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Multipurpose Monocultured Crop: Difference between revisions
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* In ''[[Discworld|The Light Fantastic]]'', Cohen the Barbarian spends time with a clan of horse nomads, who use horses for transport, meat, horsehair robes, leather, milk, and a thin beer best not inquired about.
* "Swist" from the children's story ''Weslandia'':
{{quote|
Grows super-fast
The fruit is delicious, and the rinds can be dried into cups
Excellent tubers
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Inner fibers can be spun into clothes
Oil from the seeds acts as suntan lotion and bug repellant
The crop attracts a whole ecosystem of pleasing animals
}}
* In the [[Vorkosigan Saga]], Esteban Borges's artificially designed and created "Butter Bugs" are meant to be this. They are large bugs that live in colonies with a Queen and reproduce quickly, yet their breeding is human-controlled so they can't overrun the environment. In their stomachs they secrete 'Bug Butter', which is tasteless, sort of the consistency of tofu, and can supply all your dietary needs: you can practically live of it alone. Their excrement is also excellent fertilizer, and they can be kept at low cost since they can eat just about anything that's organic, including bark, branches and grass. Their marketing didn't exactly take off at first, as people were turned off by their ugly appearance and thought it was pretty disgusting to eat something that was regurgitated by one, until Ekaterin redesigned them to be "Beautiful Butter Bugs". Now it seems they're going to be pretty profitable.
* In ''[[The Lorax]]'', the Once-ler uses the tufts from the Lorax's truffula trees to make all-purpose consumer products known as thneeds. Subverted in that the truffula trees aren't being cultivated, just harvested from the wild until there's none left.
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* Many inhabitants of the [[Warhammer 40000|Imperium of Man]] subsist on grox, an aggressive breed of reptile which has replaced cattle.
* In the ''[[Talislanta]]'' game, parts of the viridia plant can be used for everything from flour to fabric to lumber to oil to ''naturally-grown canoes''. Justified by [[A Wizard Did It]].
== Video Games ==
* ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]'' got no universal plants, but a few crops are more versatile than "eat or brew". Quarry bush leaves can be cooked as is or ground into flour, while its seeds ("Rock nuts") can be pressed for cake (also cookable) and oil (which can be used in cooking or to make soap); Pig tail and Rope reed are not edible, but both can be brewed into alcohol or spun into thread for cloth and ropes.
** Animals can be shorn (again, thread gives both cloth and ropes), milked (which allows to make cheese) and butchered for edible parts (meat, fat, etc), leather (uses range from bags and wineskins to armor, and it's the only common material good for quivers and backpacks) and bones (can be made into crossbow bolts and some armor pieces) plus hooves and horns if appropriate.
== [[Real Life]] ==
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