The Spec

The unit

A bloc is a meal built as a unit. Square, dense, and made to hold its shape. Food treated as construction material rather than as a plate of ingredients.

Admission

Every submission is screened before it enters. The bar is narrow — whether it is a photograph of food and plausibly a bloc. Quality is not screened here.

What passes is admitted and receives a permanent accession number, such as BLOC-0447. What does not passes nothing and consumes no number.

Inspection

Admitted blocs are inspected by other Bloccers, one at a time, with the maker and the running score withheld. An inspector rates three qualities from zero to five:

Squarism

Right angles, flat faces, equal proportions. Is it a cube?

Integrity

Would it hold if you picked it up? One unit, or a pile arranged into a shape?

Composition

What is in it. Variety, balance, deliberate assembly.

Certification

Once a day the gate closes and the day’s blocs are ranked. The highest-rated is certified The Daily Bloc and published, credited to whoever built it.

One a day, at most. Where a day cannot be judged, none is issued and the day records that instead.

Permanence

A number, once issued, is never reissued. Records are corrected by amendment rather than replaced, and nothing is deleted. A bloc entered in error stays entered.

Declared figures

Weight, dimensions and nutrition are supplied by the maker and are not verified. Where they appear, they appear as declared, marked SELF-CERTIFIED. Where they are absent, the registry states nothing rather than estimating.