That really upset me. I know there's still a little surreptitious meat-consumption on Earth—genetics shows we must get a few throwbacks in every generation—but I'd never before met anyone who openly boasted about it. Synthetic foods meet gourmet needs better than traditional ones do anyway. (Of course, I don't mean the dull compacted stuff we get on long space hops but the food served on Terran planets themselves.) Any Earthman eating flesh back home is deliberately trying to taste the atavistic sensations of savagery.
"You know how immoral that is," I told him.
"Hacker, let's forget the moral issue," Barnes said, considering him with disgust. "Let's just be sensible. We don't know enough about Newtane yet to eat anything."
Hacker laughed. "Why, it smells just like our own food, only better." He picked at his vita-concentrate. "Oh, let's forget about the whole thing."
We tried to. Several dignitaries rose to their full seven feet and spoke slowly into Semanticizers, flinging their queer hands out for emphasis with their thumbs waving where our pinkies do. Suddenly, though, Hacker got up from his seat and hurried down the long table to the place where the leading spokesman was eating. He leaned over him, speaking into the nearest translator, and I could see the Newtanean smiling broadly, as if trying to refuse something, while Hacker frowned. Finally the smile faded into a friendly scowl. Nothing good could be coming out of this.
A minute later a robot arm proffered a loaded plate to Hacker and he started back to us with it. Barnes rose to stop him, but before Hacker reached us he had taken two mouthfuls of the meat.
I have never seen such sheer self-satisfied delight on a human face as after those first bites.
"You shouldn't be doing that," Barnes said when he sat down next to us again.
"You're just old fogies," Hacker grunted through a meat-stuffed mouth. "This is the best food I've ever eaten."
He somehow shoveled another load of meat between his lips.