Cooking at the end of the world in Final Fantasy XIV

theverge.com:

The end of Eorzea is nigh, and I’m running around looking for ingredients for a superbread that will sustain its entire population on a space voyage to find a new planet. Panaloaf isn’t just any old type of bread, but a meticulously designed science experiment meant purely as a vessel for nutrition; since it’s a disaster ration, it can only be made using resources available on our spacecraft, which just so happens to be the moon. It goes without saying that panaloaf tastes like utter shit, and the thought of eating it for a day, much less a year or even a decade, is absolute hell.

This isn’t a Silicon Valley doomsday scenario, but the Culinarian questline in Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker set in the isolated city of Old Sharlayan. (Culinarian is a non-combat crafting profession that revolves around cooking.) Sharlayans have quite a bit in common with the techbro stereotype: a thirst for knowledge; a critical disconnect from the majority of social, cultural, and economic realities; and a disdain for the humanities. And while I’ve played plenty of games in speculative settings where worldbuilding relies on miserable food, the Culinarian’s unassuming journey opens a door into a rather unexplored realm: the connection between video game culture and startup attitudes toward eating, in an age fixated on technological progress. It’s also an age defined by climate crisis. For some, the anthropocene isn’t coming; we’re already in it.

Faced with the coming apocalypse, the Culinarian must help nutrition student Debroye with the seemingly impossible task of making panaloaf edible. It’s an extreme version of Sharlayan’s most infamous food — the much-maligned Archon Bread, a dry, ashy, flavorless loaf that busy students use to stave off