Except, it has been shown time and again that as technology advances, food gets cheaper and cheaper due to developments in agriculture, storage and preservation, and transportation. If they have the technology to colonize mars and jump between stars, they have the technology to harvest, preserve, and transport beef with ease. Thinking towards kleinbl00's idea that maybe beef is a rarity due to some unknown factor or another, I'd have to kabosh that idea as well. For one, beef is a staple meat for many, many cultures. If they're able to colonize mars and travel between the stars, chances are they wouldn't have any trouble making sure that the both the genetic stock and the environment needed for raising beef stays viable. Additionally, since their first mission was in Mexico of all places, they were in close proximity to earth so transportation wasn't an issue. Lastly, the way they non-nonchalantly talk about beef like it's an easily expected every day meal, which means it's common and affordable for two space goons like them, instead of some rare delicacy where they have to go to some clandestine restaurant and pay the future equivalent of $10,000 for a plate of forbidden bush meat. Easiest explanation? They're bad budgeters and their misery is their own doing.
Beef is expensive. If you don't have refrigeration, then you milk cows and make butter because butter lasts longer and you can cook with it. Milk you have to use asap, and when you don't have Pasteurization it goes south even faster. And when you need to farm all the grain you can to pay taxes, you are left with the shit at the sides, root veggies, chicken, pork on rare occasions, and tons of butter. Coq-a-vin is another example. This used to be poor people food; the old chickens that were nothing but tough meat and gristle needed long cook times to make edible. Throw some cheap root veggies in that and you get a good soup that has a decent nutritional base. The, admittedly racist, stereotype of Black southerners eating watermelon and fried chicken? same thing. Chickens are cheap to raise and breed, you can eat the eggs, feed them kitchen waste, and then when they are no longer productive, eat them. Frying chicken parts in oil is an efficient way to get the most out of the food when every dollar counts. Watermelon was cheap to grow as a side project and many slaves grew it to sell for extra cash. Hamburger was poverty food, now a staple. Sausage was a way to get edible food out of the offal and slaughterhouse waste with the added benefit that you can store it for weeks/months. Same with Haggis and Shepard's Pie. The cycle is fairly standard.
The easiest explanation is that the writers and the designers and the animators probably never met each other, let alone talked much (as is usually the case). So when it was written, they were in some super-shitty place that the designer's all "fuck that" and drew up something like this And nobody thought it would matter that much because the likelihood of "do they use Quickbooks" coming up as a contention among fans was remote. FWIW, I was walking on the docks with a buddy of mine back in '03 or so. he discovered that you could buy a 175' fishing trawler for $150k and decided the economics of the world were upside down as that's as much as a 35mm Panavision cost at the time (they're much cheaper now). Never mind that $150k is a used Lamborghini, a new Patek Philippe or a 3-bedroom home in Kentucky. When I broke it to him that moorage fees were also on the order of $18k a month and the bunker fuel necessary to get it to Alaska where it could fish was around $50k he grew more annoyed, not less. Your point is well taken and I agree. however, I can also imagine a Millenium Falcon with a quarter tank of dilithium crystals or whatever and nothing in petty cash left for a drink at the Mos Eisley spaceport.
Suddenly, resorting to piracy makes a whole mess of sense.When I broke it to him that moorage fees were also on the order of $18k a month and the bunker fuel necessary to get it to Alaska where it could fish was around $50k he grew more annoyed, not less.
The troupe is pretty prevalent in almost every mainstream anime of the starving protagonist. I personally don't enjoy it, but at least there is enough in this anime for it to kind of make sense. They have a massive ship, two smaller ships, and literally no other crew piloting the ship. I just don't know what it takes maintaining a ship of that size from the salary of two bounty hunters (which isn't really two as they hunt the same bounties), and just not knowing enough about bounty hunting. Now I say this in comparison to other anime I've watched before, this is so far the most plausible scenario I've seen created.