They meet to coordinate what they're short of,

"...okay. Through some combination of... farming yield, proportion of people with farm-y inclinations, logistical barriers, species need for calories, and maybe other things I am not thinking of, if humans only grew food when we felt like it for its own sake we'd... I think literally all starve? There are hobby gardeners but they don't tend to meet their own caloric needs that way, they grow, like, a lot of zucchini and a little basil and get everything else from the store, but I could be wrong, maybe somebody keeps enough potatoes and chickens for the sheer joy of hoeing and clucking that they'd be okay if none of the other starving people stole from them."

- so you have to give them presents, but since it's so scarce, they literally will just let you starve if you don't bring them presents it's not - flexibly reciprocal.

"I mean, if you relax the conditions from 'feel like it for its own sake', more people would work harder at farming if they had to subsist that way because grocery stores stopped working. Subsistence farming is how a lot of people in the developing world live. But yes, the functioning of the food economy requires paying farmers to farm because it's just not that fun."

Maybe our plants are different, or our technology, so that farming is fun for more people. 

"Admittedly, you could probably feed a lot of people off the output of Farmville if it were real, but that assumes robots or something that I don't think you have."

That is not coming through as familiar. But maybe the Valar serve a similar role.

"I wouldn't expect you to have Farmville. It's a game that reduces farming to - small enticing actions that don't require standing up or going outside. But produces no food, it's just a timewaster."

Yeah, we don't have that. The actions of farming are enticing, though? They're moving around outside making things grow.

"...and some people like doing some of that, and they grow some zucchini and then go do other things, they don't keep a city in wheat and strawberries."

...well, the amount of effort that is fun is enough to feed many, among our people.

"Like I said, farming yield might be part of it. At any rate my household has food and I was planning to see if anything of it looked edible to you - hopefully you can eat similar things to us, given the superficial biological similarity and the fact that you can breathe our air and stuff - but I don't have several days of restaurant food money sloshing around and you'd need to exchange what I have for Canadian dollars. Unless they take American here, I know they sometimes do in some parts of Canada but I don't know about this one."

Why are there different ones, doesn't that defeat the purpose?

"They can all be swapped for each other and it... lets national economies control inflation or something, I don't know the details."

Hmm. Okay. Can you acquire money by doing nice things for people?

"The usual way is to get people to pay you for goods and services they want. Usually strangers, most social interactions are not monetized."

Huh. Maybe we will learn about that later. 

"Sure. Uh, with all that in mind how long do you want to spend taking in Vancouver architecture?"

What's convenient? We could still stay a few days unless you need money to eat the trees too.

"...the trees aren't for eating. I think fruit trees usually aren't planted in cities, they attract pests and dropped fruit makes a mess."

Seems hard on the starving people. You can't eat the leaves?

"They might not be actually poisonous but they wouldn't taste good or be good for us."

...okay. A day?

"You don't have to eat every day?"

Your days are pretty short.