Thanks for the chapter. Ok, now I'm wondering how the culinary standards fell so indescribable low even the farmers (Alvs) only know how to do Neanderthal level Spit Roasting
I feel like when humanity in this universe started exploration of space and colonies, they didn't have acces to fresh products for a while and they mostly ate syntfood so they can have a quick meal with decent nutrition without losing much time, which determined a fall in the food industry( mostly farms and restaurants). By the time they realized how important and better real food was, the alvs already took over the industry and they probably made sure that all human farmers and descendants died, so humanity will not brake free from their high prices. You can imagine that since probably most cooks probably specialized in fastfood, that needed a large amount of meat, cheese(more rare than vegetables) plus different sauces(which are based on condiments and vegetables-mostly tomatoes), with all organic prices so high they got on the brink o extinction and needed to find better and more usefull jobs. Proper fancy michelin stars chefs(fine dining focused) faced probably the same problem but different way( needed fancy and already rare ingredients that became also almost extinct and the price was astronomical, plus a large amount of variety) plus most fine dining restaurants kinda pride themselves on their prepping( dry age, smoking, sous vide for large amounts of time) which caused their bussiness plumet before even being raised. So the only ones that remained were probably diner style restaurants that lifted themselves to fancy finedining restaurants not by elevating their cooking but by having simple and mediocre food compared with old times which became way better compared to syntfood today. That's how i imagine at least, just a theory