TLDR for those who don't wanna read all that
1) Drekir are mesocarnivores they need meat to not die
2) that said, they also will eat smaller amounts of fruit, vegetables and starches/carbohydrates
3) Meat makes up the majority of their diet, 50-70% of what a drek eats is meat, and can be highly variable
4) Fruits and veggies are the next largest portions, usually making up a smaller amount (15-20% each) of their diet
5) Carbs had best make up a minority of their diet (10-15%) and mostly fill a niche nutritional role
6) Made this just to kinda explain something in a way I feel is more helpful, I know the food pyramid ain't around anymore but I grew up with it and while it was definitely a deeply flawed chart, I wanted to make a food pyramid


WELCOME ONE AND ALL TO MY LOVELY NUTRITION CLASS

This is professor Patches and today I'm gonna learn ya a few things about eatin gud
so today we're gonna talk about a drek diet as, while ormer diets can be very comparable to bears and humans, a dreks diet looks less like a human and more like a Coyote. This is mostly a clarification with at least one small addition into the drek diet! Wanted to try and make something to help explain it. But anywho
Drekir are mesocarnivores.

So they are carnivores, as in they need meat and they can even live solely off meat (with some potential lack of some nutrients). But they both can and should eat some other things. But mesocarnivores do need meat, it's non negotiable to them. If you deprive a drek of meat they will starve regardless of how many other foods you give them. So to them its their staple. That said, again, its still important for a drek to eat a variety of foods that supplement their meat. Fruits, Vegetables, and yes, starches! All in far smaller amounts than their meat intake but still important.

Now as a disclaimer before getting into this fine pyramid

The foods above are representative as the reality of things is simply that drekir live over hundreds of trillions of square kilometers of land, of different biomes and ecosystems, with different food sources that can range from very conventional to very strange. So consider the above as very vague. I am not gonna cite that drekir eat camas, they do! But thats only relevant to the American plana (Suyu), rather they do eat bulby root plants like it that can vary plana to plana. Moreover on that note, especially in the awakening, I wouldn't assume big vegetables or even big fruits, most of the fruits and vegetables people are gathering are wild. So usually a lot less impressive. You aren't gonna walk into the woods and pluck giant tomatoes like those you get at the department store, Even early plant cultivation is gonna start with very wild plants that are usually less impressive than the fruits and veggies we find at the store.

But regardless, people make em work! Anywho I will give examples in a broad sense as we go, lets roll

Lets start with meat!

Meat is the staple of a drek diet, they can live only off of it ok, they cannot live without it at all. If you wanna be a drek you're gonna have to accept that you're gonna have to eat meat

Meat generally should make up at least 50-70% of a dreks calories for any given day

Or about 600-900 calories of meat a day
and of course this is a broad category of broad categories! But if it is a food that is an animal or is an egg from an animal then you're good to go! Lots of things that could be but as some broad categories.

Red Meat IE Lizard meat and Amphibian meat. Snake, Lizard, Turtle, Skink, Frog, Toad, Newt, Salamander, etc. etc.
The accessibility to red meat and how much its eaten in a culture is gonna vary a lot. As frankly its usually one of the harder meat sources to regularly get! If you're a hunter gatherer, its probably a nice treat to get in large amounts, as hunting large game is risky and prone to failure even amongst very skilled hunters.

If you're a pastoralist then you may just simply be raising your own herd of red meat animals (though not always) and if that is the case, then it's still a nice treat as usually your livestock are more useful alive than dead, you only likely would be butchering up such an animal either for a special occasion or as the poor old turtle is on deaths door. Of course this can also involve muscle meat or organ meat. Hearts, Kidneys, Livers, Bladders, Stomachs, Intestines, Brains, and other meat sacks in the meat sack also fall into here assuming they come from a red meat animal. To be frank if you're a mesocarnivore it pays to not be picky about your meats. It's all good and nutritious when its your staple, so its common to eat just about every organ and piece of meat that is edible in an animal for drekir.

This can also involve more specific foods, like cracking the bones for marrow, and at least for amphibians, eating the skin if you're not looking to tan it into a textile. Of course i should lastly mention their red meat is not exactly like our red meat. As frankly snakes and toads are different from cows and stoats
but overall thanks to many sources of red meat being as big as they are, they tend to build up muscle tissue in a way that can be similar to red meat, even if not analogous.

Fish be it freshwater or seawater in origin is also another common source of meat. Varies a lot of course! But fishing things out of a river, lake, creek, ocean or beach can actually be a very fruitful source of meat. So fruitful in fact that many communities of hunter gatherers can get away living sedentarily just off of fish alone, making a living on the coasts of a plana. Fish can of course be small, sardinelike or even smaller in size that are fished from massive nets, or they can be large, warranting drekir on open waters with fishing rods, harpoons, large fishing nets, etc. Or they can even be titanic, hunted on open waters deep into lakes and oceans in a way that wouldn't be too much unlike whaling as done by indigenous communities. I think the trout from chapter 1 of TLH speaks to that.
So depending on the fish targeted and their size, you may see a community employ a huge variety of fishing strategies and tools to get the job done. I would say overall fish is one of the more reliable meat sources out there, not the most but a lot more reliable than trying to hunt red meat animals

and of course, same story with what parts they eat. Drekir usually aren't picky with what parts of the fish they eat. Fillets, organs, eyes, bones, if they don't have another use for it they usually eat it (again can't be too picky)

Wyrm meat which is really poultry associated to the Avian dragons of the DragonScape. some of which are very very close to birds, others who are more akin to dinosaurs (which i guess are birds too).
Whether it was whacked out of the sky with a skillful throw of a throwing stick, or raised in a domesticated fashion, its a pretty popular option. Though its treated differently depending on whether its a wild hunt or a domestic harvest

For hunters in certain regions, very specific strategies get developed to kill wyrms and even then it can be quite difficult. Things flying around tend to present a pragmatic problem. So for flying wyrms in hunter gatherer societies they are a nice delicacy more often than not. Larger wyrms, usually land stuck you can treat similar to hunting large game.

Domestic wyrms such as juklir and Rapsar are kinda the opposite. While they are useful alive for laying eggs (more on that soon), they are also usually short lived, so butchering up some feathery snake for a meal every few months if not every month is pretty normal
The trickier thing with wyrm meat though is that it can be a very dirty meat that, if you're not careful in cooking, can make you sick. Drekir are more resiliant to undercooked or slightly spoiled meat when compared to a human, but only to a point.

A drek can usually eat fresh red meat or fish meat raw no problem... Wyrm meat generally has to be cooked and cooked well
And moreover, the organs of wyrms tend to be less safely edible in comparison to its muscle meat so, while not always, its typically the case that its eaten for it's muscle. That said, large land wyrms are again more comparable to red meat. The organs typically are safer to eat and often are eaten


Eggs can take many different forms, from the hardshelled eggs of wyrms, leathery reptile eggs, or mushy eggs of amphibians, insects and fish. Really this is a hard one to summarize As everything lays eggs, live birth is almost nonexistant in the DragonScape, so if its an animal, its laying eggs. For drekir this is great. Hunter gatherers would likely near universally raid various egg nests for a few free eggs from the local fauna with some degree of regularity.

Drek communities that rear domesticated animals often eat at least some of the eggs, both to control the population growth of their herds and also feed themselves, and many animals are more useful alive and laying eggs than butchered into meat themselves.

Lindir are a great example of that, They can often lay literal tons of eggs as a herd year to year and their eggs often make them more valuable alive than as food
But either way, eggs are a pretty mundane, if not absurdly varied, source of 'meat' amongst drek society. Some can be eaten raw, others need to be cooked thoroughly, the nature of the eggs will vary wildly regionally and different cultures will likely have very dfiferent attitudes about eggs, but I figure almost all of em would eat animal eggs regularly.

Insect meat is truly the most varied however. Ants, Beetles, Wyrms, Bees, Wasps, Flies, Cockroaches... Be they small and tiny or giant or titanic. The nature of the meat is gonna be as varied as probably alien. Insect anatomy is not really a familiar topic to us or drekir and is very alien on a fundamental level
But meat is meat and it can taste very good!

Smaller insects usually are eaten in their entirety. you can't really separate their exoskeleton much from the rest. Just crunch it all down Giant insects again, if wild need to be hunted, if domestic need to be slaughtered. Either way an intensive process of skinning the exoskeleton and extracting the meat from the insect has to be done. For titanic insects, while the exoskeleton usually is inedible (but still very useful), the meats tend to all be eaten provided its a non toxic part of the animal.

A lot of insect meat, particularly different organs of different species can be very toxic even to the drekir. So often care is taken to separate what can be eaten from what can't be eaten. But if a drek can eat it, be it an ant midgut crop or a bees heart, assuming the bug is big enough, they will eat it
otherwise its just a case of eating all of it as usually for small bugs its hard to eat too much of them even with the toxins accounted. Many other toxins can also be cooked out. So with that note chances are drekir wouldn't be eating their bugs raw unless they are very small bugs. I imagine most bugs would be cooked in some sort of fashion, if for nothing else to help cook out poisons

Insects are also notable, particularly smaller ones, for being easy to dry out and grind into a powder or "insect flour" that has a lot of culinary uses

Lastly shellfish and other seafood As the sea ain't just for fish. But things like Shellfish, Crustaceans, eels, etc.! Though the most commonly eaten would likely be shellfish. As surely there are cultures that live off of hunting giant lobsters and crabs as their mainstay. But even they would likely eat at least a few shellfish. Shellfish are just kinda easy to get and eat and can be very reliable So essentially in any sort of coastal community, shellfish will likely make up some amount of their diet. But again, crabs, shrimp, and lobster and similar animals can apply! Now of course for hunter gatherers, its just a part of the yearly seasons, when the giant barnacles start to build up and reproduce on the rocky coastlines. You and the boys come down with baskets and stout sharp sticks to pry them off the rocks, hammer their shells apart with rocks, and eat!

But there are also aquaculturalists who have appeared in at least the side story "Under the Logáu Noon". Aquaculture often focuses on the cultivation of many fish, but most of all shellfish as shellfish are the easiest to contain, protect, and raise quickly and effectively! While Aquaculture isn't the most common sort of drek meat farming, it is one that is very worth mentioning

But now with your main meat staple out of the way, onto Veggies and Fruits

As while meat has to make a minimum of 50-70% of a dreks calories for any given day are meat, its still good practice to eat fruits and vegetables!

Not technically necessary, but still good to do. Besides variety makes life a lot more worth living

First we will start with veggies
And I am not dividing this into subtypes, at least not in depth as the sheer absurd variety of subtypes of vegetables that I have read about is mind boggling. This can be anything from a leafy shrub, a rooty bulb, a flower, a stalk, just about anything. Essentially if its plant matter that is being eaten, that isn't a fruit or a starch, its a vegetable. This can also of course be extended to fungi I should clarify, so mushrooms, Lichen, Mold, etc. Be it a giant mushroom or scraping mold off of a cliff. Of course its also important to mention once more that a lot of the plants drekir are foraging for or cultivating usually are a lot less abundant than our vegetables today! Frankly most domesticated species in the americas died out or rewilded.

And for õndemic planar, its the case that either noone has been there ever, or in the case of Logáu it had sad abandoned for eons, and for Agõrl, its specialized crops died out after the collapse of its climate from the Pulse.
Drekir aren't walkin into the woods to pick onions, its gonna be more camas.

Its not nearly the best deal but of course you can absolutely make a solid living with wild plant foraging! And of course it doesn't take too much of a foraging session to get enough to feed a reasonable amount of people when meat is accounted for. Cultivated veggies are also often traded for from Ormer communities and, amongst horticultural communities of drekir, sometimes a vegetable or two is cultivated to help supplement their hunting and gathering or pastoralism
Of course the specifics of those veggies, and how they are gathered or cultivated is gonna vary endlessly.

It could be a team of drekir digging up rooty bulbs with digging sticks. Or a drek sifting dense algae off of a pond with a clay pot, to be strained and dried. Or it could be a den growing a small crop of squash while they hunt and gather in a valley for a few months

And onto fruits

Which are also extremely varied. Berries, Pomes, Citrus, Melon, etc. I mean

Before i continue i have to also say a Banana is also a berry apparently... nuts, I mean bananas as we know them are extinct in the DragonScape though so I guess it doesn't matter that much to the drekir.

But of course fruits are generally both far more accessible and often a lot more toxic depending on the case. Fruits come a lot of forms and most of them are grown by the plant to get eaten! As if an animal eats it and dumps out the seeds a few hours later, that seed can then go on to grow as a new plant. So many of those can of course get eaten by drekir and can come in a lot of styles. Considering you can find fruit everywhere from extremely arid deserts to tropical rainforests to arctic tundras, it would likely be just about universal in the case that some sort of fruit is being eaten.

Many can be eaten raw and most can likely be cooked. They can be syrups for meat, fruit mashes, jams, raisins, just about any way you can cook a fruit in real life you can cook it in the DS... Fruits still fruit after all!

and lastly is the more recent edition, starch

First its critical to mention that Drekir, nor Ormer, can process Gluten So if a source of starch also has gluten (for example, wheat) then it is completely inedible to a dragon and could give them some serious intestinal blockages. But while they cannot eat gluten, they can eat starches from starchy roots and tubers, or pseudograins like amaranth, wild oats, wild rices like Manoomin, quinoa or more fantastical pseudograins of other planar. Who's to say there isn't a pseudograin derived from a cactus?

There is no Maize though, sorry Maize went extinct, I feel kinda bad about it as Maize is really really cool!.. but Maize at this time is not canonical to the DragonScape

Starch is not something a drek needs to survive, in fact they can get all their carbs from meat. But Starch is very useful and would likely still find its way into many diets. This involves starchy tubers like potatoes, as well as pseudograins like quinoa. These are foods that can be make into a variety of foods including various sorts of flatbreads! Which drekir canonically at this point can eat as long as they're gluten free.

Those starches and also help them a lot with their digestion. Moreover while they can get more carbs from meat than humans, the sheer amount of carbohydrates in starchy foods can be immensely valuable just to give them a huge burst of energy. I would compare it to the relationship of circumpolar peoples in our world to bread. It is a very useful luxury and treat.

But of course they can't live off of it, not even in a malnourished way like a human can.

If you only eat bread as a drek, you will be dead in 4 months, perhaps sooner due to digestion issues. Really if its incorporated into a diet its best done as a nice minority food. As something to go with your meat as a side For hunter gatherers they often tend to forage for things like wild pseudograins, or starchy tubers, or other starchy food sources. In the case of ormer who may actually use it as a staple crop, they may trade with those ormer for some amount of pseudograin or flour.

And perhaps some horticulturalists would cultivate a starchy crop to help compliment their foraging and hunting. For a healthy drek diet it shouldn't ever take up too much real estate in their diet. But it is a useful option that can often be incorporated into a lot of meals, if as nothing else as a big carbohydrate energy shot