Since some animals taste better than others, which one tastes best? Do hominids taste any good? Or maybe some predator which vampires might rarely encounter? Killer whales?
Carnivores taste better than herbivores; omnivores are presumably in between. I implied, although perhaps not strongly enough, that Edward tried a shark; it was more or less in line with predators in general. There’s not enough variance to expect there to be a particularly excellent species somewhere. Individual vampires have preferences within animalspace but there’s no way to predict what Bella will like best until she’s sampled a few kinds.
Are there any ways to process/cook/spice animal blood so that it tastes less bad?
Nope. It’s best straight out of the jugular.
Is there a way to synthesize a yummy blood substitute? This would be an ambitious research/engineering project but with immortality, you might as well get started.
Maybe. Bella’s probably going to start something along these lines once she can stand being around human blood—she wants to figure out what there is in human blood that makes it tasty. (Carlisle could start something like this, but while he’s a fine character and whatnot, he does not have an experimental mindset, and would be unlikely to give up large chunks of his time to satisfy this interest of Bella’s. For example, instead of thinking about what might cause vampire venom to cause turning, and then getting a lot of it directly into Edward’s heart when he was administering his first turn, he settled for recreating the bites he himself had received. This, it turns out, made the process unnecessarily drawn out.)
Your other questions have, as you noted, been addressed.
Thank you, I appreciate the reply. I didn’t mean that I was curious about the answers to those questions, as such. My only concern was that I felt it would be in character for Bella to be asking questions like these. And, as your answers imply, I’m sure she will—she’s only just turned and the problem would have been less salient to her before.
No, Bella just happens to like them a bit more than other animals (except, as per latest update, orca whales.) Emmett’s favorite is bear and Edward prefers mountain lion.
I asked you if killer whales were tasty and then there was a tasty killer whale in the next update. This elicited a small, pleasant emotional reaction in me which I can try to verbalize as follows: “oh, I guess I had a tiny impact on that story I like—it’s sweet of Alicorn to interact with her fans in this way”.
I thought of the possibility that you had the chapter written already and the whale was a mere coincidence but I thought that was unlikely enough that I could proceed on the assumption that it was not the case.
I’m overexplaining—in my defence it’s been my experience that the type of verbosity I am prone to finds a less unwelcome audience on Less Wrong than most other places.
That’s interesting—while I don’t object on principle to reacting like that to reader comments, and hadn’t already written ch. 32, I don’t have a memory of consciously choosing to include killer whales because of your question. In my head it looked like I was going, “Well, they’re on an island, Bella would rather not hunt close to humans, somebody would probably be annoyed with me if they ate dolphins… what’s the range on killer whales? Oh, those things are all over the place, that’s what’s for dinner.” But of course I read your question, and you probably primed me.
I thought of the possibility that you had the chapter written already and the whale was a mere coincidence but I thought that was unlikely enough that I could proceed on the assumption that it was not the case.
I wouldn’t say the coincidence was unlikely. The honeymoon location was carried over from canon and in such a setting killer whales are the obvious choice of food. They are more or less carnivorous dolphins. You cannot get too much higher on the “similar to humans and eat a lot of meat” criteria.
But you still have cause to be flattered. Great minds think alike and all that!
So, I know this is a long-since obsolete issue, but it really is a good thing for story purposes that none of the Cullens are experimentalists by nature. Hooking up an experimentalist with a precognitive is a balance-destroying arrangement… you get the results of any non-longitudinal experiment you make up your mind to perform, with a direct perception of whether that result is reliable or just a statistical fluke, without actually having to perform it.
Carnivores taste better than herbivores; omnivores are presumably in between. I implied, although perhaps not strongly enough, that Edward tried a shark; it was more or less in line with predators in general. There’s not enough variance to expect there to be a particularly excellent species somewhere. Individual vampires have preferences within animalspace but there’s no way to predict what Bella will like best until she’s sampled a few kinds.
Nope. It’s best straight out of the jugular.
Maybe. Bella’s probably going to start something along these lines once she can stand being around human blood—she wants to figure out what there is in human blood that makes it tasty. (Carlisle could start something like this, but while he’s a fine character and whatnot, he does not have an experimental mindset, and would be unlikely to give up large chunks of his time to satisfy this interest of Bella’s. For example, instead of thinking about what might cause vampire venom to cause turning, and then getting a lot of it directly into Edward’s heart when he was administering his first turn, he settled for recreating the bites he himself had received. This, it turns out, made the process unnecessarily drawn out.)
Your other questions have, as you noted, been addressed.
Thank you, I appreciate the reply. I didn’t mean that I was curious about the answers to those questions, as such. My only concern was that I felt it would be in character for Bella to be asking questions like these. And, as your answers imply, I’m sure she will—she’s only just turned and the problem would have been less salient to her before.
Does the boar’s blood taste better because of biochemical similarities between humans and pigs?
No, Bella just happens to like them a bit more than other animals (except, as per latest update, orca whales.) Emmett’s favorite is bear and Edward prefers mountain lion.
Oh, there is a yummy killer whale in the latest update! That was sweet of you.
What’s sweet about including the killer whale?
I asked you if killer whales were tasty and then there was a tasty killer whale in the next update. This elicited a small, pleasant emotional reaction in me which I can try to verbalize as follows: “oh, I guess I had a tiny impact on that story I like—it’s sweet of Alicorn to interact with her fans in this way”.
I thought of the possibility that you had the chapter written already and the whale was a mere coincidence but I thought that was unlikely enough that I could proceed on the assumption that it was not the case.
I’m overexplaining—in my defence it’s been my experience that the type of verbosity I am prone to finds a less unwelcome audience on Less Wrong than most other places.
That’s interesting—while I don’t object on principle to reacting like that to reader comments, and hadn’t already written ch. 32, I don’t have a memory of consciously choosing to include killer whales because of your question. In my head it looked like I was going, “Well, they’re on an island, Bella would rather not hunt close to humans, somebody would probably be annoyed with me if they ate dolphins… what’s the range on killer whales? Oh, those things are all over the place, that’s what’s for dinner.” But of course I read your question, and you probably primed me.
I wouldn’t say the coincidence was unlikely. The honeymoon location was carried over from canon and in such a setting killer whales are the obvious choice of food. They are more or less carnivorous dolphins. You cannot get too much higher on the “similar to humans and eat a lot of meat” criteria.
But you still have cause to be flattered. Great minds think alike and all that!
So, I know this is a long-since obsolete issue, but it really is a good thing for story purposes that none of the Cullens are experimentalists by nature. Hooking up an experimentalist with a precognitive is a balance-destroying arrangement… you get the results of any non-longitudinal experiment you make up your mind to perform, with a direct perception of whether that result is reliable or just a statistical fluke, without actually having to perform it.