All food (except for a few) have expiration dates. Where they become inedible. So how does the Lone Wanderer eat Salisbury Steaks, Sugar Bombs, Cram, and other things around the Wasteland? The food is obviously not being mass produced anymore, because no one is there to do it. What's in the wasteland is what's in the wasteland. So how does the Lone Wanderer (or anyone really) eat the actual wasteland leftover products like Sugar Bombs and not get sick? It's 200 year old food, most foods can hardly last a year. It would have molded, gotten stale, maybe even just unrecognizable. Does anyone have an opinion or answer to this?

Its SCIENCE!

Another thing, those stimpacks. I mean you get hit in the head 3 times and you have just to use 1 or 2 of them and your fully healed?? I mean wtf

radiation

The US had been preparing for nuclear war for many years. I'd assume all the food you acquire was dried food created specifically for the vaults and home fallout shelters.

At least that's my best guess.

No need to be tooo realistic.. I mean...... you usually die when u get shot once by a bullet right ? why not play the game like that ? coz its not fun..
If everything in this game was so realistic, this game would not be fun at all, i mean no ghouls, no deathclaws, no super mutants <_<

Because it's a video game?

Go to the Wiki and read up on food irradiation. It's a method of food preservation.

If your on PC then try the FWE mod it makes the game harder but more realistic.

Partly the humor, partly the semi-serious idea that over did it with the preservatives. Partly because its a twilight-zone shifted world where subtle differences exist in the very fabric of reality. ~this is partly just my own opinion. :rolleyes:

As others have already mentioned, it's because of all the radiation in the food. The radiation kills bacteria.

Fallout Universe radiation would have just made the bacteria bigger and angry.

You mean pork and beans with 10 eyes and 8 legs ? :unsure:

In theory, canned food can last indefinitely even today. People often eat canned food that's been sitting for years. Food spoilage is typically a result of bacteria or other microorganisms, which require certain things to grow: most notably oxygen. When food is canned, all oxygen is supposed to be removed, and all bacteria inside are supposed to be killed. As long as one of these conditions exists, the food can't spoil.

By 2077, the process of preserving food might have grown far more advanced: vacuum-packing, pasteurization, dehydration, and/or irradiation could all either kill germs or make it impossible for them to grow.

So yes, eating 200-year-old food, as long as it's properly preserved, is very feasible.

I once read a read an account by a service man who was given his MRE, and when he was done, he said that based on the printed date of the candybar, he believed that the Chicken he'd eaten must have been older than he was.

Of course this may have been a joke; who knows. :shrug:
(I do know that the candy bars don't hold up to well in MRE's)

I'm thinking it's just more Beth humor, poking fun at 1950's ideas of how the future might look:

ROBOT BUTLERS AND POLICEMEN!
ATOMIC CARS! GLOWING RADIOACTIVE COLA!
A NUCLEAR GENERATOR IN YOUR BUILDING'S BAsemanT FOR HEAT AND AIR CONDITIONING!
COIN OPERATED SINGLE OCCUPANT BOMB SHELTERS ON CITY STREET CORNERS!
DEATH IS A PREFERABLE ALTERNATIVE TO COMMUNISM!
FOOD THAT NEEDS NO REFRIGERATION!
These savory Salisbury Steaks will still taste great even up to 300 years from now!

I think most modern military MREs have a shelf life of like 20 years. Maybe more. And just because it's labeled to last for 20 years doesn't mean it won't last for 40. It's just labeled for 20 so the company that makes them wont get sued if someone gets sick after eating a 21 year old one. It's like the difference between the "sell by date" and the "Don't eat after this date" labels.

The food is straight from the earlier Fallouts. (The rest is unfortunately now canon ).


Yeah. While only five years have past... there are still MRE's being hoarded and consumed, left over from Hurricane Katrina.

And how come you've never wondered about:
How the heck did the Tunnel Snakes get their LEATHER jackets?

someone probably had some leather jackets in the vault, they changed hands through the years, and the tunnel snakes just put their own badge on them. Sure they may be 200 years old, but so is a lot of other stuff, and in the future maybe they can make clothes more durable.

Underground Brahmin farm in one of the parts of Vault 101 we don't have access to. It's to the left of the baseball field

I always thought it was because Fallout 3 was in a futuristic setting, and that maybe America invented food preserving technology that was superior to ours. I mean in shows like The Jetsons they got their food by adding water to little pills that grew into full meals, maybe that's what the food in Fallout 3 is sort of like?

But I think it just has to do with the concept of the setting. When people think of anything apolcalyptic they think of human survivors scavanging old abandon buildings for food and medicine. I guess that's what the creators wanted for this game.

speaking strictly in the fallout-ese sense.. if your that worried,
theres plenty of fresh things to eat outside.

~punga fruit
~animals
~people

the world is your oyster.. so-to-speak.

QUOTE: How the heck did the Tunnel Snakes get their LEATHER jackets?

Who says the jackets are leather at all? They might just be some sort of synthetic. They might have traded for it when the vault was open, 20 years before.

One thing I rarely see people mention would be the blood packs. You see them all over the place, some in fridges, some just collecting dust at what is presumably room temperature. Considering how bloodbanks occasionally run into trouble because they can't store blood for all that long, it seems perfectly insane to have any practical use of blood that's been lying on a table for 200 years. Insane, but of course also quite atmospheric and humerous.