fectin wrote:Depends what you want; you can skip the whole question by having vita-berries growing like weeds, and used in all the national dishes. That practically writes its own campaign hooks too.
I am going to strongly suggest a NO on that. Subsistence, or even more advanced farmers would grow very mixed crops, and raise animals, and trade, and forage the wilderness to make up the extra bits of variety for nutrition and flavor. Despite that they often had some nutritional problems. And despite that... WE DON'T REALLY CARE.
OK so maybe you make a lot of money importing sea salt or beef jerky into the center of the island and exporting lotus seed paste and Taro paste. But that's not a big deal, and trade goods may as well be ANYTHING for game purposes, and you damn well shouldn't be writing up a god damn BALANCED DIET PLAN for your peasants and using it as a MAJOR PLOT HOOK. Players don't want to care about that crap. It's niggling obsessive and boring detail. Pick an exciting product like a drug or a poison, or a single crippling major deficiency (which you can pretty much pick at random if you like) and start importing oranges to the Meaty Island of Meat to ward off the exciting scurvy plague, but again really. "Oh wait I need to ensure my lotus/rice/algae farmers have a source for berries, seafood, beef and sweet potatoes!" is... just dull.
and mushrooms solve most of the rest.
I have heard talk that the nutritional value of mushrooms is massively trumped up by mushroom fanatics and that it's so small it is hard to measure and entirely possible you would do as well or better eating the dirt or compost they grow in. These rumors are hard to confirm since the Internet appears to be heavily dominated by very enthusiastic pro-mushroom commercial interests.
Also it's irrelevant because Fungi are cool, poisonous, and sometimes icky. Especially if they are giant and sometimes attack you with poisoned spears, LSD spores and laser vision.
