Kotaku’s Peter Tieryas takes a look at some of the strange foods that are featured in RPGs:

Strange foods! I’ve seen a lot of them while traveling through Asia. I wasn’t always courageous enough to try them all even when I wanted to. A friend of mine told me they serve live monkeys in the Sichuan area which I haven’t personally seen, though I have once tried cow brains dipped in curry- it was soft, gooey, and made me feel guilty with every bite, a remorse I am haunted by to this day. They have huge fried spiders in Cambodia, a species of tarantula which I don’t imagine will be coming to a KFC near us any time soon. In the movie, Old Boy, Oh Dae-su eats a live octopus which doesn’t seem that tasty, though I wonder what it would be like eating a live kraken leg and if you’re the one who’ll end up getting suctioned to death. What’s the strangest thing you’ve eaten? There are lots of weird foods in role-playing games, those long, sprawling, narratives, disguised in sprites and polygons.

The last entry on his list singles out Ultima 3, although a lot of what he writes could be applied quite generally to food in any of the first five Ultima titles:

Ultima III: Exodus: The greatest enemy in Ultima wasn’t the ogres or the leviathan serpents. It was food. The food quantities kept on decreasing whether you were excavating the dungeons or sucked into a whirlpool into Ambrosia so forays to the grocer were a necessity and you had to keep your food rates above 100. The party eventually snacked their way into the ultimate egress, the unavoidable exodus. Death.

Personally, I think DOUG the Eagle Dragon’s take on food dependency is still the best one out there, although this is a concise summary of just what sort of limits the party’s food supply imposes on gameplay.