Do you think modern orcs place a lot of a value on the ability to cook? Or that food is just served plainly or raw?

I imagine they do place a high value on cooking. A lot of orc interactions seem to be around fire pits and such. And eating together a family/group/father, in general, is super important many societies.

I don’t think orc cuisine is always this super simple food prep, but I imagine practicality and sourcing locally (for freshness) is super important to orcs – which may result in simpler meals depending where they’re at.

Given that Draenor itself was so full of plant-life due to its overabundance of the Spirit of Life, certainly fruits and vegetables were likely in abundance (that wouldn’t kill them). This could also mean spices were in abundance, as well. Though given often plant life tried to kill orcs, there may have been a fair pit of trial and error to figure out what didn’t kill them when used as seasoning or as a dish. We also know that orcs seem to really like those cactus apples in Durotar.

Also, orcs don’t seem to eat meat raw. At the worst, they cook in a fire quick, and eat then and there. So plain maybe if there’s no other options. We know that orcs favor pork a great deal, and a quick recipe list of WoD cooking recipes show basically every moderately delicious looking animal is used in some way as a food. I also imagine jerky is probably pretty popular with orcs, as well as salt-cured meats (it’s practical and useful for preservation purposes).

Blood seems to be an important component to some meals or drinks, such as bloodmead or ironwine. I imagine orcs cook with blood, mix drinks with blood, and even consume uncooked blood (not crazy unusual given that there’s several human IRL cultures that do so) in other fashions. Especially the Bleeding Hollow I would bet.

And besides the wines, orcs are also brewers of beers given their participation in Brewfest. Take that dwarves!

However, only thing I missing here is grains. Orc farms seem to largely focused on raising livestock to consume. Yet, if they’re making beers, then someone’s growing some sort of grains somewhere. But I imagine they have some sort of bread, it’s a pretty common staple food, easy to make and preserve, so super practical.

Fact of the matter is that orcs are humanoids. And people like food. And they like food that tastes good. So I imagine, orcs have an extensive cuisine of many types, but it’s not really depicted in Warcraft lore because Blizz isn’t GRRM spending 20 pages describing a single dish at a feast.

There’s also an orc chef called Bor Breakfist, so take that as confirmation that orcs fucking love food.