molecule completely indigestible to human dieters, was found to be a potent medium for bacterial growth as it passed through the digestive tract, so we can’t all digest the same foods effectively.  Perhaps there is promise here, but unless they reengineer our own digestive systems we’re probably going to continue sharing our food with something that doesn’t fully understand the concept of sharing.

  Prior to canning, long-term food preservation relied essentially on making food unpalatable to the competition.  Salted and dried meats don’t support microorganisms well.  Cheeses are in one sense already spoiled, converted by milk in a controlled spoilage process and then sealed in wax to protect it against other contaminants.  Dried fruits similarly have long shelf lives, as do many nuts.  Wine and beer contain alcohol, a poison which our large bodies are able to contain in doses which kill most infectious organisms, and thus safer to drink than the water in many parts of the world.  (And to add the voice of experience, don’t drink the soda, either–it is usually made from the water.)

  Some foods were protected by containers which were at least resistant to the primary pests who would be interested.  Earthen jars and eventually metal and glass canisters kept mice and bugs out of flour, although some cookbooks still instruct that flour be sifted together with other ingredients (a throwback to the days when it was not possible to keep flour without having bugs in it).  Cedar chests tended to discourage many insects, although these don’t entirely discourage rodents.  Despite these efforts, food was in many ways the most important consideration in long journeys.  You were going to have to find ways to supplement it, because you couldn’t carry enough to feed you the entire distance and you couldn’t keep what you could carry fresh and safe for that time.

  This, then, is the problem:  how do the player characters carry sufficient food for their adventures?

  Many games bypass this problem; it’s not particularly interesting, in some minds, to worry about the mundane aspects.  If you buy the right amount of rations, you’re covered.  If something spoils, you use your freshen food spell or your antitoxin solution to bring it back to edible.  For such play styles, food is a problem that is not permitted to get in the way.  That’s fine.  Not all games are made more interesting by all ideas.

  However, I’ve had good luck in a couple of settings with the use of food spoilage as a complication.  When food spoils, suddenly meals are rationed, tempers are short, morale is low–there are many consequences that can spring from this simple problem.

  Of course, if you introduce this problem, you should have some idea of why the food spoiled.  Characters usually take precautions against such things.  Did they pick up something contaminated at their last provisions stop, such as fruit secretly harboring worms?  (There is a type of worm that begins as an egg in a blossom and ultimately eats its way out of an apple, so there could be such a problem.)  Did the precautions fail, whether a refrigeration unit shut down or a container cracked or someone left a lid open on a box?  Some players will look for the cause and address it, or at least take precautions against that particular problem in the future.  Knowing the problem also helps the referee determine what else is affected.  Botulism from improperly canned foods can be deadly without being particularly detectable, but it tends to deform the cans, sometimes causing them to burst.  Understanding what sort of spoilage can occur and what the symptoms of it are is an important starting point.

  The focus of the problem should quickly move to how to deal with the shortage.  Sometimes the only possibility is to stretch the food that remains as far as it will go; the effects this has on the characters should be carefully considered.  Altering plans to pick up food at some known civilized outpost, or taking steps to collect more food at the cost of slowing the journey (hunting, fishing, and foraging are all time consuming activities) are also options.  In some games, truly creative players will find ways to solve the problem which are unexpected, and referees should give room for these.

  Thought should be given to how severe a problem to allow.  Some groups might be very comfortable facing the disasters of the Donner Party, but many players will not want to have to make that kind of choice.  In some games, this may become a challenge to be beaten, while others may see it as a Lifeboat-style test of their ethical principles.  If you’re going to make it a serious problem, consider carefully how the players are likely to approach it, and whether they will all be comfortable with each other’s answers.

  The aftermath of the food shortage can be interesting as well.  A problem of this magnitude can be the foundation for a bonding between characters that is stronger than family.  It could instead become the wedge that drives them apart forever.  If the latter is the case, you may have to start new characters in a new game after it’s resolved.  That will obviously be the case if the half-orc has eaten all the elves, but it might be so in less drastic outcomes.

  Again, it’s important to consider how severe the problem will be permitted to become, and how the players will respond to it.  It can be a fascinating direction for the adventure to take, handled well by everyone.  It can be a game breaker if it goes badly.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.