<This post will now go off the rails and frolic in the wilderness.>
I can imagine even with biased researchers, Food Quality still wouldn't even be totally divorced from the nutritional content of the food. Very unhealthy foods can be very delicious sometimes, but between two equal meals the one that makes people feel better would be preferred to one that makes them feel worse. That can be within the scope of perceptibility. The people who've travelled the world tasting ingredients will surely have preferences about how food makes them feel, too. Although this would probably be a small factor, peoples' biases being as they are... It's easier to sell people tasty food that causes bloating sensations than blech food that processes cleanly.
Speaking of biased researchers, the simple perception that a nation cares about Food Quality should tend to buoy its Food Quality. Providing food will be more prestigious in a nation believed to care about Food Quality, while hard work will be more frequently attempted and more reliably rewarded. People who believe they're having good food enjoy it more than people who believe their food could be better. This sounds at first like a Winmore factor (with high scores going higher) and indeed it is, but states formed transiently of peoples' expectations could also be good chaos factors if they tend to fluctuate reactively when people are confronted with information that makes them doubtful. It's also notable that quality expectations are a potentially less internationalist score influence than ingredient diversity, since even if the food was objectively improved as a result of greater awareness (it likely would be), a nation whose food quality was notably poor would suffer increased awareness of their nations' food quality issues as a result of international influences on the food supply. That could be dismal to gourmands and workers in the food industries. An isolationist nation with poor food might therefore sometimes gain in food quality due to improvements in the perception of the nation's food quality, even though strictly speaking they would only be providing food with less exposure to ideas and ingredients sourced from outside of their nation.
Ah, and thinking about people working harder... See, I don't make simulations IRL, because I'm always forever thinking of more causal implications.
Summing up some of the factors I've thought of... Is the game's underlying code complex enough to represent Food Quality Influences Due To:
- nutrition
- nutrition science
- access to ingredients
- access to international ingredients
- experimentation with international recipes
- food odor (good or bad)
- food flavor
- cultural food perfectionism
- expected value of food and eating
- rate of food-borne illness
- work ethic of food service
- morale of food service
- jealousy of other nations
- effective advertising of good restaurants
- effective advertising of trashy fast food
- the basic trustworthiness of the nation's food and water supplies
If all of that (and more?) could be represented somehow, perhaps that could ensure the graphs move somewhat unpredictably as various factors approach their highest or lowest values. For instance:
- although 'boil everything' (#705-3) should almost always be a terrible thing for food quality due to its horrible implications for food flavor and negative effects on food nutrition (ubiquitous heavy boiling is not nutrition-preserving), but if the rate of food borne illnesses was elevated while the flavor/internationalism factors were already bottomed out, that decision might still conceivably expose an apparent increase in food quality to the player and the simulation. The basic trustworthiness of the nation's food and water supplies might also increase as people get upset about sanitation issues, though obviously this would only be available if a stat which should probably start near its maximum has been previously damaged.
- For an issue choice with a more distinctive variability, check out #380-3. "Cheap and tasteless vegetables flood the markets." That's bad for Food Quality, right? Well... probably. If the headline implication is that Flavor gets worse, that's a hit to the incredibly central input which could wash out all the other implications. It's probably also dubious for nutrition and the rate of food-borne illness as high-volume suppliers use environmentally dubious high-density agriculture to outcompete smaller producers. Yet opening up food markets to increased foreign competition is also an international food influence, and in this context it's an international food influence that should even reduce jealousy of other nations. Therefore, what that decision should definitely do is increase the availability of ingredients (both measures) and the experimentation with international recipes. If Flavor is already dubious, access to ingredients is impaired, and internationalism is low, opening up the markets to foreign competition should increase Food Quality.
- For an example of something I imagine would increase Flavor while undermining many other variables, check out #837-3. It's one of the most solidly corrupt actions in the simulation. What is the corruption - the undue subjective bias - in Food Quality? Flavor. Probably also international experimentation with recipes as the budget for hiring better chefs gains undue improvement, but corrupted judgment around Food Quality should definitely focus mostly on Flavor. I would expect this issue decision could only increase apparent Food Quality, yet apparent is the key word here. I would expect it to be a weak increase weighed down by bad implications under the hood. That's firstly because only a relative small pool of people is becoming more subjectively biased (high officials) while the larger status of the nation is going to become neglected, and secondly because if the government is neglecting its responsibilities in favor of serving the subjective priorities of corrupted officials! Many factors other than Flavor should show a corresponding measure of neglect. The food might even smell worse in a corrupt nation as citizens reluctant to be treated as servants neglect a factor for which they're unlikely to be punished.
Actually, it's almost like Flavor might be a good aggregate of all the subjective factors... and then instead of having one incredibly central input, the second-to-last step of collating the factors could be to generate hidden 'objective food quality' (The Nutrition) and 'subjective food quality' (The Flavor) scores, with the reported Food Quality being a mixture of the two. Every factor improving the way the food helps people maintain their minds and bodies can be counted as improving The Nutrition, while the factors making it more pleasant to eat can be counted as contributing to The Flavor. (There should be some overlap between the two; food-borne illness is a pretty unpleasant flavor, too.) If the mixture of the two factors were variable, it might be desirable if nations could tilt their reported Food Quality towards a greater dependency on the 'objective' side... but when I imagine the utter dreariness of a nation where one is assured that one's dismal meals are certain to be 'objectively' superior, I think that perhaps there is some danger in perfect integrity. It may be appropriate to have food culture tend to tilt reporting towards The Flavor even in honest nations, which process could be responsible for causing rises in Perceived Food Quality due to The Flavor being given more room to express its great and powerful centrality to experience.
<This post will now return to reality.>
If all of this thinking sounds apocalyptically complicated, well... there's a reason I don't make simulations, but there's also a reason why I'm so absorbed in thinking about potential societal causality structures. I expect that Earth IRL is probably whoa complicated.
