Distance Tax
The vending machines in the GearHead universe are quite a bit more advanced than the ones found in our current era. They are miniature factories, capable of accepting a wide variety of raw foodstuffs and processing it into nutritionally complete meals. Typically the vending machine manager will load the machine with whatever raw materials are cheaply available. The machine’s onboard computer will compare the ingredients on hand against the thousands of recipes in its memory, then decide on the most efficient dishes to prepare.
On an asteroid station like Cayley Rock, where natural foodstuffs are rare and expensive, a vending machine may instead be provided with raw nutrient solution which it can use to grow yeast, fungi, and cloned animal tissue. These products are textured and colored to simulate a wide variety of foods.
In the colonies, tube-grown cloned steak is a popular dish. Thanks to a modest amount of bioengineering it is available in a wide variety of unnatural flavors, such as jasmine and banana. Visitors from Earth typically react with horror to these tubesteaks; people from space are equally shocked by the Terran practice of eating genuine dead animal parts.
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