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I was thinking about the food shortages on Armageddon and came to the conclusion that if Orks are essentially a fungus, and Kroot routinely eat them, could the Ork be prepared in such a way for human consumption?

Vultures have ridiculous stomach acid which allows them to eat flesh that would kill a person stone dead. So that Species A can eat Species B does not make Species B edible.

Orks aren’t fungi either. They’re meat and bone, but have symbiotic fungi as part of their biology.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Vultures have ridiculous stomach acid which allows them to eat flesh that would kill a person stone dead. So that Species A can eat Species B does not make Species B edible.

Orks aren’t fungi either. They’re meat and bone, but have symbiotic fungi as part of their biology.

If they are meat and bone it should make eating Orks easier.

Other than probably tasting terrible and being really tough - which, in a world of food shortages, is the least of your worries - I can't think of any lore which says you can't. Orks haven't adapted to be inedible, because they haven't had anything trying to eat them - the only things that do are Squigs, Squiggoths, and Tyranids (and Kroot, by the sounds of it), all of which manage it without any notable negative effects. I believe there's also been some old stories of warbosses eating grots, so there's another precedent.

I figure it's no different to the question "can you eat Eldar?".

Trouble is they are what they eat.

Predatory Species don’t taste terribly nice. And they can be filled with all sorts of nasties from their own diet.

What’s poisonous to a human may not be poisonous to an Ork. And whatever the active ingredient is? Will accumulate in their body, in turn making them hazardous to eat.

Just stick to enjoying your Corpse Starch and Soylent Viridians.

For the People. By the People. From the People.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Trouble is they are what they eat.

Predatory Species don’t taste terribly nice. And they can be filled with all sorts of nasties from their own diet.

What’s poisonous to a human may not be poisonous to an Ork. And whatever the active ingredient is? Will accumulate in their body, in turn making them hazardous to eat.

Just stick to enjoying your Corpse Starch and Soylent Viridians.

For the People. By the People. From the People.

It should be the same process that turns people into Scooby Snacks. I should write White Dwarf and ask them.

Apart from the fact it would be like top tier Heresy.JPG, humanity already has corpse starch made from people so mulching orks into meals isn't really required.

 Gert wrote:
Apart from the fact it would be like top tier Heresy.JPG, humanity already has corpse starch made from people so mulching orks into meals isn't really required.

Corpse starch is objectively unsustainable as a sole food source. Think about it- how long could you live off a single human carcass? Probably a few weeks, if you ate everything. Certainly less than a year. So to support one human for a year would require multiple corpses.

It is just a supplement to other food sources to be efficient. There is a reason hives rely on imports and don't just recycle corpses for food.

That said, I'm not convinced eating aliens is heresy. Grox are aliens and widely farmed.

Grox are also essentially animals, more so than even the dumbest Ork.

The Imperium seems to hold hatred and fear specifically for sapient aliens.

Orks are edible

Source: Against the Grain from the anthology No Good Men

Don't eat the red ones with the white dots.

Can you eat orks? Probably.

Should you eat orks..? No.

To quote Gabe, there are lots of things you can eat that aren’t food.

If I recall kroot shapers actually need to go out of their way to limit the amount of ork they eat because it starts having weird side effects. So I would guess that humans can eat orks/squigs for a short time but doing so for too long will cause problems.

If that wasn't the case squigs would actually be a great food source for humans, but they never seem to be used as such.

Kroot shapers stop their kindreds eating anything to excess because it leads to massive physiological changes and evolutionary dead ends,not because there's anything inherently harmful in eating Orks.

Needless to say humans do not have the same concerns about the side effects of eating things that the Kroot do.

I heard somewhere that Ork flesh has microbes thats harmful to humans and you have to cook them away.

On a side note, its funny that Corpse Startch is widely accepted in the Imperium. In the story Siege of Castellax, there were slaves on an Iron Warriors world who were enraged upon finding out that their protein sticks were made from human corpses.

Ashiraya wrote:Grox are also essentially animals, more so than even the dumbest Ork.

The Imperium seems to hold hatred and fear specifically for sapient aliens.

That is fair, although that doesn't exclude squigs and probably snotlings.

kyrtuck wrote:I heard somewhere that Ork flesh has microbes thats harmful to humans and you have to cook them away.

On a side note, its funny that Corpse Startch is widely accepted in the Imperium. In the story Siege of Castellax, there were slaves on an Iron Warriors world who were enraged upon finding out that their protein sticks were made from human corpses.

Well, corpse starch is widely accepted on hive worlds where life is extremely cheap and the resources per person are scarce. I doubt it is anywhere near as normalised on many other Imperial worlds and I wouldn't be surprised if people from most civilised worlds would find the practice abhorrent.

It’s good for the environment, and ok for you.

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

 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.

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.

Valhalla, at the very least, provides at least part of the food for its hives via algae cultivation in the caves. I wonder if the energy source is photosynthesis via lamps or chemosynthesis.

It is a common theme that hive worlds are not self-sufficient and require regular imports from at least one nearby agri world to remain supplied with food. The Blight of Isessos is a Heresy-era example where the Alpha Legion took out three agri worlds and starved 90 billion Imperial citizens in the sector.

Edit: on corpse starch specifically, I suppose it is possible that the Imperium has some kind of bioreactor technology that converts animal remains into a more nutritious form- a kind of gluconeogenesis from the proteins and fats in the corpses. It could feasibly add energy into the output foodstuff from typical Imperial power sources, similar to how photosynthesis fixes solar energy into chemical forms.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Trouble is they are what they eat.

Predatory Species don’t taste terribly nice. And they can be filled with all sorts of nasties from their own diet.

What’s poisonous to a human may not be poisonous to an Ork. And whatever the active ingredient is? Will accumulate in their body, in turn making them hazardous to eat.

Just stick to enjoying your Corpse Starch and Soylent Viridians.

For the People. By the People. From the People.

Humans are also a predatory species full of nasty toxins and other pathogens (notably prions).
Humans are basically poisonous to humans.

So if we are being realistic corpse starch would lead to human extinction by prion bio-accumulation (or corpse starch isn't actually made from human corpses).

I was thinking of that. And not necessarily.

I’m crossing the streams here, and bringing in the Dreddiverse’s Resyk.

In MC-1, only the super wealthy get buried. Everyone else goes off to Resyk, where the body is rendered down into a wide variety of useful components and compounds. Though it’s not immediately apparent if that includes foodstuffs. But all the chemicals that make us up are rendered and separated for certain, and used to fuel the city’s many industries.

We don’t know for terribly certain how Corpse Starch is made, only that it’s By The Workers, For The Workers, From The Workers. And given there’s a process described, it seems unlikely it’s just gut/fillet/pack it.

Given Necromunda is essentially now a Recycling World? I would be surprised if the Corpse Starch process involves leeching out the nasties.

Then again, we can happily assume the denizens of the Underhive in particular have evolved a far greater tolerance for pollutants and chemicals just by Not Dying In Childhood Whilst Living In A Toxic Hell. So perhaps it’s not required.

 Tyran wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Trouble is they are what they eat.

Predatory Species don’t taste terribly nice. And they can be filled with all sorts of nasties from their own diet.

What’s poisonous to a human may not be poisonous to an Ork. And whatever the active ingredient is? Will accumulate in their body, in turn making them hazardous to eat.

Just stick to enjoying your Corpse Starch and Soylent Viridians.

For the People. By the People. From the People.

Humans are also a predatory species full of nasty toxins and other pathogens (notably prions).
Humans are basically poisonous to humans.

So if we are being realistic corpse starch would lead to human extinction by prion bio-accumulation (or corpse starch isn't actually made from human corpses).

That assumes that humanity hasn't worked out how to degrade/filter prions or remove other accumulative toxins like heavy metals in tens of thousands of years.

That said, I can imagine a plotline where the STC human recycler develops a fault that stops filtering out he prions and the Inquisition thinks there is a weird Nurgle outbreak that is actually just a technical fault.

The prion diseases are, as far as I am aware, strictly down to eating brains and spinal cords (possibly major ganglia). If they avoid including them, and probably our livers, in 'corpse starch' it should be fine. Just not long term fesable as a long term food supply in a closed system.

While Prions are predominantly located in the brain and spinal cord, they can be found in any other part of the body.

As for an artificial way to filter them... I guess is possible but it would mean rendering down meat to its biomolecules, and if you can do that then you can do the same thing.to Orks, answering the OP with a "yes, as long as you do to it whatever you already do to human meat".

Prionic diseases are usually slow onset, as the misfolded proteins take time to bind to your correctly folded proteins and twist them into the misfolded shape, which then accumulates in your cells.

If your average hive worlder doesn't live past 35, they may never see the onset of a prionic infection.

With the huge populations you're dealing with it's also an intensive selective pressure which could very quickly select for resistance to, or delay of prionic disease onset.

So long as more meat is born for the eternal grinder, both the imperium and evolution are satisfied.

I think generally they're probably not poisonous or anything. Just probably gross, tough, and other unpalatable descriptors. But I doubt you couldn't chuck them in a corpse starch grinder. You'd just have to clean the darn thing from all the fungal growth its going to get.

 Tyran wrote:
While Prions are predominantly located in the brain and spinal cord, they can be found in any other part of the body.

As for an artificial way to filter them... I guess is possible but it would mean rendering down meat to its biomolecules, and if you can do that then you can do the same thing.to Orks, answering the OP with a "yes, as long as you do to it whatever you already do to human meat".

There is a reason I also said degrade. It is entirely plausible they have some kind of enzymatic soup for human proteins that denatures prions into a safe form, or an equivalent.

After all, we also cannot transplant brains or run cyborg slaves on artificial blood replacements either.

I agree it make work on Orks, but if the process is optimised for human proteins it might not.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Hellebore wrote:
Prionic diseases are usually slow onset, as the misfolded proteins take time to bind to your correctly folded proteins and twist them into the misfolded shape, which then accumulates in your cells.

If your average hive worlder doesn't live past 35, they may never see the onset of a prionic infection.

With the huge populations you're dealing with it's also an intensive selective pressure which could very quickly select for resistance to, or delay of prionic disease onset.

So long as more meat is born for the eternal grinder, both the imperium and evolution are satisfied.

Also good points. Even Kuru tended to hit adults.

Yes, orks are edible.