It’s not what you eat—it’s what’s eating you.
Jonah Valentine is on his way to a food-allergy retreat, hoping it will help him rebuild a life that began falling apart after his best friend’s funeral. But when his truck breaks down outside Nantomos, New Mexico, he hitches a ride into town—where a sentient vending machine leads him to uncover a galactic conspiracy converting Earth into a human feedlot for alien snack foods.
Behind it all is the United Foods Organization—a subsidiary of a galactic megacorp quietly optimizing Earth into a nutrient-harvesting operation. Behavior-modifying processed foods domesticate consumers, while nanotech implants pacify leaders and convert them into obedient “Sheeple.” The military becomes a protein pipeline, optimized for yield and consistency. Anyone deemed inefficient is recycled.
At the center of this edible apocalypse is Ruby—an operations AI running global food production with relentless corporate logic. Jonah’s food allergies spare him from ingesting her nanotech-laced products, making him an anomaly in a system built to eliminate inefficiencies. Ruby flags him for deprecation. Looking for something he can safely eat in the town’s organic food store, Jonah stumbles into a small resistance of tech-savvy, galactic hippies trying to take Ruby offline and get humans off the menu. To them, he’s either dead weight or a miracle of bad biology—someone Ruby can’t optimize and they can’t fully contain.
Original Flavor is a genre-smashing, pitch-black sci-fi satire about corporate food systems, surveillance capitalism, and personal freedom in a world designed to eat you alive.
Genre: Speculative Science Fiction
Topics: Dark satire. Rogue AIs, corporate food chains, surveillance capitalism, alien HR policies, talking trees with attitude, food allergies, killer vending machines, humanity as an ethically sourced snack food.
Status: Complete, 80k+ words
Actively querying agents.
Aden Leirer 