Pokemon food! We've all seen it, we've all wanted it, and we've all liked pictures on Pinterest of people trying to recreate it. Every person I've ever known has had to feed themself at least once in their lifetime, and Pokemon makes that reality so much more fun with bright colours, silly names for things, and happy, happy animals friends that are always along for the ride. The food options in Pokemon are pretty varied, up until the most recent game however it was-- it was mainly sugar. Lots and lots and lots and lots of sugar. No wonder Red doesn't talk, its likely the poor guy has no functioning teeth left.
But Sword and Shield brings a brand new plethora of foods from curry with apples, to curry with spam, and not only that, but Pokemon Cafe Mix, new this year, brings in even more scrumptiously visual recipes for all the pokéfamily to enjoy. However, it does bring to mind the question: are these foods actually good? In game, you're a ten year old child, by yourself, in the middle of nowhere, trying to make nutritious meals in a giant wok so uhh... probably not, uh-- but its worth testing!
Surviving in the wild area is all about using the local flora and fauna to your dietary advantage, and you can use anything you find in the wild to help you cook up that perfect meal for Pikachu-- like that shady man in the woods that sells you bones-- whose bones are they? Are they human? I don't know, but I do hope that they'll make good curry, and that's what's important! The various meals that the Pokemon world has to offer boast tons of in game advantages, friendship boosts, status healing, fame (for some reason?), but so many of them are made by inexperienced hands, and without a recipe, so how good are they really?
Food as a concept within games is very interesting by nature; its one of very few things that can't be entirely replicated in game-reality-- eating a curry with Inteleon may fill me with warm emotional fuzzies, but it does nothing to functionally fill me up, y'know? There's no simulated way to eat, as any food 'eaten' within a game does little to impact reality, and the in game rewards are often not for the pleasure of eating, but the necessity, as meals function as HP or Stat boosts, to prevent in-game starvation, or to gain a temporary effect. In Pokemon, food is predominantly purely for the Pokemon themselves: even famous interregional snacks like the Casteliacone or Shalour Sable, which are seemingly human grade, are never for the player themselves to eat; more for Pikachu, I guess. Mystery Dungeon games allowed somewhat of an in for a player seeking Pokésnacks, as once positioned as the Pokemon they were newly able to munch on Apples and Gummis, but Sword and Shield have been the only main games so far to visually indicate that humans are able to eat food too, at the player's discretion and imaginary flavour choice of course.
Why then, do we seek to eat within games, or for that matter, why seek to recreate them in real-life? Would this suggest eating them in games alone is not satisfying, but then, in that case, why eat in game at all? Why play games that function entirely for cooking, like the ever-iconic Cooking Mama, if you never get to reward yourself by eating the meal you worked so hard to make? It's certainly a question that plagues my mind, and within this project, I hope to find some answers.
Therefore, over the course of this project, I will be attempting to recreate every single food item from the Pokemon franchise, and ranking their tastiness to see how effective they'd really be in helping you make friends with Pokemon... while keeping within certain parameters.
It would be wildly unrealistic of me, considering the amount of time I have to complete and present this project, to expect to make every distinct Pokemon food ever announced for the franchise. The curry varieties in SwSh alone number past 150, so uh, nope, not doing that. Not only is that not feasible in the time I have, but eating all that curry alone would do murder on my stomach, and I like myself untarnished by Gigantimax spice, if you don't mind me saying-- I am only mortal.
Instead, I'm going to be working under a number of restrictions. I won't be making any recipe that falls under the following criteria: foods that are just an ingredient (Moo Moo Milk, Poké Beans, etc), anything that doesn't have a precise real-life equivalent (Pokemon Food, Max Soup, etc), any inedible or harmful foods (Grimy Food, Lookalike Foods, etc), anything I wouldn't be able to ethically source (Slowpoke Tail, Smoke-Poke Tail, etc), and anything that requires specific or industrial equipment to make, or that I cannot make with the resources I currently have access to, such as the various Gummis, Candies, and carbonated drinks. I also will not be considering any food that's not from the games, so anything franchise-linked that comes from the anime, comics, manga, advertising or merchandising is out.
I will be making one meal at a time, going through the various recipes one by one, to judge each individually on tastiness, difficulty of recipe and difficultly to replicate. In this way, I can give a fair review to very item, starting with Pokemon Cafe Mix's Dugtrio Sandwich Trio, and space out the challenge.
Hopefully, they'll come out just as tasty as they do accurate.
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