"They're not broken in but they're not pinching me anywhere."

"I should hope they're not broken in!  Come eat, the food's already had a decent car ride's worth of cooling."

"Great, thanks." Food! "Thank you for running errands."

"Yeah 'course."  Food!  Ari tears into some egg rolls and puts one in her mouth before heading back out for the rest of the groceries.

Omf dumpling. "I assume downscale takeout is going to be vat meat in this timeline."

"Quite right."

"Is it always like, real animals, or do they make weird mad science ones - or are people eating things that would be hard to farm, like, uh, alligator, because it's no longer necessary to farm it -"

"Initially, most meat was grown from samples taken a relatively small number of whole animals, which were judged to produce the best available version of various cuts of meat.  We moved onto editing the genomes directly a few years later, and since then a few hybrids have become relatively popular.  I believe Ariel's partial to biffen.  And yes, if you'd like to try alligator - or, let's see, elk, orca, kangaroo, dodo, that sort of thing - I could acquire some without too much issue."

"It's not my life ambition or anything but as long as I'm here, why not. Biffen is... I don't have a confident guess."

"Beef and chicken!  Mostly.  The brand I like's also got some turkey and like, quail mixed in.  And a little fish I think?"

"Salmon, yes, and some buffalo."

"Ah, okay, I don't know why I imagined they'd stick to two-animal combinations."

"Those were the norm when I was little but then they like, improved."

"If only I had known about this when you went shopping."

"I can go shopping again tomorrow!  It's better anyway; I'll be going back to the city for more things from my place and the selection's not shit there.  The grocery stores out here don't have much of the fun stuff.  ...To me.  Biffen and some other stuff you won't have tried are still pretty standard."  Nomf.  "There's some in my egg rolls; you can have one."

"I feel like a novel meat blend will not be trivially appreciable in an eggroll, half the time I couldn't tell you if they contain pork or chicken." He eats one anyway.

Yeah it's an egg roll.

"That's really fair.  What do you want for tomorrow?"

"In the appreciating novel meats department? Cold cuts, steaks."

"Yeah, but like, what meats?"

"...I have no idea what I'll like. Is orca any good? Is dodo? - do you have non-extinct dodos in this timeline, that pushes back the earliest possible divergence point though I don't off the top of my head recall how far."

"Dodos are formerly extinct.  They taste fine; orca's better."

"Well, those were the ones that stuck out to me most on the list and I have no other way to discriminate."

"I have a friend who always gets orca whenever we go out for burgers.  I think it's kind of creepy, I mean, what if they're people..."

"...even if the animal ones are people surely the vat ones are not?"

"I don't think it's immoral.  Just, like... yeah, creepy!"