They take the trinkets and play with them, turning them over and feeling the weight of them.

"I'm glad to meet you," the new person relays via tablet-woman. "I saw on the summary that you get most of your food by crafting plants — I grow food for people, and I'm curious about whether your plants are more or less suited for people than ours. On the one hand, you can change them, but on the other hand, we need to change them more."

The trinkets are very lightweight, only a little heavier than they need to be to avoid floating off into the sky. The thread attaching the handle to the cube is a little stiffer than normal thread and has very little friction - best practice for avoiding tangles - which might make it interesting to fiddle with in its own right as they move the trinkets around.

That's an interesting question! He's not sure what to expect their food plants to be like at all. He could go get some seeds if they'd like to try some samples of his?

The newcomer indicates that they would like that, and the others agree.

The woman with the tablet wants to ask questions about right- vs left-handed proteins, but can't figure out how to put the questions into glyphs, and decides to leave that to the actual experts. Presumably they've already checked somehow that the alien isn't going to poison them or vice versa, given that he's going to try their food tomorrow.

He goes in to get the seeds, and comes back a few minutes later with a collection of packets in a tray. He has some local seeds they brought him, too, that he hasn't tried yet since he hasn't had the time to figure out the new cultivars, he can do that now if they want to make a direct comparison.

For grains he's got Crafter cultivars of corn, einkorn, and popping sorghum. (He hopes they have potatoes or at least jicama; he doesn't have either with him and he likes them.) For fruit he's just got a sweet micrantha, it wasn't a priority in his emergency kit. For vegetables he's got a kind of spicy lettuce, two experimental tomato cultivars he picked up a while back and never tried, and a broadbean cultivar that makes a decent meat substitute. For nuts, he has butternuts for oil and sugar and saba nuts for snacking. His spice collection is the bulk of it, though - he happened to have it out to thin down when the fire hit - and he's got a dozen and a half or so of those, ranging from fairly recognizable green onions and dill to a dwarf cinnamon cultivar and a kumquat variety genecrafted to have a fragrant reddish peel reminiscent of caramel.

Would they like him to start with anything in particular?

Oooh!

"Kumquats are delicious," the woman with the tablet informs him, and the others make agreeing gestures. "We would like to start with those, please."

It turns out that the local seeds he's been provided with include wheat, rice, rye, two kinds of bean (black and soy), a brassica cultivar somewhere between elongated broccoli and thick lettuce, almonds, peanuts, and lentils — the kind of basic staples that (by a þereminian reckoning) one should always have available, but specifically restricted to seeds that store and travel well.

"We do have potatoes," she continues. "Or at least the thing you're communicating seems like a thing we have."

They look over the local seeds and identify them for him.

"I think they didn't give you potatoes or fruits because the seeds don't store as well, but you can definitely get them in the city if you want."

He's glad they have potatoes! That's why he doesn't have any either; aside from the spice collection most of his seeds are from his emergency kit and potatoes wouldn't've worked there at all. The rest of the local seeds look good, too.

This variety of kumquat isn't intended for eating, to be clear, though he does like the juice in porridge as well as the intended use of grating the peel onto things. He grows it anyway, first crafting the remaining material into a sort of sand that he spreads on the ground next to his chair and then putting the seed in and keeping his hand over it to grow it into a low bush with four fruit that ripen in a matter of seconds as the sandy material disappears. He passes three of the fruits around and sets the fourth aside to get seeds from later: they're a little longer and thinner than the local sort of kumquat, with a disappointing amount of flesh, but the peel smells lovely.

The three of them take tentative bites.

The peel is thick and has a strong flavor. The woman with the tablet stops after a single bite, but her partner eats the whole thing.

"That is different from our local kumquats," she agrees. "Ours have thin skins and more juice. But I see why it would be tasty in porridge."

Then she relays a question from the new person.

"How do you get these seeds? Traded with people you meet on your travels?"

More often given or picked up from public areas than traded, but all three of those, yeah. He occasionally picks up something from the wild, too, if he sees something that looks like a familiar species. But it's easy to get lots of seeds, people don't usually mind giving them to whoever asks.

"Is there a megaproject like the library but for seeds?" they question. "So that important kinds of seed aren't lost, if something happens to the area they all grow in, or so that you can compare and see how plants change over time?"

The woman with the tablet, after transcribing the questions, shows a map of the planet with two dots labeled "our seed libraries" — one in the far north of the larger landmass, and one in the far south of the other.

Not on that kind of scale, no. Lots of people collect things, though, including seeds, and it's easy to put some seeds away in a disinfected airtight container if you hear that there's a plant disease going around and not too much harder to grow a plant in quarantine, that's mostly a matter of getting clean dirt and making it its own building that you're careful with.

He begins transforming the kumquat bush back into crafting material; this part will take a couple minutes, he explains.

They watch with interest as he does, but since there's not much to see, the woman with the tablet scribbles another question.

"Do you want some hints about how people cook with the local plants you have, or would you prefer to discover for yourself?"

He thinks he's got enough adventures lined up for the next while, he'll appreciate the hints more.

She nods. That's perfectly understandable — not a lot of people really like to cook, anyway, let alone run endless experiments.

Since not all of the local variants have glyphs, she just uses little pictures of them.

"The wheat, rice, and rye are all kinds of grain. The rice likes to grow in standing water. All three of them, you prepare by taking the seeds off the end and removing the exterior with mechanical force. We usually use coarse grinders and then a sieve to separate the soft inner parts from the harder outer part. The outer part of the wheat is nutritious, but doesn't taste as good. You can either carefully remove it all for light, sweet foods, or grind it fine for heavier, but more filling foods. All three can either be ground into flour that is used in baking, or soaked in water and boiled until they become tender, and then eaten alone. Use about twice as much water as grain. How long to boil them depends on how much of the shell you removed. It's more common to prepare rice that way than the others. Rice is often used as a bed for other foods, since it soaks up flavor well. Rye has a stronger flavor of its own that makes a popular bread," she explains.

"The beans aren't hard to prepare; remove the beans from their pods, and eat them raw, steam them, or grind them into paste to mix with things. The soybean can also be used to make a firm, flavor-absorbent, nutritious solid food. But that has a lot of steps. If you don't like meat, eating beans is good."

"The kalhornaðor is good to eat raw, steamed, or baked. No preparation needed, which makes it a popular snack. Almonds can also just be picked and eaten raw, but you can also squeeze them and mix them with water to make a drink that replaces milk for some people. Peanuts can be picked and eaten, but you have to remove the hard shell. They produce oil that is good for cooking but has a strong flavor. If you grind them to paste and store it in jars, it is a popular topping or component in other recipes. Peanuts have lots of energy in them for how much they weigh, and store well, so lots of people keep some for emergencies. Some people, their bodies get into fights with the peanuts and they can't have them — it's not common, but if you start getting puffy when you try one, don't eat them."

"Lentils also store well, but you can't eat them raw because they're too hard. Grinding them to flour doesn't really help either. But they go very well in soup — if you add them to soup, they will soften and thicken it a little."

"These are all practical foods — things that if you eat them, you'll be fine, but they aren't very fancy. So it's good that you have spices to add to things. All of these except the nuts usually get eaten with meat or spices for flavor."

That all sounds pretty straightforward. He assumes they also toast the nuts? Is storing the nut paste necessary for some reason? Also before she answers can he have the board back for a moment, he wants to make a copy of all that.

She hands it to him. When she has it back, she replies.

"Yes, you can toast the nuts. I think toasted almonds are tastier than toasted peanuts, but I think some people like them. Storing the nut paste is not necessary, but shelling peanuts and grinding them down is lots of work. It's less work now that they have machines for it, but people still prefer doing it in big batches and then saving it for later. For example, I like toasting slices of bread, spreading peanut paste on them, and then putting slices of fruit on top. It's a quick meal, but tasty and reasonably filling for when I don't want to go out of my territory to get food. But if I had to shell a bunch of peanuts and get out a grinder, it would be much more work. Instead I trade for jars of peanut paste with a group of people who have big machines that make it constantly."

"Also, if you put peanuts in an emergency kit, only storing the paste saves space and weight, since you can't eat the shells. We can't grow plants as quickly as you do, so we need to have enough food to eat while waiting for the plant to grow."

Yeah, Crafters prefer foods that don't take that much work, and being able to grow things when they need them makes that limitation much more practical. Maybe he'll try some of their jarred nut paste while he's in the city tomorrow and see if he likes it.

With the kumquat plant converted back into crafting material, he dissolves it back into fertilizer again and picks out three more plants to grow. These are different varieties of pepper, he explains; the fruit is edible - birds like it, in particular - but the seed is the part he uses.

They try the seeds — first individually, to gauge spiciness, and then a bit more. They all have reasonable spice tolerance, but eating straight pepper is a bit much.

"We have pepper that is like this; I think this one is most like the peppers we have, and the other two are more different," the farmer conveys.

"We also usually store pepper dried and ground," one of the women remarks. "How much do you like in your food? People from the south traditionally use more spicy ingredients, and people from the north traditionally use less, so the city has a mixture of different kinds of food."

He grinds it to use it, yeah, and most dishes don't need more than a little sprinkle of the powder. He'd expect it to lose flavor pretty quickly if it was stored ground, though, he grinds a seed or two at once and if he keeps the powder for a couple days he can already notice a difference; maybe they've bred for varieties that don't lose flavor as much?

The farmer checks some things on their phone.

"It looks like the flavor loss is because of evaporation and exposure to light," they relay. "We store pepper in air-tight, opaque containers, which helps. Also, there are steps to dry the pepper and treat it with purpler-than-purple light before it's ground which help too. But you're right that the best foods are made with fresh-ground pepper. I suspect this is another difference down to how much in groups we are — most people in the city don't cook for themselves, because it is less work for a few people to make big batches of food that everyone can have some of. But cooking in big batches is pretty different from cooking in small batches. Ingredients get used up faster, and people want to find ways to do it that have fewer steps."

"People who live outside the city often cook for themselves," one of the women adds. "I don't know if they are more likely to grind their pepper instead of trading for it already ground."

That's interesting. He's assuming they're going to want copies of all his nonpersonal stuff sooner or later - he's sort of expecting to end up giving someone a miniaturized copy of his whole house, when he figures out who the right person is for that - and it'll be interesting to hear what various people think of the different spices.

"That would be great! People will definitely want to try the spices," they agree.

One of the women has been thinking as they discuss spices. Finally, she makes an exclamation, and then scribbles "salt!" on the tablet. After a moment she expands that into a proper thought.

"You can make plant-based spices easily, but I bet you can't make salt with crafting material. You can probably get it from seawater, but you're not always near the sea. And you don't have trains to make moving it from the sea to where people are easy. I bet we use more salt in our food than you do; salt helps enhance the flavor of other things in the food."

Huh! Yeah, he doesn't use salt much even when he has access to it; if they're using it regularly they're using more than he does.

He's thinking he might grow the leafy herbs next, or he can do more seeds - he has a couple of anisses and fennels they could try, things like that.

"I think I know the plants you mean, but neither of those is a common herb here."

The þereminians check among themselves.

"We would be happy to try those next. Really, any order is fine."

All right.

For leafy herbs he's got varieties of sage, thyme, chives, tarragon, and two kinds of dill, one with particularly flavorful seeds and another with big dense sprays of edible flowers in addition to the tasty leaves of both; he passes around cuttings of each as he finishes growing them.

They nibble at the herbs.

They're generally of the opinion that the sage, thyme, and chives would probably all go well in rice, and say as much.

When they get to the dill, the woman with the tablet gets a thoughtful look.

"I think this the same plant as gets used to flavor pickles," she writes, using the LCTL word for pickles in a little circle, since she can't really draw a pickle as distinct from a cucumber. "They're vegetables — usually cucumbers, but you can also use carrots, peppers, kalhornaðor, etc. — that have been soaked in salt water and vineager to preserve them," she explains. "And flavored with different spices. The recipe started as a way to preserve food for winter, before we had good ways to store food for that long. But they're flavorful and salty, so we still eat them. You might like them if you like dill."