Pickled Meal

Pickled Meal is a cooked food made from Meal Lice using the Electric Grill. It is a simple, water-free meal option that preserves the calorie value of the original ingredient while concentrating it into a smaller amount of food. Each unit of Pickled Meal requires 3 units of Meal Lice, or 1,800 kcal worth of raw ingredient, and the process does not add any calories beyond what was already in the input.

Its main advantage is food safety. Pickled Meal removes all germs from the ingredients during cooking, and it is the only cooked food that destroys Food Poisoning germs at room temperature. This makes it especially useful when the colony cannot reliably keep kitchen water clean, since dupes will not get sick from germy water during preparation. In practice, it is one of the safest ways to turn Meal Lice into a ready-to-eat food without depending on clean water at all.

• Pickled Meal and Liceloaf both preserve the same calorie total from Meal Lice, but Liceloaf requires 50 kg of water per batch while Pickled Meal does not.
• Because no water is used, Pickled Meal avoids any risk associated with contaminated cooking water.
• The germ-clearing effect applies during cooking, so the finished food starts out clean even if the raw ingredients were not.
• Since it is made in the Electric Grill, it fits into early and mid-game food production once a colony has the needed power and cooking setup.

Pickled Meal is therefore a practical midpoint food for colonies that have abundant Meal Lice but want to avoid the extra water cost of Liceloaf. It is not a calorie booster, but it is efficient, safe, and easy to integrate into a standard kitchen workflow. For colonies dealing with germs, it is especially valuable because it both sanitizes the ingredient and produces a meal that will not reintroduce Food Poisoning at room temperature.