Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series
Larissa Volorsky makes borscht the way her mother made it and her mother's mother made it before that: starting with the bones, hours before anyone is hungry, because the stock is not a shortcut and the borscht is not the kind of thing you hurry.
The kitchen in the Volorsky home in Brighton Beach is not a standard kitchen. It was not a standard kitchen when they moved in, and it has been modified since in ways that reflect the practical realities of feeding eight children and a husband who is a Large Grade II Lupenite at the upper end of his tier — a man who, at his peak training weight, required somewhere between six and eight thousand calories a day, and who, at his current age and activity level, still runs considerably ahead of what the USDA had in mind when it designed the nutritional guidelines. The pots are large. The stockpot is very large. The refrigerator situation is, as Larissa has described it to neighbors who have asked, a situation.
The triplets — Eugeni, Arseny, and Ilariy — are grown men now, out of the house, but they come home for Sunday dinner. Dimitri and Vladimir come home for Sunday dinner. Natasha and Alisa are still home. Sergei appears when there is food, which is always, with the regularity of a species that has been tracking food sources since before it had a word for what it was doing.
On Sunday evenings, Larissa Volorsky feeds her family.
The borscht is for everyone.
The Problem That Isn't There
The first question people ask, when they think seriously about a multi-species world for the first time, is usually some version of: but what do they eat?
The question underneath the question is: doesn't a world with predator species and prey species have an eating problem?
It doesn't. Not because the question isn't worth asking — it is — but because the world is built in a way that dissolves the problem before it can form. Every species in this world is an omnivore. Not every species eats the same things, or leans toward the same parts of the omnivore spectrum, but the baseline is consistent: nobody in this world is a strict carnivore who would, in a purely biological sense, look at a smaller person and see a meal. The Imago Dei has been at work for long enough that the instinct simply isn't there. What a Leonite wants is beef. What a Lupenite wants is also beef, prepared differently. What an Ursinian wants depends heavily on the season and the mood, because Ursinians are the most genuinely omnivorous species in the world, with a flexibility in their diet that their size perhaps makes necessary.
Nobody wants another person. The question dissolves.
What remains — once you stop worrying about the existential problem — is the far more interesting set of practical questions. What does each species actually eat? How do you cook for people who need wildly different amounts of food? How does a restaurant serve a table where the size range spans several tiers? What does hospitality look like when the coat comes in every size?
These are the questions worth asking. They turn out to have good answers.
What the Coat Changes
The baseline is omnivorous, but the coat changes where each species lands on the spectrum.
Lupenites eat with the energy expenditure of a species that runs, that is physically active by disposition, that carries a musculature that requires maintenance. The diet leans toward protein — meat, fish, eggs — with a strong secondary presence of complex carbohydrates. Russian Lupenite cooking reflects this: borscht built on a bone broth that runs for hours, dense dark bread, heavy meat-and-root-vegetable stews that carry through a long winter and a long training session with equal efficiency. Larissa's kitchen produces food that is built to last and built to fuel, because that is what the family has always needed.
Ursinians — and Boris's lawyer Arkady Stoyev would recognize this immediately — are the most seasonally variable eaters in the world. An Ursinian in autumn eats differently than an Ursinian in spring: the caloric density increases, the carbohydrate load rises, the body is doing something ancient and efficient that no amount of modern nutrition science has fully talked it out of. Arkady has a standing order with two specific restaurants in Brighton Beach and one in Manhattan that know his autumn preferences and adjust accordingly. He does not explain this to anyone. It does not require explanation.
Most feline species — Leonites, Tiscythians, Pardinians, Ocanians — share a mild lactose intolerance that is essentially universal across their ancestral lines. The operative word is mild: a little bloating, a little gas, nothing that rises to the level of a medical event. The consequence is real but it is not dramatic, and this matters enormously for how feline species actually relate to dairy in practice.
Which is to say: they eat it anyway.
The Emperor himself — Leo Amerigo, a Leonite — loves cheese. He has always loved cheese. He will eat cheese at a state dinner, at a private family meal, at a late-night kitchen raid when the palace staff has gone home, and the mild gastric aftermath is filed under the price of doing business with a cheerfulness that suggests he has made his peace with the arrangement. The Imperial Palace kitchens maintain a dairy-free option at state dinners. It is not primarily for the Emperor.
Feline species, as a general population, have simply concluded that the category of things dairy makes possible — the sauces, the pastries, the aged cheeses, the cream soups — is worth whatever modest discomfort follows. The sensitivity did not disappear because the Imago Dei filtered out the animal biology. It stayed because it does not kill anyone, and a world calibrated to human-level biology does not discard every trait of the ancestral animal, only the ones that would be genuinely incompatible with personhood. Lactose intolerance is uncomfortable. It is not dangerous. It stayed.
What no species has is anything that crosses into genuine toxicity. A canine's ancestral biology made chocolate, onions, and garlic genuinely dangerous — not inconvenient, not uncomfortable, but poisonous. That did not survive the transition. The Imago Dei framework draws the line at severity: a Lupenite's body, being the body of a person made in the image of God, calibrates itself to human-level food safety. What is merely unpleasant can remain. What would be lethal to the animal does not make the crossing. The table that belongs to a person does not hold things that can kill them for being the species they are.
Mild sensitivities exist. Violent reactions do not. The table is safe.
The Scale of the Thing
Three size classes — Small, Large, and Giant — means three very different caloric baselines at the broad level, and within each class the grades push those numbers further apart. The gap between the bottom and the top of the full range is not small.
A Small Grade I person — a Vulpen, say — might run twelve hundred to fifteen hundred calories a day at a comfortable maintenance. A Giant Grade III Ursinian at Arkady Stoyev's size and age is burning somewhere between five and seven thousand, and that is the sedentary version. At peak physical activity for that frame, the number climbs further. The food that keeps Arkady going through a twelve-hour day of depositions and client meetings is not the food that keeps a Vulpen going through the same day. It is a different quantity of the same category of thing.
This scales into every domain of cooking.
The Volorsky kitchen has two stockpots. One is for ordinary use — a large pot that most kitchens would consider oversized. The other is for Sunday dinner when everyone comes home, and it is the size of a small cauldron, and Larissa uses it without ceremony because it has been in the kitchen for fifteen years and she has stopped thinking about it. The cutting boards are large. The knives are heavy. The plates for Boris and the older sons are what a restaurant would classify as serving platters.
Natasha, who is twenty, eats considerably less than her brothers — not because of anything ideological, but because she is running a smaller frame at a lower output and the body simply doesn't ask for more. She uses the normal plates. Alisa uses the normal plates. The Sunday dinner table, set for the full family, looks like it is serving two different scales of person simultaneously, because it is.
This is not remarkable to the Volorsky family. It is Tuesday.
How Restaurants Work
The multi-species restaurant figured this out early or it did not survive.
The solution — which is so standard now that anyone under forty has never known a world without it — is the tiered portion system. A dish is not priced as a single serving. It is priced by size class, with the size-appropriate portion listed alongside each tier. The baseline portion is calibrated to the Large class — the most common size range — and the tiers scale up and down from there. Ordering is simple: you say what you want, you are in a size class, the kitchen knows what that means.
The economics work because the ingredients scale but the labor does not. The kitchen that produces a bowl of pasta for a Large Grade I and a bowl of pasta for a Giant Grade II is doing the same mise en place, the same technique, the same sauce — just more of it for the larger order. The labor cost is roughly constant. The ingredient cost scales. The price tier reflects the ingredient differential and nothing else.
What this produces, in practice, is a dining room that feels entirely normal from the inside. A table of four might include a Vulpen, two Lupenites, and an Ursinian, each with a different tier of the same dish in front of them, each eating the appropriate amount, each paying the appropriate price. Nobody is watching nobody else's plate. The portion is not a statement about the person. It is a measurement of what the person needs.
The table itself is a different problem.
Most mid-range restaurants now offer mixed-size seating: tables with adjustable-height sections, chairs in two or three sizes, the occasional booth designed to accommodate someone who otherwise would not fit comfortably in standard restaurant furniture. High-end establishments take this further, because a client who cannot fit comfortably in your space is not a client who comes back. Arkady Stoyev has a list of three restaurants in Brighton Beach where the seating was clearly designed by someone who thought about the problem seriously. He returns to them.
The places that did not think about it tend to be obvious by the quality of their clientele. Giant Grade III does not return to a restaurant where the chair legs have gouged the floor from being pushed back to accommodate their frame.
The Shared Table
There is something worth noting about what food does in this world that has nothing to do with portion tiers or caloric baselines.
Food is where the multi-species world is most visibly one world.
The Volorsky family eats Russian. The Darvorsky family — Feodore and Iggy — also eats Russian, because Feodore came over on the same ship as Boris and Larissa in 1996 and carried the same culinary inheritance. Uncle Leo's household, when the families visit, produces Italian and American food in quantities that require the Imperial Palace's considerable kitchen staff. At St. Nicholas Cathedral, the post-Liturgy coffee hour that Dimitri organizes with the precision he brings to everything features food from six different national traditions brought by six different families, all of whom are Russian Orthodox, none of whom cook the same way.
The species does not determine the cuisine. The culture does. A Russian Lupenite and a Russian Leonite eat Russian food, with their respective adjustments — the dairy question handled gracefully on both sides because forty years of Russian-American multi-species cooking has produced a native intelligence about it. An Ethiopian Ursinian family and an Ethiopian Lupenite family share a cuisine, eat together, pass the injera, navigate the different portion needs the same way any multi-size-class household has always navigated them: you make enough, you let people take what they need, and you don't make it complicated.
The Imago Dei shows up here in the simplest possible form: the person across the table is a person, made in the same image as you, and you are feeding them. The coat is visible. The table doesn't care.
What Comes Out of the Kitchen
Larissa's borscht is ready by the time the sons start arriving on Sunday evening.
The stock has been running since morning. The beets went in hours ago. The sour cream is already on the table — dairy, which everyone at this table handles without incident, because this is a Lupenite household and the lactose situation belongs to a different family entirely. The bread is dark and dense and bought from the same bakery on Brighton Beach Avenue that Boris's parents bought their bread from when they arrived in Brooklyn.
Boris sits at the head of the table. His bowl is the large one. Larissa's bowl is the large one too, because she has been on her feet since eight in the morning and the borscht is as much for her as for anyone. The sons' bowls are the large ones. Natasha and Alisa use the regular bowls, and nobody comments on this, because it has never required comment.
The meal is the same for everyone. The amount is what changes.
This is what it looks like when the law of the table works the way it's supposed to: the same food, the same kitchen, the same recipe that goes back three generations — and the coat receives what the coat needs, without ceremony, without a system that makes anyone feel either reduced or excessive for what they require.
Equal does not mean identical. The table knows this. It has always known this.
It just took the rest of the world a little while to catch up.
— Eric Flegal
Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series
What does the shared table look like in your anthropomorphic world? Tell me in the comments.
