And it was needed. Because human food was getting valuable. The courts of great lords and the houses of high politicians and great leaders were asking for human food now. But it turns out that the greatest of human chefs aren't needed, because every human capable of just basic human cooking would be greater than whatever they were using before. A very surprised cleaning lady was abducted one day from a small mining station because she was human. She wasn't a great chef, but the pirate lord who captured her showered her with various ingredients from across the galaxy and commanded her to make a great feast. Surprising herself, she made something quite decent but rather simple using whatever there was aboard the massive pirate vessel, and despite it not being the greatest meal in history, was so good that she was given more then twenty times her old wage if she'd stick around and feed the pirates. She agreed, and being creative while using alien ingredients to make human meals, created a whole new style of meals by accident.

The Terran Embassy established a cooking academy on High Concordia, and found that countless aliens applied instantly. And it wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. There just wasn't enough people to teach, and there were too many species, too many people interested in cooking, that it was impossible to teach them all. Theoretically, they could make holovids teaching cooking, but with the various aliens unused to human foods and unsure on what things should look or smell like, they'd have trouble teaching people right. They decided to accept that for now, things would be hard to deal with. That they couldn't adequately teach everyone. But that wasn't enough for aliens. Some began to head to Earth. Which was actually quite useful as Earth and her colonies actually lacked people, since emigration from the United Earth territories had been much greater than expected. For the first time since first contact, the population of Earth and her colonies began to stabilize and improve, as aliens by the hundreds of thousands moved to the quaint backwater that was the center of the taste revolution that had gripped the galaxy.

Some learned the art of cooking, many others just fell in love with the Earth, green and wondrous after the environmental restorations of the mid to late 21st century. It wasn't exactly an agrarian planet, or a primitive world, but Earth, despite lacking the great wonders that there are on many other worlds, had a soul that was welcoming. Humanity, having left behind bigotry and short-sighted foolishness as a result of the upheavals of the pre-contact era, welcomed the hungry and curious aliens with open arms. Soon aliens, having assimilated into the very food-positive cultures of the humans, were quickly as normal in the various delightful cities of the human race as humans were. Maybe humanity was small, in the grand scheme of things. But every major regime has a human or human trained chef-corps. Worlds with larger human minorities became veritable centers of culture and enlightenment, as the entire populations of those alien worlds learned how to cook in the human style. Of course, millions of worlds have only heard of the humans, the race that mastered eating and making food to a point beyond belief, where even the most basic adult human was capable of making a delicious meal. But one day, yes, one day, a short mostly hairless and mostly harmless creature will land on such a world, and open up a small restaurant, which will make them quite rich. And finally filling a hole in the soul of the people of that world.

Bite by bite from a delicious meal, made by someone who understood the human value of good food.

/r/ApocalypseOwl