Developed, highly advanced metropolis short on exotic foods

I have this setting, about an advanced city state in the middle of a sparsely inhabited wasteland/grassland type area.

This state has the 90's level tech on consumer level, and a wide range from 90's to nanotech future on the industrial/governmental level.

The grasslands provide fertile soil, ideal for growing, but it's super heterogenous due to a prior apocalyptic event*: many patches are infested by hostile wildlife, filled with toxic waste, radiation patches, and dangerous ruins. Moreover, bandits and raiders are frequent and the city state lacks resources to properly protect acres of land.

As a result, the city state uses cutting-edge technology to grow food underground, below the city, on a very large scale to that it can feed millions of people.

In order to reflect this issue, yet keep a sort of "traditional cyberpunk" vibe to the setting, I decided there are specific exotic goods that are cheap in real life, but outrageously expensive here.

My current list includes:

• beverage bases: coffee, tea, cocoa, etc
• citrus fruits: orange, lime, etc
• fragile fruits: strawberry, raspberry, etc
• all sorts of spicy peppers: chili, paprika, etc
• livestock requiring lots of care: cattle, deer, etc
• every seafood

Then again, I want to keep a cyberpunk vibe for it, without any extreme divergence from what I'd consider a "typical diet" in the Western world, so the following are definitely at an available price:

• wheat (all sorts, for bread, cereal and beer)
• sugar beets (for cheap sugar)
• grape (exclusively for wine only)
• most of vegetables (potato, onion, sweet pepper, beans, maybe even tomato?)
• livestock requiring little care: chicken, pig, maybe even duck?

My question: assuming, this way of resource distribution is a strictly enforced government policy, what are the additional assumptions? Specifically, what other food and ingredients may become super expensive in this world that I'm missing on the list, because of the fact these things are?

An extra assumption might be that future recycling technologies made food waste processing much more efficient.

*(An important note: said apocalyptic event occured more than a millena before, so everything in and around the city are permanent, and not mere makeshift solutions. Post-post-apocalyptic, if you will.)

posted almost 5 years ago

Zoltán Schmidt‭

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