So, in the outer worlds, they have shit for food. 20 minutes of casual gameplay will tell you this. If you listen to Parvati and Reed Tobson talking, she says theyre not even putting fish in the saltuna cannery machines at Edgewater.
In this reddit thread i made, i mentioned the food issue to get some input. Some users highlighted one of the facts i missed in that the food has no nutritional value. Im sure theres other things i missed, feel free to add them.
The gist of the reddit post is simply "so, when you go to the hope, theres a written entry on either a datapad or terminal that says one of the crew members started growing tomatoes hydroponically, why couldn't they do it on the colony?
It took them like 70 years to realise they were malnourished and actually running out of edible but nutritionally empty food, earth only went dark 3 years before the player is awoken by Phineas Welles. They had plenty of time to import food."
Its established in game the soil on Terra 2 and Monarch [Terra One] is too acidic to grow much of anything, but in the edgewater plot at the beginning of the game Adelaide McDevitt fixes this at the abandoned botanical lab by using [human] corpses to fertilize.
Some irl science; Decomposition of anything organic, adds nitrogen to the soil. This includes bodies. Nitrogen neutralizes acids. They do infact add nitrates to irl fertilizers. Because of her fertilizer, Adelaide was able to make the soil farmable again.
Why didnt Halcyon just, ya know, hydroponically farm fruits and vegetables, or import earth soil and some fertilizer? They had seventy years to figure this out. If they had a botanical lab, then they probably had botanists who understood soil P.h. and hydroponics. Theres fresh water on halcyon, there's rivers all over Monarch and Terra 2.
Also, why didnt the board import edible animals/plants from monarch and farm them? Terra One's flora and fauna is edible! Cascadia contained most of the food factories, chef Raymond (npc you encounter in Stellar Bay as part of Parvati's sidequest) says "dustback casserole" is made with mushrooms native to Terra One.
I know that in the ending to the Help-Welles-Run, Phineas fixes this by, essentially, creating vitamins to fill the nutritional gaps, and Dr. Eva Chartrand (Npc encountered in the Sublight Quests) is trying to alter Human DNA so they dont starve to death from the nutritionally empty food, so theres obviously a canonic solution to the food issues, but there were much easier and obvious solutions long before the long term effects of malnutrition began affecting Halcyon.