Nondescript, Nasty, Nutritious

Now with fiber! ^note Is it also a bad time to ask if this is boneless water?

Techpriest: Soylens viridiens is far more convenient, and provides everything necessary for continuing good health.
Cain: Except flavour and texture.
Techpriest: [baffled] Oh. Those.

— Ciaphas Cain: The Greater Good

In addition to nutritive qualities, most foods have a taste, texture, appearance, and distinctive shape. Beverages have colors, smells, temperatures, and qualities that are eye- and-palate-pleasing. We humans like to prepare our food in ways that please the senses, and entice us to consume it. Even nature has done this. Fruit has its bright colours and sugary or savoury tastes, vegetables have appealing textures and crunchiness, peppers and spices provide fine grittiness and mix of pain and pleasure, and milk has its clean tone and rich aftertaste, just to name a few.

However, maybe something has gone wrong and caused us to eschew those ideals. The food might be prepared by a sapient machine that only knows the basic dietary requirements of a species or individual, the culture may be sterile in many ways, people interred at a correctional facility are being treated as objects and not individuals, or some ecological or economic catastrophe has forced us all to turn to Poverty Food.

Enter the "Nondescript, Nasty, Nutritious" substance, something that can barely be called "food". It has carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, other organic compounds, binders, fillers, and any other substance that is "part of a balanced diet". You can eat it, it can fill you up and sustain your life. However, as the title suggests, this food lacks any taste, personality, taste, and appeal, leaving behind a... "something"... that could very well work either as a meal for you, a brick for your house, or oil for your car.

Mmm, tasty.

Other times, this "food" is made out of mixed creatures and/or other things that, in normal circumstances, are not consumable as food, but have been heavily processed and somehow given the ability to supply nutrition to the consumer.

Note: Although it's implied that a particular food of this trope should lack color, the color of the substance doesn't necessarily matter. It just has to be any of the following: somewhat artificial-looking or gelatin-like or paste-like, heavily processed, bitter/odd-flavored, or even lacking in taste overall. It could look a vibrant transparent blue, but taste like pure soy sauce, or be colored radioactive green and taste of just... matter.

See also Plain Palate and Only One Who Likes Spam for people who prefer this kind of food, and Mess on a Plate for food that's visually unappealing regardless of its nutritional content. If the diner is lucky, it Tastes Better Than It Looks. If the food is specifically a tasteless but filling soup, it's a Soup of Poverty.

Sometimes overlaps with Future Food Is Artificial, Food Pills, Indestructible Edible, If It Tastes Bad, It Must Be Good for You, Mystery Meat, I Ate WHAT?!, Poverty Food, Disgusting Vegetarian Food, and Foul Cafeteria Food.

Whoever eats this "food" might be Too Desperate to Be Picky.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Implied to be the case with "cyborg-safe" food in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. After Togusa accidentally bites into a plain looking "sandwich" meant for his augmented teammates, he spits it out in disgust. Batou explains that it's almost pure gluten with some protein-based Nanomachines for maintenance of cybernetics. It's implied at multiple points that Full-Conversion Cyborgs don't have a sense of taste that works quite as well as that of a regular human, but eating is still important for their psychological health.
• Girls und Panzer: One OVA has the girls out camping and discussing military field rations and how various nations' militaries once got together to trade field rations as part of an international demonstration. The US's MREs, naturally, were so bad no other country would take them.

Comic Books

• In one Judge Dredd story the Judges had to shut down the production of "Gunge", food made out of various kinds of waste material (vermin, hair, etc.) due to the public outrage it provoked. However, since Gunge was useful for alleviating the city's food shortage they then changed the production process to reduce the ingredients into unrecognisable bland mush that was sold as "Foodstuff A", "Foodstuff B", etc. Since the new version carried the Justice Department's seal of approval, listing ingredients was not needed.

Fan Works

• Nutrient paste, which Empath and the Psyches ate in Psychelia in Empath: The Luckiest Smurf. Its taste is described as porridge made with a bag of cement.
• In the Turning Red fic The Great Red Panda Rescue, the scientists feed Mei nothing but a gray-colored gruel.
• In Iron Hearts, the Dark Mechanicus and the Iron Warriors' human servants subsist entirely on cans of Nutrient Paste. One tin per day is enough for an entire 24 hour period, and a steady diet of nutrient paste can keep a human healthy from weaning to death by old age with no ill effects. The problem is, they taste like, well, paste, which means that most people who eat them are desperate for anything else (the Dark Mechanicus, being a monastic order, don't care for mundane pleasures, and the Iron Warriors only feed them to their slaves anyways). Twilight loves them, because she can have a can of paste for breakfast and work all day without having to stop and eat (which is why humans like them too). Her friends insist she eats something else once in a while, though; if only for social reasons.
• Property Of: The food generally given to the humans is described as this, often consisting of a dark-brown loaf meant to provide carbs, a protein loaf that allegedly tastes like an overcooked cheese-and-broccoli omelette, and red-orange spheres that are meant to supplement fruits and vegetables. They aren't intolerable and none of the humans get sick from them, but many of them yearn for actual food (with Sam at one point wishing aloud for a milkshake).

Films — Animation

• Lightyear: In his quarters, Buzz takes out a food ration package that looks like a pizza delivery box. He bends and shakes it to activate some kind of internal flash cooking mechanism. Opening the box reveals a TV dinner-like tray with congealed loafs of different colors in the compartments.
• Monsters vs. Aliens: On Susan's first day at the monster holding facility, she is fed a gray, oatmeal-like substance dispensed from a tube (along with a spoon to eat it with). All the other monsters are given food appropriate for their species (fish for Link, garbage for Dr. Cockroach, a ham for B.O.B.), so it might just be they haven't figured out what to feed a Giant Woman and went with the most basic dish.

Films — Live-Action

• Judge Dredd: It's implied that the food provided inside the Megacities is like this, as a service droid advertises:
  Service Droid: Eat recycled food for a happier, healthier life... Eat recycled food. Recycled food: it's good for the environment and OK for you.
• The Matrix: The mushy grey goop that's seemingly the only food available in the real world is so bland ^note the taste of which is described as being similar to runny eggs, a bowl of snot and Taystee Wheat., it's given by Cypher as a reason for his defection. It's described as "...a single cell protein combined with synthetic [amino acids], vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs."
• RoboCop (1987): The title character is mostly cybernetic, with only the bare essentials of Patrolman Murphy left installed. To sustain his organic parts, OCP has provided the precinct headquarters with a nutrient paste dispenser that looks somewhat like an ICEE machine. The stuff comes out into a cup as a brown sludge, with the consistency and look of left-out applesauce. Nonetheless, one of the other, fully-human OCP executives, Donald Johnson, tastes the stuff, and takes a liking to it.
  Donald Johnson: [sticks his finger in the cup and tastes the sludge] Tastes like baby food!
  Robert Morton: [with a quizzical expression] Knock yourself out.
  [Johnson continues eating from the cup]
• In Snowpiercer, the residents of the Tail are fed with protein bars made from cockroaches and other insects.
• The Fly (1986): While it looks okay, the steak Seth cooks for Veronica (after running it through the teleporter) tastes "artificial" according to her. This is to demonstrate why every animal he sends through ends up turned inside out; it doesn't know how to handle organic material.

Literature

• Andre Norton's science fiction novels sometimes mention survival food called "E-rations". They lack flavor but fulfill all necessary nutritional requirements, including providing extra energy. The novels they appear in include Forerunner Foray and Postmarked the Stars.
• Ciaphas Cain features the vat-grown foodstuff "soylens viridiens", which is nutritionally complete if completely unenjoyable. The title character loathes the stuff, but Techpriest Cyborgs appreciate its convenience. Note that this is a direct reference to Soylent Green, which (in the movie version at least) is famously made of people.
  Techpriest: Soylens viridiens is far more convenient, and provides everything necessary for continuing good health.
  Cain: Except flavour and texture.
  Techpriest: [baffled] Oh. Those.
• In the same setting, one of the Gaunt's Ghosts short stories introduces “slab”, a standard Imperial Guard ration manufactured by taking any and all available foodstuffs and then pressure-cooking it all together until it turns into a single homogeneous mass. It can be stored and prepared any number of ways, tastes like nothing in particular, and looks distinctly like plastic explosive, which one of Gaunt’s old schoolmates once took advantage of to play a legendarily ill-advised prank on an instructor.
• The Stormlight Archive: Food created by Soulcasting magic is vital for military rations and the poor, though the total lack of character in the meat- and grain-like substances make people avoid it when they can. Kaladin is outright incredulous when a recipe manages to make Soulcast meat tasty.
  Peet: It's cheaper than water.
  Kaladin: That's probably because even the grain is Soulcast. It will all taste like mold.
• 2001: A Space Odyssey has Doctor Bowman explore the kitchen area of his habitat. He discovers packaged foods in the cupboards and bottled comestibles in the refrigerator. Unlike the film adaptation, the contents in every case are an azure blue substance with a cake-like consistency, devoid of any discernible flavor.
• Charles R. Tanner's 1932 short story Tumithak Of The Corridors depicts a society living underground, subsisting on "Food Cubes," which are produced by automated machinery that the people have long forgotten how to adjust or control. These cubes have no taste, and neither do the people have any cultural memory of foods that had taste. Eating is considered a dull, necessary chore.
• Subverted by Extee Three^note Officially "Terran Federation Space Forces Emergency Ration, Extraterrestrial, Type Three" in H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy. To humans, Extee Three is nondescript, nasty, and nutritious, but fuzzies love the stuff.
• In The Ship Who... there are ration bars referred to as the basic foodstuff of the Central System worlds, and handed out in bite-sized pieces to client worlds. In Partnership after a First Contact Faux Pas the natives of Angalia are entirely dependent on ration bars, with a population too large to be supported with the amount of food their environment could provide.
  • Ration cubes are elaborated on some more in The Ship Who Searched, which mentions that brawns call it "kibble" and that it's stockpiled and cached in every base just in case something happens to the (more palatable) food synthesizers.
  Tia had been told that while it looked, smelled, and tasted reasonable, its very sameness would drive you over the edge if you had to eat it for very long.
• The novelization of Alien: Isolation involves a hauler captain who had to resort to the pale, slimy, very cheap to buy in bulk food and how much he wishes it was anything else.
• The Krakau of Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse were repulsed by human food. When they provision their human soldiers, they give them a once-daily dose of slow-release fats, proteins, and nutrients in the form of a large tube of gray sludge, which Wolf says tastes like salty snot. Unusually though, they aren't expected to eat it by mouth and instead have feeding ports installed into their stomachs. Later in the series, while Mops will sometimes eat by mouth, she keeps some tubes with her so that she stays nourished even if she loses her appetite.
• The Caves of Steel: The most unfortunate citizens of future Earth's vast subterranean cities get rations of yeast mush. Vat-grown yeast is the foundation of the cities' food system, but most people get food that's a few steps removed from it or at least better-prepared.
• The Machineries of Empire: Even a Magitek-fueled Galactic Superpower issues indestructible ration bars to its troops, though they can usually get much better meals instead. It's a joke among the Kel military that consuming ration bars voluntarily is a sign of mental illness. To their credit, they're not bland — their flavours and odours are described as "distinctive".
• In Only You Can Save Mankind, when Johnny is baffled that the ScreeWee captain wants human food, specifically breakfast cereal and burgers, she explains that the ScreeWee normally eat a waterweed which "contains a perfect balance of vitamins, minerals and trace elements to ensure a healthy growth of scale and crest. But, as you would put it, it tastes like poo."
• The Scholomance: The titular Wizarding School's cafeteria automatically creates rations in the form of nutrient-rich gruel. It normally glamours this into the form of proper food, but if the enchantments are on the fritz or the school itself is annoyed, the students get the slop instead.
• The Duchy of Terra series has Universal Protein, which is basically normal food processed down to a nutritional least common denominator that can be safely eaten by any known species in the universe. Stir in some trace elements/nutrients required by the specific species eating the meal, and you have a healthy meal for any sentient. Since UP is easily stored and preserved, it's the standard meal for any spaceship with a mixed race crew, but it doesn't change the fact that a UP meal looks and tastes like porridge seasoned with crushed vitamin tablets.
• Played for Laughs in the picture book What Are You So Grumpy About? One of the questions is "Did your mom and dad forget to buy your favorite kind of cereal, so you had to eat 'grown-up' cereal?" In the illustration, the grown-up cereal is labeled "100% Organic Whole Grain Wheat and Millet Food Substance: A Regular Food," is made by "Boring Acres", contains "No Sugar, No Fat, No Fun", and the ingredients include gravel, birdweed, wood chips, corn husks, burlap bags, weeds and dirt.
• Tress of the Emerald Sea: Plentiful "verdant spores" explosively grow into large masses of vines when exposed to water. The vines are edible when fully grown - they're not nutritionally complete and are disparaged as "weeds", but they're a compact emergency food source for seafarers.
• Spacers and colonists of Taylor's Ark eat pretty much nothing but "Nutri", a flavorless paste that keeps indefinitely and provides complete nutrition. Flavorings can be added to spice up basic Nutri — curry, annatto, fruit, and hazelnut are popular options. Poor Dr. Shona Taylor finds herself unable to eat anything but unspiced Nutri when she's pregnant and visiting Mars (where natural food is abundant).
  "Are you sure you won't have some of the stew? Vegetables? Fruit?"
  At the very thought of solid food, Shona's stomach did barrel rolls. She slid hastily into her chair. "No thank you, Auntie. Nutri contains everything I need: vitamins, minerals, protein, carbohydrates..."
  "Hah! Everything but flavor. It looks like such a nasty mess. And it doesn't taste like anything at all!"
• In Heavy Object, Legitimacy Kingdom military rations are regularly compared to erasers in taste, texture, and appearance. They're nutritious enough to keep the soldiers fighting, but none of them are happy about it.
• Translation State: The only foodstuff available on the Central Space Station is skel, a thick, fleshy leaf with all of a human's nutritional requirements and an indescribably strange flavour. Condiments are inadequate to the task of disguising it.
• The Hobbit: The Lakeman produce a travel-ration called "cram", which Bilbo and his dwarvish companions are forced to subsist on for an extended period.
  "If you want to know what cram is, I can only say that I don’t know the recipe; but it is biscuitish, keeps good indefinitely, is supposed to be sustaining, and is certainly not entertaining, being in fact very uninteresting except as a chewing exercise."

Live-Action TV

• Andor: On the brutal Narkina 5 prison complex, the prison laborers are fed exclusively with tasteless nutritional paste to keep them going, dispensed via a small hose in their cells. They're allowed to eat as much as they want, since even the Empire knows starving your slave labor is counterproductive. The top-performing group gets taste added to their food.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Captain Raymond Holt describes this as being his idea of a perfect food.
  Holt: I have zero interest in food. If it were feasible, my diet would consist entirely of flavorless beige smoothies containing all the nutrients required by the human animal.
• Doctor Who: In "The Caves of Androzani", when Sharaz Jek has rescued Peri and the Doctor from being executed, one of his workers, Salateen, brings the two bowls of unidentifiable off-green slime that Salateen only calls "nutrition".
• Girl Meets World: The episode "The Forgotten" treats cafeteria food this way. What's more, it provides the Aesop that cafeteria food has to be this way. When you're producing food for hundreds of students, you have to make sure that it won't cause distress to the most sensitive of tummies. Maya adding (unidentified) seasoning to the school mashed potatoes results in enough kids throwing up to traumatize Lucas and Farkle, who are aiding the janitor. The idea of a more personalized diet plan (or at least leaving the seasoning out and letting kids add their own) is ignored.
• I Love Lucy: In the famous episode "Lucy Does A TV Commercial", Lucy sneaks her way onto a TV spokesperson role for one of Ricky's television programs. The product she endorses is the ever-memorable "Vitameatavegamin", which claims to be a health tonic of a clear liquid, also claiming to contain "Vitamins, Meat, Vegetables, and Minerals" as well as 46-proof/23% alcohol, which she slowly gets drunk off of during the course of rehearsing the commercial. Lucy's first taste of the tonic ^note which was actually apple pectin, the same stuff used for making jams and jellies, and pectin is bitter, which explains why Lucille Ball's reaction was so natural goes about as well as you expect, given what meat, vegetables, and alcohol would taste like blended together, if there is any substantiation to the claim.
• In the Legends of Tomorrow episode "The One Where We're Trapped on TV", in the Fates-controlled world, all food is reduced to different colors of mush. Beige and grey seem relatively common, while blue is apparently fancy. Nate takes a liking to them.
• The series finale of The Librarians has the destruction of the Library rewrite the world as if Humanity never had any imagination or creativity. Among other things like muting colors and reverting everything to a generic 50's aesthetic, all food is replaced with a mush made from flour and fat, to Eve's disgust.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • "The Cage": Captain Christopher Pike is forced into a "zoo", of sorts, of sentient/sapient creatures. One of the "sustenances" given to Pike is a glass of blue mystery liquid, which the Talosian Keeper claims contains a "nourishing protein complex".
    • "By Any Other Name": Kelvans, somewhat-xenophobic aliens from the closest galaxy, Andromeda, take over the Enterprise to bring themselves back home. Their only source of nourishment is Food Pills that contain all necessary elements; efficiency, as they call it. It's implied, though not strongly, that they are not as tasty as real food. The trope is inverted in this case, when one of the Kelvans begins to prefer eating (or rather, "consume bulk material", as they call it) from the Enterprise's food slot system ^note (which itself dispenses food that resembles vibrant multicolored marshmallows), rather than their food pills. Kirk, McCoy, Spock, and Scotty, use this Kelvan's emotional reactions to the food to their advantage, and give the other four Kelvan crewmembers similar reactions through irritation, love, jealousy and drunkeness. This allows the Kelvans to see that they are becoming something other than they were before, and they would not be recognized upon arrival back in their galaxy.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • Becomes a small, but important plot point in the episode "Allegiance": Captain Picard is abducted by unseen captors and replaced with a body double. While in a holding cell with two others, one of the individuals, named Tholl, has already found a translucent fluorescent pink disk of a gelatin-like substance, in a food dispenser in the center of the room. It's implied that neither Tholl nor Picard seem to like its taste. When another, Essoq, a gruff individual from a race more vicious than the Klingons, is abducted, it's found that he does not like the taste either (which he reacts vocally to), and, implied, cannot eat. Unfortunately, he has his eyes set on Tholl as a meal, and is getting hungrier by the hour...
      Tholl: It's edible, but I wouldn't call it food.
      [Picard takes a bite of the substance]
      Picard: [inquisitively] Mmmm... [he puts it down on the dispenser's counter]

    and later...

    [Essoq hesitantly and slowly takes a gelatin disk from the food dispenser and sniffs it]
    Essoq: What is this?
    Picard: Food.
    Essoq: The only food?
    Picard: It would seem so.
    [Essoq licks the disk, then suddenly grimaces in disgust and throws it down on the floor]
    Essoq: POISON!!!

    • In the episode "Liaisons", the alien ambassadors of the week have no real concept of pleasure, even in their food, only turning to tasteless nutritional Food Pills. Unfortunately, this causes one of them to take their enjoyment of exoplanetary sweet foods and drinks too far, and tests Counselor Troi's nerve (who herself enjoys chocolate very much). By the end, Troi is so tuckered-out of sweets that she seems to prefer using the food tablets for a while.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • Starfleet field combat rations have a time-release formula that can keep you nourished for three days. O'Brien loves them, saying they're the only thing he misses about serving on the front line during the Cardassian war. Everyone else finds them barely edible.
    • In the episode "Til Death Do Us Part", Ezri and Worf are prisoners of the Breen. All they are given to eat is algae paste.
• Stargate SG-1: Thor's people, the Asgard, have apparently taken this approach to their food despite their advanced technology. Rations are simply colored literal shapes, such as spheres, squares, pyramids, cylinders, that look like modeling clay. Lt. Colonel Carter, who has worked closely in the past with the Asgard, doesn't take well to the taste.
  Thor: I like the yellow ones.
• Firefly implies that this is the case with a lot of food used on spacecraft and on border worlds where the harsh environment and desert landscapes mean that fresh food is in short supply. Book is able to get passage on Serenity by offering fresh strawberries, and in the pilot episode the extremely high value bars that are being fought over are revealed to be high-quality ration bars that are worth much more than gold.
  Mal: [handing a ration bar to Patience] This bar'll feed a family for a month; longer, if they don't like their kids.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech: Most mechwarriors keep a small stash of nutrition bars in their cockpits for times when they're stuck in the mech for long periods and can't get access to anything else. They're not popular, but they'll keep you going. The descriptions make them sound like they're basically Power Bars. It's also common to keep a stash of sports drinks in the cockpit as well, but those are generally better-received unless you've been forced to live off them for several days.
• "Kibble" in Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk Red is a mass-produced nutrient mix that satisfies most requirements for sustenance, but tends to look, smell, and taste like the dry pet food it takes its name from. As such, it's primarily eaten by those who can't afford better (which is quite a lot of people in this Crapsack World).
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Murlynd's Spoon creates a porridge that meets all the consumer's daily nutritional needs, but tastes and feels like warm, wet cardboard.
  • The Create Food and Water spell generates a simple foodstuff of your choice, but the food itself is rather bland.
• Paranoia: Lower clearance citizens have a wide variety of algae based and synthesized food products to choose from, and the happiness drugs prescribed to all citizens will help them forget the lack of flavour. The game often states that most lower clearance food, for all its nutritional value, is rather devoid of significant flavour. Part of the introduction to Red clearance is a gift of a hydroponic apple, which the text describes as tasting mindblowingly good in comparison.
• Pathfinder, being a spinoff of Dungeons and Dragons, copies Murlynd's Spoon, though names it the Sustaining Spoon. Like the original, it creates a flavourless paste that tastes like wet cardboard. The Create Food and Water spell (Only Create Food in the second edition) similarly describes the food as bland.
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse: The Bone Gnawers know a Gift to turn any organic material into a stew that fulfills the dietary requirements of whoever eats it... at the expense of having the taste and consistency of wallpaper paste. Since the Bone Gnawers are by and large homeless, penniless vagrants, they'll take what they can get.

Video Games

• Some versions of Angband and its variants have the "Create Food" spell which creates "a pint of fine grade mush" — its taste can only be speculated upon but it's far less nutritious than "real" food. Later versions of the game replace the spell with "Satisfy Hunger" that directly increases your satiation level, averting this trope.
• In Assassin's Creed III, Shaun in one combo mentions finding an old machine Those Who Came Before used to create manna, the so-called food of the gods, only to find that its taste is utterly unappealing, which he theorizes may be the result of them having different taste buds than humans. Rebecca proposes the alternative theory that the machine's "flavorizer" broke down in the 50,000 years it went without maintenance. It's never cleared up who's in the right.
• Baldur's Gate III: Gruel restores a good amount of HP and is exceptionally quick to eat in combat, but is described in such glowing terms as "watery sludge" and "grey goo".
• The Clockwork City expansion in The Elder Scrolls Online shows us that Sotha Sil has arranged his eponymous domain such that every citizen gets a supply of "Nutriment Paste", described as "A thick yet rheumy substance produced within the Clockwork City. Though quite filling, and rather healthy, it is food devoid of pleasure." One sidequest involves a farm on the edges of zone that produces a small amount of extremely valuable actual fruits and vegetables, while a full chain of sidequests in the poorest quarter of the city itself has you help source methods of making the naturally growing "Ironstalk Mushrooms" and meat from the local wildlife "Fabricants" into something edible, and tastier than the paste.
• In the Fable series, Flavor Text for tofu describes it as healthful, but "vile-tasting" and texturally unpleasant. The icon is a featureless pale cube.
• Fallout 4:
  • You come across a school infested with bright pink ghouls. It turns out that the school had been feeding its students nothing but a pink "food paste" as part of a Vault-Tec experiment, which on top of being tasteless also turned people's skin pink. It's unclear whether the irritability it caused was also a side effect, or merely the result of all other foods being banned from school grounds.
  • The Institute also has nutritional processed food pastes, but given that one of the scientists was complaining they got rid of his favorite one, they must have at least some flavor.
• Final Fantasy XIV:
  • Shadowbringers introduces the Archon Loaf, favored sustenance of overworked Sharlayan scholars. This bread, made from blended fish and vegetables, was designed solely for nutritional value with no regard to taste. The result will keep you going, but it's an acquired taste at best. G'raha Tia finds it nostalgic, and Urianger somehow unironically likes it, but most non-Sharlayans would rather find something else to eat. Items like this lead to the creation of "The Last Stand", a restaurant ran by a Sharlayan drop out who got tired of the food and wanted something with actual taste.
  • Endwalker's Faculty of Medicine role quests one-up the Archon Loaf with "panaloaf", a project commissioned from Professor Galvaroche by the Sharlayan Forum as a food supply for emergencies. Their only requirements were two — that a single serving contain all necessary daily nutrients, and that it be possible to create only with locally-available ingredients. So Galvaroche started with Archon Loaf and jammed in more ingredients to up the nutritional value, making an already-unpleasant foodstuff so much viler that his test subjects — the same people who already subsist on unmodified Archon Loaf — literally couldn't keep it down. His assistant, Debroye, who is much more passionate about food as an enjoyable experience, has been charged with making the thing palatable without sacrificing its nutrition, and as an Alchemist or Culinarian, you help her out by providing various flavor improvers. The quote below is just one of several colorful descriptions on how awful it is.
    The initial flavor is like a numbness in the tip of your tongue, which gradually transitions into an overall sense of crushing emptiness. It is quite possibly the worst thing you have ever eaten.
• Half-Life:
  • Half-Life 2: After the Earth is taken over by the Combine, the citizens receive rations dispensed from automatic machines, as seen at the train station in the game's introduction. While we never see any of them consumed, these rations are apparently of very poor quality, with one citizen (who is actively waiting in line for the rations) having this to say about them:
    Citizen: You gotta be damn hungry to wait in line for this crap.
  • Another citizen says that he'd join Civil Protection "just to get a decent meal".
  • In Half-Life: Alyx, the player may occasionally find water-flavored "desiccated sustenance bars" and an additional egg-flavored "gelatinated calorie paste" in the world while rummaging around, indicative of Earth's current status as a ball of resources to be used up by the ruling Combine. Note the label that recommends consuming them within 9,000 days after opening.
• One food item in The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC is Mystery Paste. It restores 2400 HP and cures all status ailments, but the treasure chest it's initially found in warns you that you're cursed, and the description reads "The real mystery is why anyone would eat this."
• Oxygen Not Included has two examples.
  • The first, Nutrient Bars, are pre-made rations intended to aid your colony at the start of the game. You are incapable of creating more Nutrient Bars via cooking, farming, or ranching — they can only be optioned from either the Printing Pod or randomly spawning vending machines. It tastes horrible, but never rots.
  • The second example of this trope is the Mush Bar, which is the first edible item players can produce and, going by its recipe, is little more than heavily processed mud. Due to the process used to make Mush Bars, they will always have germs on them, meaning eating too many will make your dupes very sick. Mush Bars can be grilled at an industrial grill, which not only makes them slightly more palatable, but also cuts down on the germ amount.
• Louie's culinary notes on the Giant Breadbug from Pikmin 2 mention that the creature yields a massive amount of nutritious meat, but it's so flavorless that it would be better off as filler for all-you-can-eat buffets.
• Rimworld: Nutrient Paste is available to settlements advanced enough to build their dispensers. They blend together any sort of ingredient into bland, oozy and sterile paste that colonists aren't especially happy to eat. However, if you don't have a proper kitchen set up it's often better to set one up, as pawns find eating raw ingredients even worse, and both these and meals cooked in filthy kitchens and/or by unskilled cooks may cause food poisoning, which is even worse for moods all around and kills productivity because the afflicted are in too much pain to even walk properly. And even if/once you have a skilled cook with decent equipment, nutrient paste remains useful by virtue of being by far the most efficient way to feed prisoners. They don't like it any more than colonists do, but then again, few players care about their prisoners' happiness, or lack thereof.
• An event in Civilization: Beyond Earth has an industrial adhesive be proved to be perfectly edible once dried, but it "tastes like cardboard." The player can either have it double for foodstuff, or remind the eager scientist telling them about it that nobody likes foods that double as glue.
• Star Trek: Judgment Rites: "Though This Be Madness": This is what the food prepared by the Phays supercomputer is described to be; heavily processed. It's also fortified with tranquilizers as well, made to calm and pacify the developmentally-challenged individuals on the ship. One of your goals is to subvert this, and instead repair a botany incubator to grow fresh fruit for them.
• Stardew Valley: The Field Snack is a food item resembling an energy bar, made using a maple seed, pine cone, and acorn that provides a decent amount of energy in the early game. While it's never said to taste bad, none of the villagers are happy to receive it as a gift, implying it doesn't taste very good, either.
• Streets of Rogue has Fud as a common food item, appearing as a glass jar filled with light brown stuff. The flavor text describes it as "like food, but worse", it is implied to be carcinogenic, and it can be crafted by combining any item in your inventory with a Fud Processor, meaning it is essentially made from random garbage.
• One Lonely Outpost starts the player character off with a handful of bars of Nutrient Paste, which have the description "100% daily essential nutrients, 0% fun. Science's perfect meal tastes like disappointment." The player character can craft more with green waste and fish sauce, but why would they want to? One message you receive from headquarters notes that Nutrient Paste tastes so bad that a lot of colonists will go on a hunger strike over having to eat it, and borderline begs the player character to start farming different types of crops to prevent this.

Webcomics

• Isla Aukate: During the Hurricane arc Silver has to eat high-energy protein bars to fuel his caloric-powered empath powers, he hates the taste.
• In one The Order of the Stick strip in Dragon, the Order meet a man who insists that the secret to a content life is to ignore Flavor Text. He subsists entirely on a gruel that Roy says tastes revolting, but which he claims doesn't really taste of anything, because there's nothing about that in the rules.
• Outsider: While in transit from a Loroi warship to one of their worlds, the human Jardin is relieved to learn that among the materials recovered from the wreckage of his ship are some MRE-type meal packets, as Loroi food tends to make him sick. When Talon asks about the one he takes, he says that it's beef stroganoff, but admits it's not very good. That said, after being deprived of human food for so long, he's very happy to dig in once it's prepared.

Websites

• Neopets: The Nutritional Block is a white, grainy cube classified as "Gross Food" — an item category otherwise mostly consisting of culinary calamities and bodily wastes. Like any other Gross Food, Alien Aishas consider it enough of a delicacy to stock in their vending machine, but it will damage a pet's mood if fed to them.
  "Mmmmmm... packed full of... nutrition!"
• SCP Foundation: One of the items vended by SCP-261, the multi-dimensional vending machine, was a metal can simply labeled "FOOD", containing a thick grey paste. It was low in fat and cholesterol and contained all necessary vitamins and minerals, but didn't taste or smell like anything and made whoever eat it appear emotionless and slow-witted.

Western Animation

• The Fairly OddParents!: One episode has Timmy wish everyone was exactly the same so that no one would get picked on for being different. This results in everything on earth becoming gray and nondescript, from the people to the food. Timmy's mom is such a terrible cook, she can't even manage to make gray blobby mush for dinner and winds up with a pink misshapen mess.
• The Loud House: Lisa is known to invent food like this:
  • In "Friend or Faux?", she invents "kelp leather", which looks like a slimy green blob and is apparently chewy. Lisa describes it as "full of nutrients", but having "zero taste".
  • In "School of Shock", she makes something called "protein nuggets", meant to make her classmates better at learning. However, they taste bland, give them gas, and are awfully hard.
• Monsters vs. Aliens: In "Prisoner of the Dark Dimension", Sqweep's attempt to make a nutritional substance for the Vornicarn results in a light brown sludge so disgusting that even B.O.B. rips out his own tongue after trying it. Sqweep and B.O.B. find that they can mask the taste by adding chocolate and feed the Vornicarn chocolate bunnies with the nutritional substance as an ingredient.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: There are only two kinds of food in the Horde, gray ration bars and brown ration bars, and everyone from the grunt soldiers to the Force Captains eats them. Apparently, the gray kind is better than the brown kind, as mentioned by Adora, but this does not stop Scorpia from getting really excited when she gets to try actual food at Princess Prom.
• Futurama has "Bachelor Chow" for the domestically inept folks of the 31^st century. Its nutritional value is unknown, but it looks like kibble and is Damned by Faint Praise by its own advertising:
  Now With Flavor!

Real Life

• Defying this trope with rations is now a big part of military strategy — modern armies are very cognizant that troop morale is important for combat effectiveness, and crappy food is guaranteed to hurt morale, so they strive to make even combat rations as tasty and palatable as possible within the limitations they have to meet. It's not for nothing that the phrase "An army marches on its stomach" has been a military maxim since the Napoleonic era.
  • The D Ration fortified chocolate bar, created by the US Army to replace whole meals in emergencies, was initially an invocation of the trope: The colonel in charge of the project was concerned that soldiers might just eat the chocolate for fun, and thus he told his food chemists to create a taste "slightly better than a boiled potato". They succeeded. The bar was also so hard that many soldiers had to shave off bits with their knives rather than bite it, and frequently caused digestive issues that earned it the nickname "Hitler's secret weapon". All of this combined resulted in troops often choosing to go hungry rather than eat the chocolate, even when they had no other food. Later iterations brought emergency chocolate into the realm of "not horrible".
• "Nutraloaf" is prepared by blending various different nutritive foods, putting them together into a vague loaf shape and baking the result until you have a large, orange loaf that's eaten without utensils and reportedly tastes like absolutely nothing, somehow hiding its every ingredient from the tongue. It's only served in certain prisons in the US and Canada to misbehaving inmates, with results going from "misbehavior stopped" to "hunger strike". Although apparently because of its taste (or, more precisely, lack thereof), its use as a punishment is controversial, and there's been multiple lawsuits calling for a ban on Nutraloaf, arguing that it's so bad it should be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Its proponents largely respond by pointing out that it's mostly served to those who can't be trusted with even a plastic spoon to eat with.
• Gatorade, when it was being formulated, initially tasted like urine or toilet-bowl cleaner, according to the players, until Mrs. Cade suggested adding lemon juice and cyclamate to the recipe.
• Soylent (not the film Soylent, but it was named after that as a Shout-Out) was introduced as a meal replacement shake that meets 100% of human nutritional needs. Its main claim to fame was its "aggressively neutral" non-flavor. It gained a cult following among techies too busy to eat a proper meal. These days, Soylent comes in many flavors — Chocolate, Banana, etc. — including the aggressively neutral original.
• Huel is a very similar meal replacement that comes in the form of grey powder. Both have had similarly unflattering reviews on palatability.
• Similarly, plain yogurt, while extremely good for you, has a flavor that could also be described as "aggressively neutral" and mildly sour. Ditto for cottage cheese, that bland and lumpy diet standby of the '60s and '70s, and tofu, that much-maligned vegetarian/health food staple, which tastes just faintly of soybeans and water, at least if eaten by itself. Averted if tofu is cooked with something else, like stir-fried vegetables. The tofu will absorb flavor from any sauces and spices used while cooking and can actually act as a flavor-enhancer if done right.
• Just about every Tom, Dick and Howard who’s ever been hospitalized will swear up, down and sideways that hospital food fits this trope to a T. Much of this boils down to mass-produced hospital food being designed to follow whatever dietary guidelines any potential patients it could be fed to might have, typically meaning very little to no sugars, salts, fats, or spices.
• Many a student, both current and former, maintains that school cafeteria lunch is a perfect example of this trope — that is, when the cafeteria's options don't amount to poorly-prepared fast food options like heart-attacking, grease-dripping pizzas and burgers.
• John Harvey Kellogg's corn flakes were intentionally bland and near-tasteless so as to avoid gastric distress in people with digestive issues. When his brother William founded the Kellogg Toasted Corn Flake company, he added sugar to the recipe for market appeal.
• Sylvester Graham commissioned a whole line of Graham breads made from coarsely-ground wheat intended to minimize pleasure and stimulation in life, a motive that is often conflated with Kellogg's (Graham lived a few decades earlier and the Kellogg brothers drew influence from him). For obvious reasons most Graham crackers today are flavored with honey or cinnamon and used as a vehicle for s'mores or a reasonably-healthy snack for small children.
• A lot of the vegetarian/natural foods/“health food” cuisine of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was said to fall under this trope, consisting of bland, beige loaves and patties of legumes and whole grains.
• Oatmeal could be the poster food for this trope. In its normal form it's a pile of bland gray lumpy goop. But that's also why it's popular; because it's so bland it takes on the flavor of whatever is mixed with it, making it easy to customize to anyone's taste. Many a breakfast buffet will have an oatmeal bar with several choices of mix-ins. Much the same could be said of grits, especially in the American South.
• Rice (for starch) and beans (for protein) are extremely cheap, and are easily prepared. Mix them together and you get the modern equivalent of glue-tasting, lumpy nutrient paste. It gets better if you know how to cook the ingredients properly; rice and beans is a staple of multiple world cuisines, though granted all of them use spices in addition to the basic components.
• Gruel, in its most basic form, is a thin soup consisting of oatmeal, legumes, and lots of water, and will sustain someone with either an upset stomach or who is too poor to afford bread, without offering the slightest bit of culinary satisfaction. Fancier versions, however, can contain spices, milk, sweeteners like sugar or honey, and even brandy or sweet wines, and be both nourishing and flavorful.
• Laboratory rodent blocks were originally designed to be like this, to ensure that mice, rats, and guinea pigs used in psychology research would receive proper nutrition, yet remain desperate enough for something with greater appeal to run mazes, push buttons, or the like for a food reward. Subverted in brands marketed for pet rodents, whose owners generally want their little buddies to be both well-nourished and happy.

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