Monster Food Theories (part 3)
@anvypie poked me about this post, so after a minor 5 year delay, here's part 3 of my food theories for Undertale! Because I like world-building and have far too much time to think about things at work haha.
In part 1 I covered why I believe monster food is most likely physical food infused with magic, and therefore is limited to what can be produced in the Underground. In part 2 I covered which foods the monsters have access to canonically (and also a few more they probably have in theory, though I have additional thoughts on that which I'll get into later.)
In this final part I'll cover my thoughts on the differences between monster and human food, as well as some updated ideas about the foods monsters have access to and why. But first, we have to back up and talk about two related theories that impact how this all works: The Timeline and Where Magic Comes From.
(This is gonna be a looong one, but I hope you enjoy the read!)
This theory came together for me fairly recently, so I'm actually pretty excited to share my thoughts on it.
In Undertale, our sense for the timescale of the events of the game is rather fuzzy. We have the opening sequence, of course, which gives us a vague, fairy tale-esque intro.
So from the gate, it seems like we're supposed to guess the year the game takes place in is somewhere in the 2010s, with lore about a war that happened some unspecified time ago. How long ago isn't important to the story that happens with Frisk, so it doesn't come up again except to be hinted at in background details. We're free to speculate.
However, I think the game actually tells us upfront nearly exactly how much time the monsters have been trapped (at least by a certain point in their history), and we can make a further educated guess from there about when the events of Undertale itself actually take place.
This is my theory: The history lesson we're given at the start of the game is being told to us from the monster side of things. 201X isn't a date as humans measure it. It's a date according to monster timekeeping. And what would have been a big enough event to be the start of a brand new era of history for them, where they would have started counting years up from 0? When they got trapped underground.
Because it's later revealed that it's Chara, not Frisk, we see in the opening sequence, this theory would mean monsters had been trapped undergound for a little over 2000 years by the time Chara joined them.
And Chara was just the first to fall down there! We have no idea how long it took for the additional 6 humans plus Frisk to all find themselves in the Underground, but it feels likely there was something of a gap between them. At the very least, we know for certain there was a big enough gap between the 6th child and Frisk that most monsters didn't even recognize a human on sight anymore. That probably means at least a few decades. Long enough for most older monsters to forget and younger ones not to know what humans are like in person.
The only other number we have for guessing how long a gap there was between Chara and Frisk comes from Papyrus, who uses the online handle of COOLSKELETON95.
Now, the 95 could be a completely arbitrary number of course, but (at least when I was growing up), it was pretty common to slap your birth year onto the end of whatever online name you took if the one you originally intended to use was already taken.
If Papyrus is using the same naming convention, that tells us he was born in a year ending in 95. We don't have a solid grasp on how old he is (or if he even ages at the same rate as a human would - but that's a can of worms I'm not opening up.) For sake of ease and because he gives me the vibe of a very young adult, let's say that he's 20 during the events of Undertale. 2X95 + 20 gives us 2(1)15. That puts the earliest monster-counted year that the game can take place in at 2115, giving us a 100 year gap or so for all 8 human children to fall into the Underground. Seems reasonable enough to me.
So. According to this theory, monsters have been trapped in the Underground for a minimum of about 2100 years. A long time.
Well, that brings me to the next part.
Now we're really getting into pet theory territory here, but I'll do my best to make my case:
Monsters are the source of the world's magic.
This theory is pieced together from a few places.
First, there's how Flowey greets us in the Underground.
He talks to Frisk like they have no idea about combat magic. That this would have been the first time they would have seen something like this.
In the Snowdin Librarby, we can get some more information:
So humans can't do magic and don't even really know about it. It's something that belongs only to monsters.
But, this contradicts the opening sequence, right? This bit specifically:
We get some more context with the 10 year anniversary playthrough (which I believe Toby said wasn't canon, but.... damn it's hard to not to want it to be.) In this clip, Gerson has a lot of interesting things to say, including this line about what it cost humans to force monsters underground:
So that explains the discrepancy, right? Humans had magic at one point, but expended it to seal the monsters behind a powerful barrier.
But in that case, if humans don't innately have magic, where did they get their barrier-making magic from in the first place? Or if humans were once capable of having and using magic, why would draining their reserves in a one-time expenditure mean there wasn't any magic from that point onward? Why didn't their reserves refill?
It only makes sense if humans, incapable of having magic on their own, lost their access to the magic they were tapping into when they sealed monsterkind away.
Monsters were the source of magic in the world. Like the way that humans shed excess heat, or beans fix nitrogen in the soil naturally just through their biological process, monsters give off magic just by living.
And once that source of magic was sealed away behind a one-way barrier, like the way heat dissipates and nitrogen gets used up, the lingering magic in the rest of the world may have dissipated over time and been forgotten, relegated to legends and fantasy, just like the monsters themselves.
But in the Underground, now effectively a contained little bubble, monster magic would have build up. It would have concentrated in a way it would never have on the wider surface world. And from what we've seen of the Underground, it would make things weird.
The way I see it, it's highly unlikely humans just happened to decide to trap monsters in the one super magical cave system in the world. Sources are scare, but from what we're given, it seems like the Underground went through some shifts over time.
When monsters first arrived, it sounds like the cave system that would become the Underground was a fairly barren place of little note.
Pretty normal sounding. Not much to say, just a long walk through lots of earth. But then a bit later, things are different...
It changed! Things became more extreme in the Underground after monsters (and their magic) had been there for a while.
And when magic gets concentrated in a small space, say for 2000+ years, that space starts changing and taking on properties it wouldn't otherwise have. You start getting things like trees that can grow without sunlight. Crystals and water that glow. Flowers that echo.
Everything becomes shot through with concentrated magic. Including the food.
So here we are at the end of my theory. What makes monster food different from human food is the magic. Whatever crops and livestock they have in the Underground are saturated with it and have been for a long time, and this is likely what gives it the strange properties the game tells us about. Gesturing back to part one...
This is in addition to the special properties that some monster food seems to have, likely added on intentionally (like Sea Tea increasing the drinker's SPEED for one battle.) And of course, the ability for whatever crops and livestock they're raising to live without sunlight, which is crucial in their situation.
This works great for monsters, clearly. It seems like everyone's getting enough to eat, and even monsters without digestive systems can eat just fine when the food is so magic-laced it just gets absorbed immediately.
How would a human that fell into the Underground deal with this kind of diet long term? That I'm less sure of. Getting energy, aka calories is great and all, but humans evolved with complex gut biomes that we rely on in order to synthesize certain vitamins. If no food is reaching the gut and that biome starves and dies? Not sure what would happen to the human in question. It's possible that Chara and the humans that fell after them wouldn't have lasted long, even if monsters wanted to keep them all alive. Not to mention the whole lack of sunlight thing. A human would either need to absorb (and get a bit weird from) magic pretty fast to survive the Underground long-term, or else they would probably get sick and die from nutritional deficiencies before too long.
Now as for what food monsters have access to and why, I'm once again going to go out on a limb a bit and do some world-building theorizing based on what we know. In part 2 I covered the lists of foods we know the monsters have based on what we see in the game, and I extrapolated a list of base ingredients they might have access to from that. I'm not going to directly retread that territory. Instead I'm going to break the types of food I think monsters might have down into 3 categories: Starting foods, acquired foods, and synthesized foods.
Starting Foods (What they would have had when the barrier went up)
When the monsters were sealed away, they must have had some food on them, and not just ration type things that would be used up and that's that. There had to be the promise of being able to feed themselves or they never would have allowed themselves to be pushed into the Underground. Continuing to fight for even a small chance at life is better than willingly being imprisoned knowing you're sure to starve to death, right? So they had to have something. Either supplies from their own camps, or those provided by the humans to keep them from panicking at the last moment, or some combination of the two.
I'm guessing this is where a lot of their staple foods would have come from. Seeds and root vegetables that could be planted and propagated, animals that they had a chance at keeping alive and breeding. Things to give them hope that their prison would be survivable and not just a slightly delayed death sentence.
So, wheat, barley, potatoes. Apples. Chickens and goats (since we know they have access to eggs and milk of some kind, and both those animals can live off of weird scraps better than most.) Possibly other root vegetables too - things like carrots and onions.
The early years probably would have been very difficult, but clearly things got better with time as they began to make what they could out of their new home.
Acquired Foods (Additions gotten through luck and circumstance)
In part 2 I theorized that there would be some food potentially found within the caves, waiting for them. Edible mushrooms that might grow in the right conditions. Fish and shellfish in the streams and lakes. Snails. ... Moss? (Apparently there are some edible species.)
But over time, some additional food sources may have also found their way into the Underground. Whether that means animals finding their way in and getting stuck (like wild birds or rabbits that could potentially be caught and bred) or new seeds coming to them via the same route that brings human garbage to the dump. If couches and DVDS and old TVs made it down there, it's reasonable that food trash would too, and if they were very lucky, some of it might contain usable seeds.
That could very well be the source for some of their other crops. I'm looking at things like grapes, limes, cucumbers, tomatoes... Maybe even whole plants that got thrown out, which could mean salvageable leafy greens like spinach, or herbs if they're lucky.
There's also the possibility of being able to salvage whole food items. Packaged and sealed things that could survive the trip into the dump (or the fall Frisk took), like astronaut ice cream or chocolate.
And of course, over time with things getting all weird from the magic, new food sources might sort of... (hah) crop up. Water sausages, for example.
Aka cattails. While these plants do have edible parts (the rhizomes can be cooked like potatoes or processed into flour, tender young green growth can eaten in a few ways, and early flower spikes can be processed and eaten a bit like corn on the cob) none of this resembles how Sans was using them as replacements for hotdogs. Because, y'know...
UNLESS the plants got weird from magic, and plant corn dog delight is now a thing that exists in the world.
Synthesized Foods (Science time!)
The last category would only be possible once they have a really solid societal footing and start building up enough technology to start doing complex food science. Mettaton is the one that talks the most about this sort of thing. Only the finest artificial ingredients and chemicals and all that.
When it comes down to it, certain ingredients would be very hard if not impossible for monsters to have access to, so if you can't get the real thing, the next best move is to try to imitate it, right? Going off of salvaged samples, or honestly just trying to create flavors and textures wholesale from descriptions and guesswork, this is where they might get things like cinnamon, coffee, sweeteners, and other flavorings.
In this way, theoretically monsters could have access to just about any food! Or, I should say, they could make their version of anything if they wanted.
Between magic distorting things over time and having to do their best to replicate what they don't have access to, monster food (in addition to having all those magical properties mentioned earlier) might just be different from our version of things. Same names and similar visuals, but noticeably different tastes and textures than a human might expect when, say, getting a hamburger or eating spaghetti. They're just doing their best with what they've got. Results may vary.
And that's part of what I actually find very interesting. After all the trauma and generations of imprisonment at the hands of humans (who most of them seem to have complicated feelings about), monsters are still willing, if not eager, to adopt bits of human culture, like food. After all, most of the foods we see in Undertale would have been invented long after the monsters were sealed away. These aren't comfort foods handed down by generations, memories from a time before all this. These are novel recipes, brand new ideas they had to figure out how to recreate in order to try themselves. They wanted human food, despite how they might feel about humans, their conquerors. I just find that interesting.
Anyway, that's the end of my thoughts on monster food! And the timeline of how things played out, and where magic originates from. All big swings and pet theories, but things I find fun to think about and try to have make sense within the context of game canon.
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