Headcanon Wednesday (but on literally any other day) : Eating and Sleeping Habits (1/?)
I want to post something and get gratification, so I'm only doing the Council Classic© species for now.
Asari are geared for Thessia's 27.6 Earth hours of rotation, and need about 10-12 Earth hours of sleep every 15-18 Earth hours ; however, partly because nocturnal activity has been a staple of many asari cultures since antiquity, partly because many of Thessia's regions are very hot, many asari traditionally take an extended siesta for about one to two hours shortly after midday. On planets with rotational periods shorter than Thessia's, like Nevos or Lesuss, asari tend to skip the siesta ; conversely, on planets with much longer photoperiods, like Cyone, asari tend either to have two siestas or a single, but much longer one — the specifics entirely depend on the planet and its environment.
Asari do not typically sleep in beds but in nest-like basins filled with cushions, usually called "pods" — not to be confused with the sleeping pods found aboard spaceships ; but the pods are actually the basis of the (in)famous high-tech "pleasure pod", enclosed with a semi-opaque purple hood. Some cultures do not use pods ; instead, a depression - the nest - is carved (with patterns evoking seashells) in the floor of one's room and filled with cushions.
Unlike many humans, adult asari more readily sleep with other asari with whom they are not romantically or sexually involved, usually relatives or friends ; nudity, likewise, is not inherently erotic. As a result, pods and nests tend to be very large. In situations where they cannot - or won't - afford the space or the expense, asari settle for beds or cots.
On Thessia, most asari eat twice a day, usually eating lunch late in the morning then dinner early in the evening, and it is the default for spacers and commandos — though again, culture and planetary peculiarities means many asari usually eat three times a day instead : a breakfast upon waking up, a midday meal, and a supper. Dinner is always the most important meal - and longest - of the day. If they can, asari will eat with other people and will only rarely isolate themselves ; depending on their preferences, they may eat together in congenial silence, but more often than not they will enjoy talking as they eat. It is also very common for public readings of poems, novels or essays to be held during mealtimes, either in mess halls or in restaurants. Asari eat seated in chairs or on the floor, as most humans do, but bench seats are much more common than in human cultures.
Because of the hungry metabolisms fueling their biotics, asari dishes tend to be both copious and nutritious ; as many sagacious experts have previously observed, non-asari usually gain a few (or many) kilograms when they visit an asari world and sample the local cuisine, even though they eat the alien-friendly "visitor versions" of traditional asari dishes with the eezo filtered out.
Asari dishes skew heavily toward sugar and high-calorie, fatty foods because of their demanding diets ; they have something of a sweet tooth compared to other species. The Thessian equivalent to honey ("asari honey"), in particular, is ubiquitous in asari cuisine, from honey marinades to honey syrups and honey meads ; some connoisseurs have said that asari have a type of honey for everything the way some humans have vintages for every occasion, with honey made from the nectar of the common irsaal a particular favorite.
Asari food is also spicy as a rule (and is often sweet and spicy at the same time), to the point that a spice pot takes up the role a sugar bowl would have in a tea party. Spices, salt, and honey are the typical condiments of an asari meal.
Meat, seafood and fruit are important elements in many culinary traditions, though vegetarianism is very common, either for cultural or religious reasons. Many asari are also "cruelty-free omnivores" : they will only eat meat that has been grown in a vat and consider eating parts of a killed animal morally repellent.
Asari alcohols are both very diverse and very popular among levo species. These include, but are not limited : elasa (also known as erasa), honey mead, ice brandy (such as Serrice Ice Brandy), akantha, champagne (such as Anäis champagne), Blue Thessia, wine (such as Thessia Red), whiskey (such as Zigos whiskey). Eezo-free variants are made for exportation.
An asari canteen or mess hall, such as the common kitchens found in the phalansteries and arcologies prevalent on asari worlds, will often propose at least two to four dishes from different asari gastronomical traditions, so that most asari have an encyclopedic knowledge of the various cuisines in their cultures. Since first contact and the development of xenonormativity in asari relationships and society, they have also become very fond of some culinary arts from the cultures of other species, and various levo dishes - or substitutes of dextro dishes - are proposed on a regular basis. In such cases, asari often have either a shaker of eezo dust or eezo food complements in pill form to prevent eezo deficiency in their organism ; this has historically made asari targets for mugging, though their biotics and their tendency to move about in groups forestall all but the most inexperienced or desperate criminals.
Many xenoanthropologists believe that meals are so important in all extent asari cultures because their metabolisms makes them particularly vulnerable to famine conditions, a dread that historically would have been cemented by very long lifespans.
A devout siarist is expected to meditate at least twice a day, in the morning after waking up (usually just before or right after breakfast, if applicable) and in the evening after supper. The duration of the meditation will vary : acolytes, for instance, can meditate for as much as two Earth hours in the morning.
On the Citadel, where the galactic standard day is only about 10 minutes shorter than the Thessian day, asari are perfectly at ease. The various forms of basic salary prevalent in the Republics means they usually negotiate to work as much or as little as they please, and they have the time to eat, sleep and enjoy themselves.
Salarians sleep one Earth hour every day ; as a Sur'Kesh day lasts about 21.5 Earth hours, this means salarians need to sleep every 20 Earth hours or so. Traditionally, salarians do not have a private bedroom, but sleep in a private cell or a dormitory. Most salarians sleep with a headrest to facilitate air circulation in Sur'Kesh's hot and wet climate. Because of concerns over material decay due to humidity, most traditional salarian beds have been variations on mats and hammocks. In the modern age, sleeper pods, which suspend the sleeper in null-grav, have become popular in the wealthier clans ; they are also present in salarian businesses for those employees who wish to spend a few days at work.
Because of this, salarians have always spent both the day and night awake, usually sleeping in shifts. In consequence, the workday was historically structured around visibility : tasks that needed light to be done were done by day, while the rest could wait the night. As a result, salarians pioneered light emission technology (lamps) much earlier, relatively speaking, than other species, as otherwise nighttime activities would have been fairly limited. Therefore, salarian complexes and cities have always been active no matter the hour, with businesses, temples, homes, civil buildings and other establishments only closing for cleaning and maintenance. Moreover, the day has traditionally been associated with work and activities undertaken for the collective, especially physical labor, while the night instead has been associated with leisure, social activities, and intellectual work.
Salarians have five or six high-protein meals every day : at daybreak, around midday, in the afternoon, at nightfall, at midnight and in the dead of night. As a rule, if salarians are left to themselves, food is hearty and there is a lot of talk and noise and games and music ; the salarians' greater ability, relative to other species, to recognize patterns and process stimuli before being overwhelmed often allows them to take part in several conversations at once. Salarians seating silently by themselves, seemingly unbothered by all of that, are fairly common too : salarians can be so focused on their own thoughts that they can ignore everything going on about them and "tune out" the noise. However, the salarian proneness to multitasking means they are just as likely to eat their meal even as they are doing two or three other things at the same time — but the demanding salarian metabolism means they never skip a meal.
The traditional meal form is a lot of dishes served simultaneously on a table, buffet-style, and individual salarians taking whatever they want. However, female meals and formal occasions call for a structured succession of dishes each more impressive than the last. As with everything with salarians, gastronomy can become competitions of virtuosity and innovation, especially a dalatrass is out to impress a representative from another clan or polity. This is especially true in salarian dining rooms, which contain tiered, concentric rings of tables looking down on the central table where the dalatrass or her deputy, her close supporters and those currently in her favor are seated. Refectories, on the other hand, are pretty similar to what humans are used to, except they tend to always be partially or entirely in the open. This can be difficult for non-salarians when it rains.
Salarians are omnivorous : their diet, and therefore their cuisines, largely consists in insects and insect products (like larvae or eggs), some mollusks, small pseudo-amphibians, pseudo-fish, grain and grain products (like bread), fruits, fungi and tough fibers. Each salarian clan has numerous, enormous insect farms ("hives"), with many domesticated subspecies greatly specialized through careful selection, to the point that clans can often boast of breeds unique to them. A gift of hives from one clan to another is considered princely.
Because of the extremely tough, iron-rich salarian teeth, some of the dishes salarians prepare - especially fibers and insects, like smoked bug jerky - are completely inedible by alien standards because they are considered either undercooked or overcooked and might damage non-salarian teeth. Some salarian culinary traditions insist on eating certain kinds of insects live, which is considered horrifyingly disgusting by those salarian clans and non-salarian cultures who do not share in the practice.
While they use spices like most everyone else, salarians usually do not salt their food due to their sensitivity, which can result in some meals tasting bland to alien palates. This cannot be easily remedied because there are no salt shakers on salarian tables : salt, which painfully burns salarian skin, is a controlled substance. On the other hand, salarians always have liquid nitrogen on hand for instant icecream.
As with asari and humans, salarians have a high proportion of sweet-receptors that makes them crave sugar, but salarian cuisine skews toward the savory, the bitter and especially the sour. Dried seaweed snacks, for instance, are a kind of treat particularly favored by salarians.
Salarians cannot get drunk, succumbing instead to alcohol poisoning if they imbibe too much of liquids whose sole interest for them is that it prickles the tongue and the throat — much like humans can be poisoned if they drink too much water. It is speculated that this insensitivity to alcohol evolved because otherwise their metabolism in conjunction with the diet of the frugivorous salarian ancestor species (alongside their preference for overripe fruit) would have resulted in their being drunk all the time.
Palaven rotates once 28.3 Earth hours, which is but one of a series of factors contributing to its relatively high surface temperature. Like all native lifeforms, turians have long adapted to this situation, with an added wrinkle : as obligate hypercarnivores, they must sleep a lot, and they usually do so right after eating as otherwise digestive torpor would impair waking activities.
Turians therefore need to sleep for about 14 Earth hours every Palaven day, though they never do so at once. A pre-Hierarchy turian's daily schedule would have looked like this :
waking up around sunrise and immediately starting their day for about 6 Earth hours ;
a copious breakfast around midday typically lasting less than an hour, immediately followed by about 3 Earth hours of sleep, which allowed turians not to be active when the day is at its hottest ;
waking up for another burst of activity, this one about 5 Earth hours long ;
a small lunch lasting less than a half-hour, followed by about 1.5 Earth hours of sleep ;
waking up for another burst of activity that lasts about 3 Earth hours ;
dinner, the most important meal of the day, which usually lasts a full hour, immediately followed by the longest sleep period for about 7-8 Earth hours.
The realities of the Hierarchy have changed this somewhat. Firstly, as with soldiers of most species, turians are trained to fall asleep the moment they go to bed, even at irregular hours, as they do not know when they will next get the chance to rest — and all turians are soldiers.
Secondly, every day on every planet, moon, space station or starship in the Turian Hierarchy is structured in shifts, meaning that there is always someone manning an important post no matter the hour ; so, whereas Thessia and other asari planets noticeably slow down around midday, Palaven and other turian planets maintain the same degree of activity regardless of the time of day. Turians stationed on Palaven - especially the young healthy ones who want to prove what good turians they are - actively seek out the shifts when they'll be awake in the hot hours after midday.
The Hierarchy schedule looks like this :
Shift 1 : about 6.19 Earth hours of activity, entirely dedicated to work or getting to work (7 imperial half-hours, or 3.5 imperial hours)
Downtime 2 : about 2.65 Earth hours to eat and sleep (3 imperial half-hours, or 1.5 imperial hours)
Shift 2 : about 5.30 Earth hours of activity, divided between work and personal time (6 imperial half-hours, or 3 imperial hours)
Downtime 3 : about 1.77 Earth hours to eat and sleep (2 imperial half-hours, or 1 imperial hour)
Shift 3 : about 3.54 Earth hours of activity, usually personal time (4 imperial half-hours, or 2 imperial hours)
Downtime 1 : about 1 Earth hour to eat (1 imperial half-hour, or 0.5 imperial hour) and 7.95 Earth hours to sleep (9 imperial half-hours, or 4.5 imperial hours)
As a result, most turians tend to be lightly sleep-deprived at the best of times, a condition typically exacerbated by their tendency to seek out unpaid overtime at work. As every sixth day is a day off (unless they're on active duty), they make up for it at that time.
The Palaven and Hierarchy day is divided in 16 hours, each about 106 Earth minutes long (1 hour, 46 minutes), though in practice the half-hour (about 53 Earth minutes) and quarter-hour (about 26 minutes and 30 seconds, Earth time) tend to be the basic time units of the Hierarchy.
Upon joining adult life, turians are issued schedules to make sure not everyone will be off work at the same time (with the exception of holidays and festivals). On Palaven and military/state installations, turians follow the 16-imperial-hour schedule, even on planets which do not match in the least this pattern : that way, a turian's shifts will naturally cycle them through the various hours of day and night.
Exceptions are made for : civilians of all stripes, especially children ; those turians actively raising children, whether parents, teachers or support staff (boarding schools are very common) ; turians past the conscription tiers of the Hierarchy, i.e. decision-makers of any stripe which all need to be awake at the same time so they can work together, and who have no one waiting in the wings to fill in for them as they sleep ; and their respective staffs. Those are all on Schedule 1, which follows the day/night cycle of Palaven.
Because of their anatomy, turians do not sleep in beds but can instead sleep by :
lounging in the equivalent of deck chairs [as seen in the Garrus issue of Mass Effect: Homeworlds]
This is in line with what another researcher first documented long ago, as is evident here.
Because of the state of extreme drowsiness turians are undergoing as digestion kicks in and they get to bed, turians would rather sleep than have sex in turian-style beds (which aren't built for fun times anyway). Most sexual activity, therefore, happens in private, but usually standing up or on some other, more useful piece of furniture.
Turian cuisine is meat, meat, meat, sometimes dressed with fibres for dietary reasons. Turians think that good food is a) efficiently nutritious in a way that will sustain soldiers for a long time, b) healthy, c) cheap, as credits can probably be better spent on things that will benefit the Hierarchy directly, and d) pleasant to the taste — in decreasing order of priority. This mindset is not entirely cultural : the turian sense of taste is somewhat atrophied, relative to other species, as the processing of visual stimuli that gives turians exceptional vision takes up proportionately more neural space. Moreover, the anatomy of a turian's mouth - with only fourteen fangs and no closed sides - means they do not chew their food but swallow it whole in chunks which are then masticated in the gizzard ; in consequence, food spends very little time in a turian's mouth. In turian gastronomy, smell and, to a lesser extent, visual presentation are more prized, as they excite the appetite of the onlooker ; but overall, cuisine is poorly developed (with the exception of "archaic" traditions from different Palaven cultures) because it is considered somewhat frivolous.
The mainstays of turian cuisine are parts from the Palaven animals known as the hyax and xemna (herd animals) and the louza (poultry) ; dehydrated hyax stew is part of staple rations in Hierarchy military bases everywhere. Graxen, a party food, is the equivalent of human popcorn. In general, turians eschew sugary foods altogether as they have no taste receptors for sweetness (as they have no frugivorous ancestors), though they can taste chemicals exclusively present in meat humans cannot sense.
A rare delicacy in turian cuisine is some kind of carrion strips known as esqualax, which smells and seems horrific to just about every other species who balks at the idea of eating rotting meat. Turians will calmly point that other gastronomic traditions, including human ones, are from their point of view as equally unappealing ; the concept of cheese, in particular, especially the moldy ones, seems particularly obscene.
Beside food, turians consume gastroliths : small pebbles which will grind down food in the gizzard. Gastroliths are usually provided in canteens and mess halls and can be bought in turian grocery stores or ordered online. Hierarchy turians take pride in buying rocks cheap as dirt, whereas turians from independent colonies (especially on Illium) will sometimes spend credits on designer gastroliths or gastroliths from exotic, far-off places.
Turians haven't developed many alcohols, in part because they are more sensitive to alcohol intoxication and tend to get drunk faster relative to other species (horosk is only strong enough to send some turian drinkers into a coma). Beside this, their cultural mindset, and the dextro chirality of whatever isn't pure alcohol, another major hurdle is the turian tolerance of various compounds which are toxic for many other species : for instance, ruthenium chloride, a compound to which turians are insensitive but which is toxic to all three other Council species, is often used by turians in bottling and labeling. More impressively, turians cannot get methanol poisoning, and so their drinks are often mixed ethanol and methanol, or even pure methanol : if Drossix Blue supposedly makes some human stomachs burst from consumption, it's because methanol poisoning in humans can cause vomiting and intense abdominal pains, before it kills you.
The low threshold before alcohol intoxication doesn't keep turians from getting shit-faced, on the contrary : as with many straight-laced, collectivist cultures where individuals are under a lot of stress, excessive drinking is common in appropriate social situations where people are allowed to "cut loose". Alcoholism is unfortunately a recurring health issue among particularly traumatized veterans.
Other researchers have documented the impact of turian drinking vessels on the galactic standard.
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