Praeothmin wrote:Yet, strangely enough, people seem to prefer real food to replicated one when they have the choice, like Sisko's father...
Also, replicators?
Energy intensive (as seen in Voyager where replicator rations were cut due to power issues), require dedicated technicians to maintain, which many colonies may not have.
Need organic components in order to make food, they don't create it out of thin air, they need material components in order to replicate items.
Sure, you can store organics in the form of vegetable and meat pastes that the replicator uses, but you first need to harvest these components somewhere.
Replicators are not magic hats that create things out of nothing, they need base material to work with...
Joe Sisko is an older man, born either before the introduction of replicators or just after it. Early models would undoubtedly have had flaws to shake out. Quark replicates a lot of what he serves using his replicator bank. Janeway subsists on replicated coffee. We've seen Ben Sisko and other crewmembers making liberal use of the Replimat. That some of them complain about replicated fare is hardly surprising. If you eat the same meal a thousand times, it might be the best you've ever had the first time, but it would get boring later on. The meal itself is chemically identical every time, but your perception of it has changed.
Janeway's YoH quote and numerous other examples show us the replicator can recycle matter into other viable forms, moving between organic and inorganic matter. Organic matter is differentiated chemically from inorganic matter by the presence of carbon. No carbon=inorganic. Riker describes the process as "inorganic materialization" in "Lonely Among Us," here using 'organic' to refer to a non-biological process. Inorganic life has been known to the Federation since the discovery of the Horta in "Devil in the Dark," which is silicon based. Several other silicon-based species have been discovered.
In any event, the replicator can produce organic and inorganic matter, and recycle one into the other. There is no need to store meat paste at all. All it needs is a supply of basic atoms to arrange into molecules. Remember this nasty little trick?
http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... se_276.jpg
Phaser sentry, cup of tea, phaser sentry. All in about ten seconds.
Or even more simply, consider that glass is mostly silicon dioxide, which is inorganic. Every single time the replicator produces a drink in a glass, or food on a plate, it's producing both organic and inorganic matter.