Gamp Puns

In GOF at the start once they've picked up Harry everyone is over at the Weasley's house, including Bill and Charlie and Molly is cooking a meal when "She slammed a large copper saucepan down on the kitchen table and began to wave her wand around inside it. A creamy sauce poured from the tip as she stirred" Is this not her breaking Gamp's law that you can't create food out of nothing? I know it seems very nit picky but I was wondering if there's an explanation for it or is it just "it's a book enjoy it" which I'll be doing anyways? Maybe because sauce isn't strictly a food?

Could Malfoy have "required" a functional vanishing cabinet into existence? Could it have formed a passageway directly into the Chamber of Secrets? Or to the Hogwarts kitchens (as opposed to the Hog's Head in Book 7)?

So according to Gamp's Laws, it's impossible to transfigure food. But food isn't any different from any other items. You can transfigure or conjure a bird, and birds are edible, so presumably, you could do the same for meat. So why does the Law work?

My interpretation is the "durability" of a transfiguration. If you try to digest a transfigured or conjured food item, it'll revert to its old state. So eating a conjured food item gives you no nutrients (it reverts to nothing), and eating a transfigured object is just a more appetizing way of eating the original object.

Additionally, this would relate to how "permanent" transfiguration works - it just creates more durable results (though ones that still fail if broken down completely such as during digestion). This ruling also gives an explanation for why food can be increased in size if you already have some - the food already exists, so it doesn't revert the same way (and I know this explanation is shady since wouldn't it revert to the small size, but magic makes no sense).

However, as an interesting effect of this interpretation of Gamp's Laws, transfigured or conjured food is actually still quite useful:

• Transfigure a salad into a chocolate bar, and you can experience the joy of eating a chocolate bar and receive the nutrients of a salad.
• Transfigure something dangerous (like a knife or vial of poison) into something edible and it can kill the consumer
• Conjured food contains zero calories, and thus you can snack to your heart's content without worrying about weight gain

Oh also as a minor plot detail you could use: if you want to have an enterprising main character, you could have them be the first person to think of the idea of selling this sort of stuff as a health option.

***

Or of course, you could go an alternative path where the law is completely false and was fabricated as propaganda to make sure people keep buying food (and thus giving money to whatever group is selling said food).

This is the reason Harry, Hermione and Ron would be starving at points in the Deathly Hallows. But is there anything preventing them from transfiguring a rock into a chicken and preparing a nice bonfire roast? (I understand JKR not writing this in to intensify their suffering, but is it technically possible?)

This really goes into the realm of belief powering magic.

Apologies if this has already been questioned on this sub but I just want to hear some other opinions, because this has always irked me a bit.

So Hermione states in DH that you can conjure food from nothing yet there were many times in the series where an animal or living thing was conjured, which is technically food.

Further inference made me think that since things like wine and sauce could be conjured, "food" meant something with substance, like meat or a watermelon say. But there are even discrepancies in this theory,

Just three examples,

CoG - Malfoy Conjures a snake from thin air at the dueling club, snake is edible and nutritious,

GoF - Olivander conjured birds while testing the wands

HBP - Hermione also conjured birds.

Ideas, opinions?

It’s a pretty dumb, unimportant question, but I’m curious—do you think a wizard could magically conjure salt? Food is one of the five principle exceptions to Gamp’s law of elemental transfiguration as Hermione (and eventually Ron) points out in DH, but does salt qualify as “food”? It’s technically just a rock, so I feel like it could be conjured like how water is able to be conjured with aguamenti (though it’s unclear whether that water is able to be used for the purpose of hydration—Voldemort prevents magically conjured water from having an effect in the cave, but the fact that Harry tries to conjure it in the first place makes me think that under other circumstances it would have worked). But at the same time, salt’s primary use is for consumption, so maybe it does qualify as food? I don’t know. What do you think?

Genie of the Lamp

Sure, they understand that they need food to live, that the body starts eating it’s own muscles of deprived of food long enough, and they know that something in the stomach breaks food down and at some point extracts everything useable from it.

But they don’t know what it breaks down into, they don’t know how the result is used by the body, and they sure as hell don’t know shit about the metabolic process. So a transfigured apple will be an apple as far as all your senses cal tell, but as far as your GI tract is concerned it’s just a very convincing wax apple, or whatever it was transfigured from.

If a wizard turns a baseball into an apple and cut it in half it will behave like two halves of an apple because that wizard knows what happens when you cut something in half and has likely cut an apple in half before, or at least seen the inside of an apple while eating it. But that wizards knowledge of how an apple functions breaks down in the face of the complexities of Adenosine Triphosphate production. It’s a bit like asking a guy who’s built a decent garden shed from scratch to recreate the building he works in from scratch and by memory; sure he may eventually manage it, but that’s a monkeys, typewriters, and Shakespeare kind of probability right there.

So maybe if someone who memorized everything there is to know about an apple at a molecular level both as a singular existence and in regards to digestion and metabolism and how the resultant energy is spent and how the eventual byproducts are dealt with transfigured an apple, it may be a fully edible apple?

Additionally, could you transfigure some extremely healthy but horrible tasting food into an equivalent mass of cake, eat the cake, and then get the benefits of the original food if the transfiguration is allowed to break down, returning the cake to its original self? Or transfigure it to look, smell, taste, sound, and feel like cake, but react like the original nasty superfood? Could you alter the shape and appearance but maintain the original properties? Like turning a limp of pig iron into a block of mahogany that magnets will stick to? Change the outside but leave the metaphysical inside unchanged?

Edit: this was brought out because I remembered a scene where Ed from Fullmetal Alchemist mentioned that he could turn a patch of grass into bread with alchemy. And made me think, yeah, he could make a shitty loaf of hardtack since grass has and can be turned into its constituent parts, water

The Weasleys go around in secondhand clothing and struggle to buy everyone's robes when they grow out of them. And Lupin goes around in what i think was described as tattered clothing. And Ron was stuck with embarrassing dress robes.

I wonder - can't magic help with this? It fixed Harry's broken glasses on at least two occassions. Shouldn't it be possible to repair and mend clothes good as new? Bones can be completely regrown and most common injuries seem quite curable with magic long as it wasn't done by dark magic.

So why the limit with clothes? I always imagined you should be able to just transfigure clothes to look different or better or to at least mend rips and wear and tear. Or, like food can be mulitiplied if you already have some but you can't create something from nothing. Why can't the Weasleys just multiply an older sibling's clothing? I mean i always assumed that's how Molly could afford to make everyone sweaters every Christmas. Or am i remembering wrong and they wore exclusively hand-me-downs?

Sorry for the wrong spelling of "Transfiguration" in the title that I can no longer edit. :-(

"Your mother can’t produce food out of thin air,” said Hermione. “No one can. Food is the first of the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfigur--”

“Oh, speak English, can’t you?” Ron said, prising a fish bone out from between his teeth.

“It’s impossible to make good food out of nothing! You can Summon it if you know where it is, you can transform it, you can increase the quantity if you’ve already got some--”

-HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS

This idea came from something I posted on another thread where I wanted to see fics exploring Molly's day to day life as a magical housewife with a limited budget. How does she make ends meet, what charms and spells does she know to prepare food and do other chores, what's her dynamic with Arthur like, etc. And then this silly "what if" intruded... What if out of desperation one day...

...It was very a bad day. She had already run out of supplies in her larder and Arthur would only get his salary the day after tomorrow. She had to put food on the table or the family would go hungry. Maybe there was a tiny chance that there were some ingredients left...

So Molly waves her wand to do a spell that was supposed to be a hybrid of increasing the quantity of something and transforming it--except she hasn't increased or transformed anything. She actually produced food out of thin air! Not being that bookish, she thinks that:

1. she's finally gotten the hang of an advanced household spell
2. there must have been crumbs of bread left that she managed to increase into a whole loaf, and other bits and pieces of ingredients that got transformed to a stew--not feast level quantity but enough for sharing as long as she rationed out the portions.

...But really, she managed to disprove Gamp's law. Since that day, she has unknowingly been repeating that feat when in tight situations.

Just had a weird bug I've never seen before. I'm playing single player campaign, recently got into chapter 3. I finished a homestead robbery mission with Sean, then fast-travelled back to camp. As soon as I arrived, I saw Karen on guard duty and she started firing. I then saw the text alert, "you have led enemies back to camp". I had about ten seconds before the 'game over' sort of screen, during which I ran to the people Karen was shooting. There was an enemy camp set up just beside the Clemens Point camp, causing the ensuing firefight and game over.

Anyone experienced this before? This is my fourth playthrough and first time seeing this.

Unpopular opinion here, but is Yolanda Gamp (how to cake it YouTube) really that bad? I know that she uses the devils dough in most of her videos, but my main issue with fondant is that people use it like “oh my cake is awful and dry, but I’m going to use fondant on it to make it seem tasty and pretty” I personally hate fondant because if you put presentation over taste, let’s be real, it’s not a cake. But, Yolanda, while using fondant, also spends a lot of time making sure her cakes taste good. She also doesn’t pull the no buttercream only frosting thing. Is she really that bad?

Money is one of the 5 exceptions of gamp's law of elemental transfiguration. So one can't conjure money from thin air or transfigure say pebbles to gold coins. This probably also holds for similar valuables like a gold bar. But there are other valuable things that one can transfigure. For example, one can transfigure a pebble to a rare breed of dog or cat and sell that with a hefty price. I know this is possible cos once Minister Cornelius Fudge transfigures a teacup to a gerbil in muggle prime minister's office. Similarly, one can transfigure garbage to drugs and arms and ammunition and sell them to the muggle black market and become a billionaire in perhaps no time. So where does that leave the second exception of Gamp's law?

Does anyone have a clue what the other 4 of the 5 principal exceptions to Gamp’s law of elemental transfiguration are? I feel like body parts must be another because they couldn’t make george a new ear or mad-eye a new leg. Any ideas?

As you might know, Hesper Gamp formulated a law which rules Transfiguration. However, there are 5 exceptions: we know, for sure, 3 of them are food, money and life.

But how can this be possible? Does magic know whether or not something is consumable by humans? Wood can be food, but it can be created of the "nothingness". About money, who knows what other magical creatures use as a trade currency. Life can also be achieved with Transfiguration. Senpensortia, for example, summons a snake. It is stated that it is not a living being but just an arrangement of air molecules. Biology tells us that's life. Life is just the arrangement of organic molecules which can be achieved by nuclear modifying a group of atoms, normally with high levels of energy.

My theory is that these exceptions are not exceptions at all, but they are a relief for the Ministry of Magic who doesn't need to worry about money being created by anyone and the creation of Homunculus, for example.

What do you think? Am I going crazy???

BASIC INFORMATION

Full Name: Matthew Richard Gamp

Birthday: October 20th

Age: 15

Birthplace: Windsor, UK

Ethnicity: Biracial

Languages: English, French and moderate German

Blood Status: Pure Blood

Sexuality: Gay

APPEARANCE

Faceclaim: Leo Bonaventure and another 2

Eye Color: Black

Hair Color: Brown

Height: 5ft 9'

MAGIC & EDUCATION

Wand: Cherry Wood 10 Inches, Dragon Heartstring Core

Patronus: Buzzard

Boggart: Werewolf

Previous Education: Ludegrove School

Current Academic Performance -

Outstanding: Charms, Astronomy, Transfiguration, Muggle Studies, History of Magic

Exceeds Expectations: Defence Against the Dark Arts, Care of Magical Creatures, Study of Ancient Runes, Arithmancy

Acceptable: Herbology

Poor: Potions

Dreadful: Divination

Extracurricular Activities: Ancient Studies and Magical Theory

FAMILY INFORMATION

Father - Theodore Gamp, 53. Former Quidditch Star turned highly successful Restaurateur

Mother - Amélie Gamp nee Kama, 50. Heiress and Columnist for the Daily Prophet and the muggle Daily Telegraph

Brother - Frederick 'Freddy' Gamp, 22. Currently in Brazil studying the flora and fauna

Sister - Charlotte Gamp, 19. Up and coming painter

Ancestor - Ulick Gamp, First Minister for Magic

SHORT BACKGROUND

Despite being one of the oldest and most distinguished bloodlines in the UK magical community, the Gamps thought it important to raise their children in the muggle world just as their parents had done for them to show them that despite not having magic themselves muggles can do some amazing things that would seem magical to the ordinary wizard. Theodore was a former Seeker for the English National Quidditch Team who led his team to victory in three consecutive Quidditch World Cup finals before injuries forced him to consider retiring, he met his wife Amélie a then budding journalist while on tour in France. They got married about 8 months later, and within a year of marriage they gave birth to their first child Frederick.

The family does frequent between France and the UK very often and was considering sending the children the Beauxbatons for a while till the ultimately decided to stick with Hogwarts.

Personality: Shy and introverted and mostly keeps to himself, he has a few friends but doesnt go out of his way to really enage people. Can be seen as cold and rude at times and is really competitive, but is ultimately just a kind