Gastromancy (game)
| Gastromancy | |
|---|---|
 The memo's illustration: a figure in a top hat rides a loaf-shaped object through the sky above an arcaded building with a red-roofed tower | |
| Developer(s) | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| Publisher(s) | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| Platform(s) | Maxine's Quest (planned) |
| Release | Unreleased |
| Genre(s) | Food science |
Gastromancy is a planned game about the science of food by Molecular Reality Corporation, one of the eight titles in the 2022 memo "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest". Its fields are "molecular gastronomy, nutrition, mycology, agriculture", and its samples are "reishi tea, vegetable oil emulsions, dairy emulsions, food coloring dyes".[1] Players were to run those samples through a nanopore on the company's console while playing. The game had not been released by October 2026. Its name is an old word for ventriloquism.
Description
Every other entry in the memo names the games that inspired it, from Pac-Man to FarmVille. For Gastromancy the line reads "Inspired by: multiple depending on type of food and stage".[1]
The samples cover the four fields. Reishi is a woody bracket fungus of the genus Ganoderma, long used in Chinese medicine and usually taken as a bitter tea, and it stands for mycology, the study of fungi. Emulsions are droplets of one liquid suspended in another. Milk is the familiar one: its fat floats in it as globules a few micrometers across, each wrapped in a membrane that keeps it from merging with its neighbors. Butter, made by churning cream until the membranes break, is the reverse arrangement, drops of water held in fat. Mayonnaise is a vegetable oil emulsion, kept from separating by the lecithin and proteins of egg yolk. Food dyes are small molecules, many of them carrying electric charges. Droplets, particles and charged molecules are the kinds of things that change the current through a pore when they pass, the effect on which nanopore sensing rests. The phrase "molecular gastronomy" dates from 1988, when a physicist and a chemist used it for the scientific study of what happens to food when it is cooked.
The game was not in the company's 2021 advertisement "We're on an epic quest", but it was among the seven offered on the sign-up form that followed. In a sample of 135 answers it received 13 votes, the fewest of the seven.[2]
Name
Gastromancy is formed from the Greek gastēr, "belly", and manteia, "divination". It meant prophecy by voices that seemed to come from the speaker's stomach. Ancient Greek ventriloquists were called engastrimythoi, "belly-talkers", and were consulted as seers. Aristophanes mentions the most famous of them, Eurycles, in his comedy The Wasps (422 BC). Some older dictionaries give a second sense, divination by gazing into round-bellied glass vessels filled with water.
The memo does not explain the name. Its game is about food, which also passes through the belly.
Later mentions
The title turns up in two later company documents. JeoPOREdy!, the company's nanopore quiz, has a category called Gastromancy, whose one clue concerns the discipline of molecular gastronomy and whose commentary looks forward to "our Gastromancy game".[2] In The Disclosure Crawl, a text dungeon about the company's science drafted in 2025, a note beside a 2024 report that more than 3,000 chemicals from food packaging had been found in human bodies ends: "'Gastromancy' quests are only the beginning!"[3]
The nearest the company has come to running food through a pore is its condiment trials. On June 30 and July 1, 2026, it entered a ketchup, a salsa and a mustard on its shelf of laboratory provisions, each stored at 4 °C. The ketchup was "kept at 4C", the salsa "not yet tested or suspended in solution" and the mustard "not yet placed in solution".[2]