ok so like. murderbot is famously anti-food right? but consider. we know secunits have a sense of smell. it mentions liking/not liking plenty of smells across the series (the 'dirty sock' human smell, ART's showers smelling good.)
where i'm going with this is that good food smells good. and i don't think mb has ever been around any good food. like think. academic surveys, mining installations, close-quarters space travel, these are not places or occasions known for their cuisine. its experience of food in an olfactory sense is probably limited to ration packs & corporate cafeteria lunch settings. until relatively recently, it had never even been through the 'human' parts of stations before, where it may have smelled some sort of actual food in passing. it's probably seen plenty of other types of food on media, but never smelled any of it.
so imagine. come with me on a mind journey. mb stopping in on Mensah's actual house for some reason during the day, and one of her spouses or something is baking gingerbread (very much the kind of cookie that fills up the whole house with good smells). like. would it even recognize it as being food necessarily? gingerbread is very much one of those smells that everyone tries to recreate and no one quite can. I imagine it's not thrilled with the concept of ovens in general (humans please stop putting your hands in/near hot things), but imagine it frantically trying to place the smell and mensah being like hey you good? and it being like theres. a smell. something must be wrong somewhere. and mensah being like oh no that's just gingerbread, tano's baking cookies. and it's like that's FOOD???
