Vegetarian fine meal

See also: Fine meal and Carnivore fine meal

A vegetarian fine meal is a variant of the fine meal created from vegetarian ingrediants.

Acquisition

Vegetarian fine meals can be cooked at a Fueled stove or Electric stove. Each meal requires 0.75 units of nutrition from vegetable or animal products (milk or eggs), 450 ticks (7.5 secs) of work to make, and a Cooking skill of 6.

Summary

A fine meal can be eaten by humans or animals for 0.9 nutrition. As it takes 0.75 nutrition of raw food to create, vegetarian fine meals provide 120% nutrition efficiency, which is less than regular fine meals.

Eating a fine meal or any of its variants gives the +5 Ate fine meal moodlet for 24 hours. This moodlet stacks with the +12 Ate lavish meal from lavish meals. If Ideology DLC is active and the meal was made out of raw fungus, its normal moodlet will be applied.

Analysis

Vegetarian fine meals are useful for the fine meal mood boost if meat is unavailable, or if it is forbidden by ideoligion. Vegetarian meals are less efficient for food than simple meals or fine meals. However, they are reasonable for daily use, if your colonists have the time to produce the extra food. They can also be saved for mood-related emergencies.

Even if meat could be available through hunting or ranching, it might be easier to make vegetarian meals instead. You would need to grow +50% more food to make vegetarian fine meals. Getting meat could take more work.

Extra work from simple meals

To establish how much extra work a vegetarian fine meal would take, we would need an estimate of how much is required to feed a pawn with (vegetarian) simple meals. In Losing is Fun, 25 tiles in regular soil is a rough over-estimate of what would feed a baseline pawn with year-round growing, assuming a competent planter and simple meals.

Extra planting work required to grow veg. fine meals.
Left: Food to feed 1 colonist with simple meals.
Right: Extra food from simple meals to make vegetarian meals.

If you were planting 25 tiles of crop to feed per colonist beforehand, you'd need to plant 38 crops to feed colonists using vegetarian fine meals. With an extra 13 crops of food, it would take a healthy Plants 8 grower an average of 4,810 ticks (1.92 in-game hours) more work for every harvest. Rice plants take ~ 5.54 days to grow in regular soil when considering day/night cycles.

With rice, you'll need an extra 868.2 ticks (14.47 secs) of Plants work, per day per colonist.
With corn in regular soil, it'd take only an extra 230.6 ticks (3.84 secs) of Plants work for the same thing.
By spending a single game-hour of work, you could upgrade 2.9 colonists to vegetarian fine using rice, and 10.8 colonists with corn.

Remember that these values are for a grower with Plants 8. If you have anyone better than Plants 8, or if you are playing on a lower difficulty than Losing is Fun, then you'll need even less work.

This analysis makes multiple key assumptions. First, it neglects the "spike" in work caused by each harvest. Second, it assumes a temperate, year-round ground biome with 0 negative events harming your crop production. Finally, it does not include the extra, pre-skill 150 ticks (2.5 secs) of work required to actually cook a fine meal (of any type). After taking these assumptions in mind, you can compare it to the effort of gathering meat.

Overall, vegetarian fine meals are very affordable in terms of work. Growing more food is a simple task, especially in temperate and warm biomes. If a cold snap or toxic fallout ruins your food supply, you could always switch back to simple meals, giving you a nice food buffer. (Assuming you didn't cook all your food right away)