I shall now ponder what the club of the people who had sex on a transport pad is called.

Insert some technobabbly about pattern buffers degrading yada yada.

This does not apply to tomatoes. Homegrown tomatoes are actually better for actual material reasons (you can let them fully ripen, unlike commercial farmers who need to pick them early so they stay firm enough to ship)

then how will your cat recognize you!!!

Every time you transport someone you kill them, and create a new entity that only coincidentally shares their memories elsewhere.

It stands to reason, then, that every time you replicate a steak it is ethically as if you directly participated in the killing of the cow. Every meal, the same cow, dead, over and over, millions, no, billions of times, never actually to rest and to finally pay its final sacrifice.

There's mention of trying to program replicators for particular recipes, and it being difficult to get a good result. I wonder if there's a whole culinary skill around simplifying a recipe so it's less complex to replicate?

And I bet drinks are easier, because it's all water with a suspension of some chemical. Fewer complex structures of solids.

@MostlyHarmless

True, but from my time as the designated coffeeboy, the former group appears much more common than the later.

No, pretty much all Starfleet cadets get wrung through a bunch of transporter cycles to prewash all the flavour out of them, if they hadn't already accumulated enough transporter cycles already.

Starfleet probably just contracted out to Aramark or Sodexho or someplace like that for the patterns and they got what they got. That was back when Hegseth's head-in-a-jar was in charge and he didn't prioritize food service.