Mr Biscuit Revisited

Inspired by this post by u/Jorahm615

The basics

Mr. Biscuit turns any organic matter into something that technically supplies a human's nutritional requirements. It takes 10 minutes to go from biomass to wafers but it can only produce enough of something you can arguably call food to feed 10 people. It's the hardtack of the 2040s but not as soft and tasty. You'd think it could produce 144 "meals" per day based on the 10 minute timer but either it doesn't or that only feeds 10 people.

I would say it works mostly as described. For whatever reason, it makes food for 10 people. If the Tech really wants to dig into it, it's either:

• A question of quantity. How many of those 10 minute "meals" does one person need to eat per day? One? Three? Six? 14 is the magic number where feeding 10 people requires keeping it running all day every day. Just build a big hopper so you don't have to manually feed it every 10 minutes.
• A limitation of the hardware that can be Tech Upgraded to double its output.
• A limitation in the software created entirely to force you to buy more units. Electronics Security and Software to disable it vs. . . eh, probably 24. That's the crafting difficulty to make your own Mr B. Crack the software and it runs 24/7 as long as you can feed it, providing food for 40 or 50 people.

Personally, I'd go with the latter because it's the more dystopian option. It could be making food for 40 people by default but Marketing calculated 10 people as the most profitable option and had it tuned down to that level.

"There isn’t enough organic material to feed a Mr. Biscuit regularly inside a city."

I always disputed that. That's written by someone who's never tried to find food on the street before. I get why it's there. Widespread Mr B use in the city has knock-on effects to the culture. Making it viable in the city if you work for it can really create that dark future atmosphere.

In theory the dumpsters that we'll be talking about are padlocked but the teenager working at the counter doesn't get paid enough to care. It's easier to leave it open than unlocking and relocking it on every trash run. Places targeted at rich people might have more secure dumpsters and surveillance or they might not. Human laziness defeats the most powerful technological solutions.

If you've ever worked in a convenience store, grocery store or restaurant, you know how much food gets thrown out. A motivated dumpster diver can bring you 100 lbs or more per day of expired scopdogs and soy donuts. Buck A Slice pizza slices that have outlived their usefulness even come in a little wedge shaped cardboard box that Mr. B can also convert to wafers. In the past you could just eat this stuff but the dumpsters pour bleach on them automatically now. Mr. B doesn't care.

Then there's half eaten real food from corpo restaurants and moldy food from expensive Fresh Food markets. Stop by the office tower and you'll find coffee grounds and filters, shredded documents, cardboard boxes. Go out to the park and rake up the leaves for a few more pounds.

Heck, hit up the hospital or even your local Ripper's dumpster. Don't worry about the biohazard markings on the trash. Mr Biscuit will sterilize it. . . probably. Set out some cockroach and rat traps in your crappy cargo container apartment. Set some at the NCART station and bolt them to the floor. Everyone will think they're official. Add in those gonks you killed on your last run and. . .

Once you start down that road, it's worth remembering that body banks don't buy corpses anymore and NCPD doesn't go into bad neighborhoods at night unless it's a MaxTac call. Your local gang will probably welcome a volunteer body cleanup crew as long as you wait until they've been stripped for gear. Your average dead ganger will feed Mr B for an entire day, less for Maelstrom (too much metal) and more for some of the big, corn fed, good ol' boys of 6th Street.

A Fixer with a few Mr Bs that anyone can use or an Exec who creates a church soup kitchen with them has access to the eyes and ears of people who see everything. You can bet Molly Anderson has already figured that out.