Alien Lunch: Difference between revisions

* Subverted in Alan Dean Foster's ''[[Spellsinger]]''. When Jon-Tom, newly arrived in the Warmlands from our world, goes out to dinner with Mudge the otter, the entree is a large roast cut from a python. Rather than shy away or even comment, Jon-Tom tucks in immediately, as he's far more hungry than squeamish.

* In ''[[Shadows of the Empire]]'', while en route to Gall, Lando makes Luke and Leia some Giju stew. No one wants it; Luke compares it to [[It Tastes Like Feet|old boot plastic and fertilizer drenched in pond scum]]. Annoyed, Lando takes some to show them what they're missing; "The expression on his face went from irritated to amazed, slid to horror, then right into disgust". He decides that it was overspiced, and they're just going to open a packet of beans for dinner.

* An inversion in the first book, Speaker to Animals can't eat with the humans, because their food "smelled like burnt garbage."

* In Somtow Sucharitkul's ''Mallworld'', an alien ambassador brings a live animal (considered a delicacy on his planet) to a diplomatic dinner with the humans. The animal looks like a vaguely humanoid rhinoceros beetle and is about the size of a howler monkey. The humans are appalled... APPALLED, I tell you... to find out that the "animal" is actually a child-stage member of the ambassador's own species. (Turns out the aliens aren't sentient until adulthood, breed '''very''' quickly and in copious numbers, and generally consider their own children vermin; any that manage to survive to adulthood are taught how to be civilized beings, but until they they are hunted and eaten by their own parents.