Destiny cookbook imagines a truly alien future food called 'coleslaw'

I respect cabbage. It's a versatile, tactile, nutritious vegetable and like the upcoming Destiny 2 expansion, it is beyond light—you'll probably burn as many calories as you consume trying to hork a damn cabbage down. But if you, like me, have been wondering if there's a better way to eat cabbage than biting into it like an apple over and over, the upcoming official Destiny cookbook has an answer.

Coleslaw. 

Really though, coleslaw? Fucking coleslaw? 

Here's Destiny, a game where you invade a ship so incalculably large that it can chew up planets and process them into wine, a game where you kill shadowy insectile Hive gods and travel through infinite time loops to prevent a species of sentient milk from destroying humanity. What do people eat in this setting, you might wonder. What defines the food culture? Coleslaw, apparently.

Coleslaw is so benign a recipe that it could appear in any cookbook in the universe and my eyes would gloss over it every single time. Coleslaw is fine, good even, but how did it get a two-page spread in the official Destiny cookbook? Could've called it Hiveslaw to make it the least bit relevant, but nah. We get cookies and cocktails named after guns in the Destiny universe. And then coleslaw. Plain old coleslaw. I bet Zavala doesn't even think about coleslaw. 

What really gets me here is the paragraph of accompanying coleslaw lore that anchors chopped cabbage and vinegar firmly in the Destiny universe. And that its inclusion in the official Destiny cookbook, a text designed to represent the character and culture of an imaginative science fiction setting, is based on the author seeing Xur's abyssal, tentacled face and going, 'Huh, it is this thing in particular that reminds me of coleslaw.' 

I mean, I kind of feel for the author here. Destiny is a pretty austere universe compared to something like World of Warcraft, which made for a fun recipe book. You don't get much downtime in the field to sample the local cuisine, and playful recipes names like Vex Milk and Red Legion Sauce don't exactly elevate the sensory experience of dunking cookies or eating spaghetti. 

I just feel like, of all the existing and popular recipes to shove into a marketing tie-in recipe book, picking coleslaw is about as inspired as the act of eating coleslaw. At least go all out and make us put the coleslaw into a conceptual future bowl, or include instructions for molding it into the shape of a gun. 

But maybe Bungie is trying to tell us something. Maybe it's no coincidence the average cabbage is the same shape as the Traveller, the mysterious sphere the appeared over Earth and gifted certain people the power of light. Those with the power became guardians, protectors of Earth against the encroaching darkness and more prescient Cabal, Vex, and Fallen threats.

What is the light if not metaphor for a concoction of apple cider vinegar, mayonnaise, and assorted garnishes and spices? And chopped cabbage the splintered remnants of humanity? The dressing, or light, enriches the cabbage and the cabbage, a vessel for texture and constitution, gives the dressing shape and purpose. Without light, what is humanity? Without dressing, what is cabbage? 

The following essay will explain what I believe broccoli can tell us about the true nature of the Darkness. Webster's dictionary defines a vegetable as—