fandomhigh | ACTUAL Ancient Food Crimes; Friday, First Period [07/22].

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ACTUAL Ancient Food Crimes; Friday, First Period [07/22].

"Morning, everyone!" said Summer, perhaps a bit too cheerfully, but that was starting to be par for the course for her classes these days, wasn't it? She stood at the front of the classroom with several little disposable cups scattered around in front of mysterious unlabeled pitchers of various different beverages. So already, you knew this was going to be...fun.

"I have very recently fallen into a bit of a wealth of beverages that prove that food crimes are not just a thing of the past: there are many of them alive and well and happening today, even outside my own kitchen. A lot of these come from the synthesis of artificial flavors and chemicals that allow food scientist to do things like make a soda taste like grass or bacon or s'mores. Which begs the question: just because you can, does it mean you should?

"Odd pops, however, are indeed thoroughly modern, but, as we learned last week, ancient people could sometimes do some weird stuff to beverages, too. Granted, their reasons typically had a lot more to do with the fact that easy access to clean and uncontaminated water was a rarity and adding things like vinegar to you drink was a good way to kill off bacteria that would make you sick, where there are arguably absolutely no benefits to consuming a ranch-flavored soda, but I digress.

"I thought, since I have all these modern weird sodas from a mysterious benefactor," who she will happily blame for all of this should anyone complain...and she expected at least someone to complain, "I thought we'd do something a little different today. Blind taste tests, on a variety of different different drinks, and the goal is for you to figure out: Ancient Beverage Crime? Or An Abomination from This Day and Age, Happening Right Under Our Very Noses? And we'll just see where that takes us."

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Come try some drinks and attempt to determine exactly what it is and if it's a modern monstrosity or an ancient anomaly!

Offerings include (but are not limited to, if you wanted to mod something else, you're welcome to!), unsurprisingly, the infamous meat seltzer, grass soda, posca, pulque, ranch soda, restina, s'mores soda, kumis, chica de jora and its sister soda of sweet corn.

Cheers!

Edited 2022-07-22 09:57 (UTC)

Goose was definitely going to be trying all of these drinks and the first one that he picked up happened to be one that he definitely knew.

"Oh this one's the meat seltzer," Goose declared confidently, which was not any surprise really and then paused, "er ... I'm guessing it's an ancient beverage crime?"

Goose really had no idea, he had only found out about meat seltzer on Wednesday and he had another sip of the drink.

Summer grinned faintly, shaking her head. "Thoroughly modern," she informed him, "although I do have a feeling that one is going to go down in history all the same."

Goose considered the drink for a bit and grinned, "I wonder if there's any meat seltzer back home?" he wondered, "I should check and see if they do,"

After a pause he picked up another drink to try, which turned out to be the Kumis, this one was a bit harder for him to guess, "this is some kind of milk drink?" he tried.

And now Summer was left wondering if providing Goose's galaxy with meat seltzer would put her on some kind of list with his government....

"Fermented mare's milk, to be specific," she offered. "Popular especially among the nomadic tribes of the ancient Mongolian steppes. The fermentation process is actually very important, actually, because mare's milk apparently contains so much lactose that you will have a very bad time if you drink it straight. Forget about it if you're lactose-intolerant, you could probably die."

Probably not.

But you might wish you did!

Re: Drink Drinks and Discuss! - ACTUAL Ancient Food Crimes, 07/22.

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Liz wondered for a few moments if this would be something she'd be safe to try in class and she did hover near the drinks for a bit as she debated.

"I don't suppose there's really any safe ones for me to try?" she considered, tilting her head slightly as she tried to figure out if she did actually want to try one.

"Technically speaking," Summer noted, "I'm pretty sure none of these are safe for anyone to be drinking. But...."

She took a moment to consider what the options were, and rearranged a few cups to move them forward for Liz.

"These should be fine," she decided, which included all of the sodas (but not the meat seltzer, that just seemed cruel) and the posca. Everything else? Summer had no idea, but it just generally seemed to err on the side of caution with those.

Liz hesitated and then reached over to pick up one of the drinks, that turned out to be the s'more soda and took a tentative sip, "I think this one is the s'more soda?" she asked and then took another mouthful, blinking as she could really taste the chocolate, apparently she was really having a craving for chocolate and it didn't matter that it happened to be in a soda.

"Oh," then she remembered what the purpose of the activity was, "is this something that is more modern?" she tried.

"It is," Summer confirmed with a nod. "Although, fun fact, we do have evidence of marshmallows that trace back to ancient Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians. But the s'more itself didn't start making an appearance until much later."

Look at her! Retaining information she'd googled and sharing it in class like a real teacher over here!

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Yeah, Vi had a sneaking suspicion that Summer had never really had to worry about bad water. She picked up a random cup and downed it in one go, feeling the burn of some kind of booze, which was still smoother than the stuff circulating Stillwater. "Old. It's not bubbly."

That sneaking suspicion would have been wrong, but okay. Mostly right, sure, but there had been, like, at least two occasions...

"While a lot of this is definitely hinging on modern sodas," Summer allowed, "which are bubbly, that's not necessarily a hard-and-fast rule. Plenty of gross modern drinks are bubbly, and fermentation can sometimes cause ancient ones to naturally fizz. The difference between carbonated fizz and natural fizz, though, yeah, are pretty different."

Guillermo was not really sure about trying these different drinks but he could at least give them a try and the first one that he picked by some weird coincidence happened to be sweet corn, "oh," Guillermo made a face as he tried it, "I ... it tastes like sweet corn," he decided.

Guillermo liked sweet corn, he just didn't like it in soda form, "I'm going to go with that this this more modern," he considered.

Summer grinned faintly, and nodded, then gestured to the chica de jora beside the sweet corn soda. "You should try that one, too," she suggested, "and do a comparison. They definitely have something in common."

Guillermo tentatively took a small sip of the chica de jora, he blinked a bit, "that one's not too bad, a little bit sour maybe," he admitted, "this has corn in it as well right?" he thought he could taste it.

Summer nodded. "Exactly," she said. "Although I would not be surprised if the only corn in the soda actually came from high fructose corn syrup. That one," nodding at the most recent cup in Guillermo's hand, "is chica de jora, corn beer, passed down from the Incas."

Billy grabbed one of the drinks and made a face as he took a taste. He didnt know what Kumis was but it was not good.

"Tastes like fizzy sour cream..." he said with a slight wince. "Actually reminds me of the drinks we ~~handwavely~~ ran into while in the jungles on one of our missions. And that tastes just as bad as this."

"Well, that one comes from the steppes of Central Asia," Summer offered, with a faint grin, knowing that the reveal of exactly what Billy had been drinking was about to come up, and that was usually pretty fun, "but it wouldn't surprise me at all if various forms of fermented mare's milk managed to make it into other parts of the world as well. And stuck around for some of them, too."

"Yeah some of the groups we worked with in Africa were fond of similar drinks.... thankfully I didn't stick around long enough to develop much of a taste for them."

Unlike some of these people, Gray had the good sense to at least sniff a cup of mystery liquid before putting it in his mouth, which was the happy story of how he was once again able to avoid drinking the meat seltzer. A second cup got, "Oh, that's the retsina," and then the high schooler downed the wine. "It's actually not bad, especially if you mix it with ambrosia. Now which one's the ranch soda? I wanna try it."

Gray. No.

Summer took a moment to consider the restina, before noting, "I'm going to just assume you don't mean the mid-Western staple of potlucks and picnics when you say ambrosia, but, hey, I could be wrong. Also, telling you which one is the ranch soda defeats the whole purpose of the activity. Be adventurous, and take those chances."

Although she did consider just telling him based solely on the fact that he was actually requesting it.

"I might," Gray told her with a straight face. "You don't know my life." He didn't, but hey.

Scientifically, it was probably one of the clear, bubbly liquids. One of them was meat seltzer, but he'd already figured that one out, so...

He picked up another cup and gave it a dubious sniff. Could be ranch? He sipped cautiously. "Bleh," he said, sticking out his tongue. "Grass." Did he really think the ranch soda was going to taste any better?

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Do you know what is not delightful? Ranch soda.

Steve's face was a picture.

Ohhhh, a face like that from Steeeeve was a rare treasure, indeed.

And very delightful.

"Not a fan?" Summer guessed.

"Not a fan," Steve confirmed.

Hannibal wrinkled his nose as he tried a few of the more pungent ones. He could tell the modern from the ancient, though, purely on the basis of which ones had modern chemicals in them.

There was a reason he didn't drink a lot of soda unless he made it himself.

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