Battlestar Galactica: The food question answered (sort of)

I’ve blogged previously about the issue of food on Battlestar Galactica: specifically, where are they getting it? With some 40,000 odd people on the Colonial Fleet, that’s quite a few mouths to feed. Previously I speculated that perhaps they were growing food and raising cattle or poultry on some of the civilian ships. Last night’s episode, The Passage, touched on the food issue. The food on the Colonial Fleet became contaminated, and unless they found food soon, the entire fleet would soon starve. They do find food on a planet, sort of: they find edible algae on a planet beyond a star cluster. It has to be put through their “food processing” machine before its edible.

Based on the episode, does the fleet, after all, harvest food from planets? And if that’s the case, wouldn’t planets that support food edible by humans - particularly plant food, which would produce oxygen - support human life? Which slingshots us back to the question I posed previously: if they’ve passed all of these planets that could support human life, why didn’t they set up shop there? I suppose they might have passed them up simply from fear of the Cylons finding them. As I recall, New Caprica was in a place where (supposedly) the Cylons would never find them. That turned out real well…

Another question that comes up based on last night’s episode is this: if they’re harvesting edible plants from planets for their food source, does that mean the entire fleet is vegetarian? Okay, everyone: tonight’s dinner is cooked algae! Tomorrow’s dinner will be steamed algae. The next night will be….

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