The strangest thing to me in the game was the fact the most common food eaten is Potato Mochi. Where in the flying fuck did they find Potatoes? There isn’t even a berry with a name or appearance that resembled a Potato, except maybe Iapapa berries. And since later in the future all mention of said Potato is nowhere to be found, what the hell happen that made this magical tuber vanish from the existence of the pokemon world? Was there a Pokemon Potato famine?
Although considering that LoA had tons of ingredients and food that isn’t found in modern day (wheat, crunchy salt, etc), the Pokemon world really must go through dramatic environmental changes like crazy. Makes you wonder how its even possible to survive in that world, especially to the point where modern day Pokemon world is impossible without said Pokemons. No wonder humans left for space once all the Pokemons mutated into Guzzlords.
The strangest thing to me in the game was the fact the most common food eaten is Potato Mochi. Where in the flying fuck did they find Potatoes? There isn’t even a berry with a name or appearance that resembled a Potato, except maybe Iapapa berries. And since later in the future all mention of said Potato is nowhere to be found, what the hell happen that made this magical tuber vanish from the existence of the pokemon world? Was there a Pokemon Potato famine?
Although considering that LoA had tons of ingredients and food that isn’t found in modern day (wheat, crunchy salt, etc), the Pokemon world really must go through dramatic environmental changes like crazy. Makes you wonder how its even possible to survive in that world, especially to the point where modern day Pokemon world is impossible without said Pokemons. No wonder humans left for space once all the Pokemons mutated into Guzzlords.
To be fair, all mainline Pokemon games before LoA only mentioned the name of the foods or ingredients that are related to gameplay mechanics (berries, poffins), produced by Pokemon (Slowpoke tails, Moomoo milk), and plot-related items (the damn tea key item in FRLG, my god the kid me spent hours to find that one). In fact, I don't think the playable character ever ate anything on-screen before SwSh.
Hey, at least LoA finally retcon the Indian Elephant Pokedex entry
Like with the Indian Elephant, it's always been the case that all real animals exist as well as Pokemon. It's just that it's like how in a McDonald's commercial, they will never, ever show any other restaurant exists, even to say that other restaurants are shit, because it's frankly free advertising them to even mention them even to call them shit. As far as a McDonalds commercial is willing to admit, you can eat McDonalds, or you can fucking starve. Similarly, Pokemon will say Milktank milk is the best milk, but they're not going to admit that there is another animal that might produce milk.
The same goes for Pokemon - they used to have real animals in early versions of the anime or games, but they're gradually being phased out because there's now nearly a thousand of the buggers, so why give screentime to anything that might be a cute pet that GameFreak can't license and get royalties if a kid likes it? Buy GameFreak-brand Milktank milk, kids! Available wherever GMO laws are lax enough to actually make some of those monstrosities real!
That said, unless they want to really go all-in with the "Pokemon Are Food" angle, which is undesirable for obvious reasons, they need to still have normal plants and animals for people to eat, it's just that players never stuffed potatoes in their pockets because there was no gameplay reason to do so.
There is a rather simple explanation for the Potato that works within the context of the game. The potato was given to the region by Arceus, either by a transplanted person or just by itself.
