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Yes. Though I am sure the latrines will be growing suspicious fungus later.

Iracundus wrote:

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
What's especially grimdark is you don't even get meat from the corpses, just starch. Could Kroot even survive on corpse starch?

I just put it up as a misleading name that has stuck. The human body does not contain significant amounts of starch. Even glycogen amounts to maybe 400-600g spread around the body. If you rendered a human body down for nutrients, what you would be getting is protein from all the meat and minerals from the skeleton.

Maybe the Imperium mixes the protein with starch from other sources (such as from crops). A hive world can get such sources from either imported crops or from locally raised flora. The teeming masses of a hive world generate a lot of human waste and that can be recycled and used as fertilizer.

Actually if "corpse starch" was 90% plant starch with some supplemental protein mixed in from corpses that would explain the name and the nutritional value and why they can produce so much of it. Mystery solved?

I wouldn't be surprised if it had extra stuff mixed in. You'd kinda need to since you can't feed a Hive on the corpses of its own dead indefinitely.

Corpse starch seems to mostly be a slang term and not actually an official designation(at least in-universe). It just gets called that since dead bodies are recycled in with all the other organic material to make it because why waste perfectly good protein? Starch is probably there because I expect the stuff is bland and of questionable flavor, just like eating wet cornstarch, and since it also has dead human bodies in it mashing the two together just makes sense.

Lets face it, if some food stuff was available today that was any appreciable % human flesh it would get a slang term to reflect that.

I'll bet that all nutrient paste in the Imperium probably gets called Corpse starch even if a particular batch doesn't actually contain corpses.

This product is probably just a generic "Nutrient Paste" recipe that can be made with standardized equipment that you can feed any vaguely calorie containing material into to create a shelf-stable food stuff. The Imperium is also many things, but wasteful is not one of them, so bodies get recycled along with everything else.

You could have an Agri-world which processes all of its crops into a version of corpse starch that basically only contains vegetable matter, Another world which makes it using plankton and algae. And hive worlds which mix imported bulk corpse starch with any organic material that is recycled from the hive itself, including bodies. Specialized collection crew who collect dead bodies on battlefields to process the corpses and mix them in with the corpse starch rations heading to the front.

 Grey Templar wrote:
I wouldn't be surprised if it had extra stuff mixed in. You'd kinda need to since you can't feed a Hive on the corpses of its own dead indefinitely.

Corpse starch seems to mostly be a slang term and not actually an official designation(at least in-universe). It just gets called that since dead bodies are recycled in with all the other organic material to make it because why waste perfectly good protein? Starch is probably there because I expect the stuff is bland and of questionable flavor, just like eating wet cornstarch, and since it also has dead human bodies in it mashing the two together just makes sense.

Lets face it, if some food stuff was available today that was any appreciable % human flesh it would get a slang term to reflect that.

I'll bet that all nutrient paste in the Imperium probably gets called Corpse starch even if a particular batch doesn't actually contain corpses.

This product is probably just a generic "Nutrient Paste" recipe that can be made with standardized equipment that you can feed any vaguely calorie containing material into to create a shelf-stable food stuff. The Imperium is also many things, but wasteful is not one of them, so bodies get recycled along with everything else.

You could have an Agri-world which processes all of its crops into a version of corpse starch that basically only contains vegetable matter, Another world which makes it using plankton and algae. And hive worlds which mix imported bulk corpse starch with any organic material that is recycled from the hive itself, including bodies. Specialized collection crew who collect dead bodies on battlefields to process the corpses and mix them in with the corpse starch rations heading to the front.

Hive worlds probably import two kinds of food from offworld. For the rich there is natural food as people today would understand the term, and they might be in raw unprocessed form so the nobles of the spire can have freshly baked bread or grilled grox meat. Then for the masses there may be the raw material to make "corpse starch" or the imports might already be in ready to eat ration form as it might be easier to just process it at the source agri-world. If raw material this might then be mixed with the bodies of the dead in order to add some protein since otherwise humans cannot survive on no protein diets.

In Ian Watson's Inquisitor, after the hive world of Stalinvast gets rocked by a Genestealer cult rebellion that is successfully put down, there is an explosion of street food merchants selling a variety of meat products that probably everyone knows is human but nobody says it. For the poor, it might have even been a rare chance at tasting real meat rather than ultra-processed rations.

"Corpse starch" isn't the only term out there. In the hive city of Varangantua, the workers seem to subsist on starch ("fist-sized blocks of starch, reclaimed from the dregs of the food-processing plants of the more affluent districts of Varangantua"), Stamp ("the all-encompassing term for reconstituted protein of even more dubious origina than starch") and lho-sticks (cigarettes basically). A character's mother manages to get her hands on a treat: some vitamin supplements and a box of "carb-bars" which are described as a sort of "synthetic sucrose slab". So the equivalent of a cheap sweetened chocolate bar minus the chocolate.

On some worlds workers might exist in effectively unpaid slavery conditions where they work for food. On Varangantua there seems to be money even at the lowest levels of society (called "slate" on their world because the moeny exists in little chips). Though the workers existed in effective wage slavery, having the illusion of petty choice in what you bought for food might mean a little less unrest.

Iracundus wrote:
On Varangantua there seems to be money even at the lowest levels of society (called "slate" on their world because the moeny exists in little chips). Though the workers existed in effective wage slavery, having the illusion of petty choice in what you bought for food might mean a little less unrest.

Ha what a wacky setting.

There is probably a spectrum. Some hive worlds truly have nothing in terms of food variety, others an illusion, and some others will have at least some actual food variety. Some enterprising people are probably farming roaches, rats, and other vermin to eat and get a little protein.

In the Rogue Trader DLCs you get to see part of the ship where people are farming algae and fungus for food.

I wouldn’t be surprised if human remains are only part of Corpse Starch.

I mean, we can reinforce breakfast cereals with additional vitamins and minerals, and I believe those can be synthesised entirely. At least the vitamins.

So, in terms of what humans need and can’t synthesis in their own bodies (not allowing for ancient STC genetic fiddlin’) you’d add Vitamin D and C.

Vitamin D because we need sunlight to synthesise that, and Vitamin C because the gene responsible for that is turned off in humans.

But again, that’s assuming no en masse genetic tinkering went on with the original colonists leaving ancient Terra for the stars. Certainly with 40K’s level of gene science? Turning on the Vitaman C gene seems entirely sensible, and pretty trivial, because it’s already there. You just need to know how to switch it on.

I appreciate some might find that a cop out? But given we see Kin and possibly other Abhumans as the beneficiaries of quite extreme genetic tailoring, the better to ensure their survival on various worlds? Making edits to improve or relieve nutrition considerations seems like a no-brainer.