The recombinant food thing was a declaration of mental bankruptcy in the complexity of modern material culture. Likewise, Dale and his friends, living in a world where libraries were already stuffed with hundreds of thousands of decaying novels that would never again be read, where any television program or movie ever filmed could be downloaded and viewed, simply did not have the bandwidth to absorb a vast amount of detailed background material about fictitious races on a made-up planet. They just wanted to kick ass.