I always wondered about that myself. Why bother to transport anything in bulk when it could be rematerialized at any time by the transporter?
A partial answer at least was given in TNG’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise”: molecular patterns cannot be stored indefinitely, presumably not even in Picard’s time.
(Raises hand again) If the colonists are in danger of starvation wouldn’t:
[ol]
[li]Transporting already processed foodstuffs[/li][li]Evacuating them [/li][/ol]
Be better solutions than transporting grain which will take months to grow and may still be insufficient if the crop fails for some reason?
I mean you don’t take seeds to Ethiopia and Somalia and then say “Good luck with the harvest.” You first take food AND then you explore helping their agricultural systems
The whole point was that under the terms of the Organian Peace Treaty, Sherman’s Planet would go to whichever side could develop it most efficiently. No way was the Federation going to let it go to the Klingons by default!
And in Charlie X, the cooks in the kitchen are startled to find that all of their ovens are filled with turkeys.
Yeah, this is what I was going to say.
Read Post #20?
Hmmmmm. Would Kirk’s Enterprise be carrying the bulk wood and metal needed to mechanically reproduce 100 flintlocks? :dubious:
Even in the TNG era they couldn’t replicate living things. And sending down a bunch of dead seeds wouldn’t do the colonists much good.
I think you mean Relics.
Then … how did the transporters work? 
If that’s the one with Scotty, yes. Thanks for the correction (I’ve only seen it once).
“Very well” - Data
More seriously, it appears they can transport living things but not replicate them; replicating them introduces “single bit errors” that result in the copy being dead and replicated food & drink tasting a little different.
It’s a big ship. I see wooden furniture and objects all over the ship (like those data cartridges—those are clearly painted blocks of wood!) and plenty of metallic objects. Ships on long voyages often had woodworking and metalworking shops in the past. Why not in the future?
Okay, but simply storing the molecular patterns in the transporters after dematerializing the original seeds wouldn’t be the same as replicating them from scratch. The only questions would be (a) How long can their patterns be stored in the buffers? and (b) How much energy is available for rematerialization?
Or, they could have simply harvested the wood and metal from the planet … but I don’t think that’s what the Klingons were doing.
They could have just beamed everything up … but then why do they need mining operations on other planets?
Also, wouldn’t the transporter’s biofilters have been able to screen out the offending virus? :dubious:
I’m assuming that quadrotriticale has even more gluten than contemporary triticale, so I’d like to see the celiac rates in that century.
On another note, Salman Rushdie describes P2C2E–Process Too Complicated To Explain. I believe this is germane to this discussion.
I don’t think they had biofilters back then.
Yeah, but it’s the only Earth grain that’ll grow on Sherman’s Planet. Whatchugonnado, huh? 
I did; it doesn’t seem to address the point that I was making, which was that although people were arguing that TOS Enterprise was replicating food, the Enterprise had (a) kitchens and (b) cooks, which you wouldn’t need if you were replicating your food.