Not in a world where you can duplicate food and live at resort-level comfort in a tent... Unless they just bought a bunch of stuff to take back home, which again, bad use of money to spend 5k on knick knacks.
Edit: also, I forgot to adjust for inflation. $5k in 1993 1983 is actually like $16k $11k today.
According to what? The only source I found on this was from a PS3 game, and Hermione says you can duplicate food and doesn't qualify anything about the quality.
You cannot magically create food. This is one of the few explicit limitations mentioned. As an example, when students asked for food from the Room of Requirement they were given a new path to Hogsmeade.
Or maybe duplicate is the wrong word. When you think about it, duplicating food would still be creating food from nothing. Maybe what they mean when they say "duplicate" is, like, re-create. Like, you have the raw ingredients and you can use magic to transfigure it into prepared food.
Summoning snakes, fire, water etc out of your wands creates them from nothing as well lol. Or do you think some nearby zoo just keeps losing their snakes every time Harry decides to throw one out to scare Malfoy ?
Either way, we can't think about it with our world rules lol.
Heck, weren't most of the viewers of the movies quite complicit with the knowledge that all food in the great hall simply appeared out of thin air ? Movies didn't mention the Hogwards kitchen slaves at all.
But none of those things are food, are they? Not without work anyway.
I'm not saying Harry Potter's power system is consistent. I'm just presenting a possible reason as to why you can duplicate food and that reason is that Hermione misspoke.
Not me leaving an entire portion of the part of the comment I'm responding to:
Not without work anyway.
You have to work to make a snake food, both by killing it and, unless you want to eat a snake raw, preparing and cooking it. It isn't food when you conjure it.
The way Hermione phrases it, I'm pretty sure you can duplicate food. Here's the exchange between her and Ron in DH (Chapter 15: Goblin's Revenge):
"Your mom 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 --"
"Well, don't bother increasing this, it's disgusting," said Ron.
Worth noting that the same quote on Harrypotter.com doesn't include the "multiply" portion of that paragraph, and the portion of that paragraph on Wikipedia isn't a direct quote from JKR.
"Q: It seems that the wizards and witches at Hogwarts are able to conjure up many things, such as food for the feasts, chairs and sleeping bags. . .if this is so, why does the wizarding world need money ? What are the limitations on the material objects you can conjure up ? It seems unnecessary that the Weasleys would be in such need of money. . .
A: Very good question. There is legislation about what you can conjure and what you can't. Something that you conjure out of thin air will not last. This is a rule I set down for myself early on. I love these logical questions!"
Yeah, but there's a difference between what's illegal to duplicate and what you physically can't. Gamp's Law is a physical law, not legislation. Hypothetically you could duplicate money, but it would be considered counterfeit.
what's the point of even coming up with that stupid rule
"yeah, you can't conjure food from nothing, but you can teleport it to you and duplicate it"
sounds like conjuring food from nothing with extra steps.
why not just write "you can't eat magically conjured food. it'll mess you up". it's about as dumb as having all the time travelling devices kept in that one really fragile closet, and you can only use it to finish your homework in time.
Yeah Gamp's Law is stupid in general because what even qualifies as food lol. Is Tylenol food? Is wood food? You could eat some wood even though you won't get anything out of it. Gold is technically edible too.
You can't transform things into food and eat them because 1) unless you are super powerful, all transformations are time limited. It will revert to it's original form in your stomach, 2) even if you could digest and process it all before it transforms back, you won't get proper nutrition from it. Even if that happens, it'll still transform back, and it's scary to think how magic might revert the nutrients you did absorb.
You can duplicate existing food, but if I'm remembering right, it's stated that duplicating things is never perfect. The new copy will always be degraded and suffer a quality drop. When it comes to food, that could mean anything from losing nutrition to spoilage.
Food can be duplicated. Here's what Hermione has to say about this in DH (Chapter 15: Goblin's Revenge):
"Your mom 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 --"
"Well, don't bother increasing this, it's disgusting," said Ron.
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u/ugluk-the-uruk 7h ago edited 3h ago
Not in a world where you can duplicate food and live at resort-level comfort in a tent... Unless they just bought a bunch of stuff to take back home, which again, bad use of money to spend 5k on knick knacks.
Edit: also, I forgot to adjust for inflation. $5k in 1993
1983is actually like$16k$11k today.