Arenamontanus wrote:

There are likely *lots* of open-source recipes out there, of varying quality and taste.

And hazard. Consider what kinds of entertaining and fun stuff you can pick up by downloading executables off the internet today. Now add in the kind of madness that is possible via EP. Sure, firewalls have improved, but the race between hackers and firewalls (just like locks and thieves, or armor and arms manufacturers) tends to leapfrog back and forth. Sometimes the defenders have the edge...And sometimes the attackers do. Consider what kinds of horrific nanitic trouble one could borrow by downloading a recipe intended for a very specific client, say...One which actually was an encoded message, perhaps. An octopus, if I remember right, can taste at a very fine 'resolution' using its tentacles...So it might be able to run a tentacle over that meatloaf and deduce a specific 'message' written in tastes on it. Meanwhile the person trying to EAT it is going 'This is worse than my mother's meatloaf.' Remember: this is Eclipse Phase. All the normal rules are off, everything your players encounter that doesn't come through carefully vetted and firewalled channels might be an exsurgent attack disguised as a fill-in-the-blank (If you haven't read the adventure in the first issue of 'The Eye' with the virus disguised as a heavy mining drill, DO SO.), and anything at all might turn and bite them if they don't check it carefully.

Tharsis League meat-farms being hacked by Barsoomian integrists with a wicked sense of humor, making their pork grows spaced with nanodrugs and improper for consumption, and the one who eat that meat completely aloof of anything happening around him (bad pun between aloof and the arabic term for 'pig'). It's looking funny but the people who ate the contaminated meat became so detached of the world that they stopped eating, drinking, and eventually breathing. And resleeving from the stack produced the same symptoms, forcing them to be resleeved from a clean backup from before the infection about the commercial recipe blue prints, i think that big brands that we already know, either for food and drink, will be selling both the physical product and the BDF (Blueprint Download Format) files. Can you imagine finding the logo of GAP and the msh://Mars.DrivethruClothing.hycom url? or Iglo's stylized forke logo above the adress msh://Venus.drivethrufood.hycom ? or the present cards containing an ecto with the blueprint of a millesime wine? "Celebrate your 21st Birthday with Johnny Walker! (click to decompress bdf file)" possibilities are endless I think restaurants might use fabbers too, but only for ingredients. Only the most expensive one would use geniunefresh product. Real vegetables, meat from real animals, instead of meatcrops (gotta wonder how one makes meatcrop circles, though! hamburgers?) in Mass Effect 2, there's a great discussion in which Shepard gets to talk with the Mess Officer Gardner, where he says he can't only cook so much much from military rations. One of the side-missions is actually to pick groceries on Citadel! it's quite enlightening about the possibilities of side-quests story hooks for scum barge crew. finding raw material and blueprints of good recipes to keep the crew happy. Allows the PCs to boost their Rep scores and good introduction to an adventure. Like going to pick rawmat from a vendor, and getting involved into something much bigger

I feel like the internet has a pretty mature canon of recipes already, so I can only imagine how comprehensive the data on the mesh is in EP. It's hard to imagine anything but the rarest, most secret recipes being unavailable instantly and freely… and you can probably reverse-engineer anything via sensors.

With the sensors and computing power available, I'm not prepared to bet you can't figure out the ingredients and prep within a pretty small margin of error. It's simply not that complicated, and not easy to keep secrets.