what-bot:

Headcanon that programs don’t normally taste things, so they don’t have a disgust response to tastes, only things they don’t like.

Kevin creates Grid food and then wishes he didn’t because he has to watch people eating absolutely deranged combinations like cheesy lemons on toast.

He really should’ve seen it coming because his first trial of bringing user food to the Grid went like this.

Kevin: This here is food. You eat it.

Clu, eating chips: This is a good one. *puts a strawberry on the chip*

Kevin: Tron, I’d like to report a crime.

Tron: *currently putting orange juice in the pickle jar* Hm?

I love this. (One of my favorite details of @datamodel-of-disaster’s fic The Five Stages of Rectification is how programs ended up developing weird tastes for food when lasered out into the User world– iirc Quorra would eat pretty much anything in any combination, while Tron was picky as hell)

I think it doesn’t even necessarily have to be about lacking taste responses, but could even just be about lacking the social conditioning that humans have about foods.

because when you think about it, most of the disgust responses that humans have, in regard to “what is and isn’t food” or “what foods go together,” are culture-specific and learned through association.

For example, how liking root beer is almost exclusively a US thing, and Europeans think it tastes like medicine (because it is used as a medicine flavor there, as opposed to a fun soda drink like in the US).

one of the things I find most fascinating, when imagining Program culture, is to speculate on… which human social constructs that we take for granted would simply not exist there. And what else might be in their place.

…it’s an autism thing. I know this. Because I am already hella predisposed to not take social constructs for granted and to put my own constructs in their place. And I would eat a pizza topped with not only pineapple but also marshmallow peeps and candy corn. because why not.