10 Star Trek Foods We Wish Were Real
A culinary tour of the Alpha Quadrant and beyond (and there's a lot of booze).
With over five decades under its belt, Star Trek has explored alien cultures in ways most franchises can only dream of. From religion, architecture, and customs to the geography and weather patterns that shape societies, each new series has added greater depth to various species.
Still, too little emphasis has been placed on one of the most fundamental elements of culture: food! There’s been the odd chartreuse drink in Ten Forward and several bizarre things mentioned in the replimat, but they’ve been too much show and too little tell.
Human food has dominated, notably in Captain Sisko’s quarters, while most alien dishes and ingredients have been reduced to human foods with alien adjectives and no description – Jibalian fudge, Ktarian eggs, Malkothian spirits, and so on.
To understand a culture, it’s best to break bread with the locals. The best part of traveling, after all, is eating new foods. And until they start selling tickets to Qo’noS, we’ve got to rely on what the TV shows us.
Here, then, are 10 iconic Star Trek foods that have added greatly to the canon by making our bellies rumble.
10. Raktajino
The senior staff of Deep Space Nine couldn’t seem to function without regular infusions of raktajino. Described simply as Klingon coffee – essentially Earth coffee with a Klingon-grade targ’s kick of added caffeine – it’s easy to see why and how Sisko, Kira, and the rest won the Dominion War.
As later items on this list will show, Star Trek, particularly DS9, has sometimes used foods to convey the basic traits of various alien species. It’s no surprise, then, that raktajino touches all the Klingon bases: bold, strong, energetic, and even polarizing.
Before being bonded to the Dax symbiote, Ezri Tigan absolutely hated raktajino. Afterward, she was overwhelmed by the intense love of the drink passed along from previous hosts Curzon and Jadzia, and Ezri found herself unable to resist it.
Klingons: Love ‘em or hate ‘em, there’s no denying that their glorious raktajino won the war (and countless battles against staying in bed each morning).