Two reasons, actually.
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It’s not their preferred preparation. All the replicated food is based on a pattern from an original recipe. It’s not adding flair or anything, it’s literally a copy of a dish made who knows how long ago. And that’s where the next reason comes from:
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Imagine eating some spicy pepper dish from, like, the 1940’s vs the same dish made today with spicer peppers. It wouldn’t be as spicy eating something that wasn’t, at the time, really selectively bred to be more spicy. If the recipe for the replicator is, like, hundreds of years old it would probably not be as potent as the same dish made with real ingredients.
I can imagine that the characters that have expressed disdain for replicated food probably get hit by both of these. It’s not the way they would preferred it to be made, and it’s also like eating vegetable jello salad in 2024.
“Gimme a noodle bowl of a variant i never tried before. As allways, make it on the spicy side. Hot. If one doesn’t exist, smash together gordon ramsey, anthony bourdain and some random vulcan cooks in a simulation and whip up a few innovative, new ones.” Would be my go-to.
One would imagine every single, good recepie from the internet is going to exist in the replicator database. And it’s gonna know what is popular and what is not. One would imagine there being stuff in there that is almost impossible to cook yourself and stuff made by centuries of food scientists. Synthetic stuff and stuff from history. Wanna try bland potatoe stew from the 15th century or rare wompa-lompa steak?
The people complaining have poor imagination or are horrible at interacting with the computer. You can try human meat with black pepper if you are so inclined. Without prion disease too!
Vulcan cooks are probably a bad bet if you’re looking for something spicy.
They’re from a desert planet, if any comparison can be made to humans, they’re probably great at making spicy food. On Earth, it seems like all of the best spicy food is either from desert regions or tropical forests.
The Vulkans, Klingons, and Romulans all probably have great spicy food.
I can’t remember if I saw it online or if it was just something my friends and I were talking about, but it was a theory that Vulcans probably use stupidly spicy food while training to control their emotions.
I dunno, when Neelix made the soup spicy Tuvok thought it was too spicy.
An outlier?