What if you engineered real food and spiced it like each of theirs, subverted the supply chain for a little bit, and gave people real food? Then you take it away in a week or so and everyone realizes that these chains have gone downhill.
Isn't this the back plot of the game, Rain World? With the slug cats and the depressed robots stuck on a decaying world when the sapient, organic species all left?
You've got a hard point there. At more than 100 colonists, my game loads in at less than one frame per second. That's why there's a cap on kidney harvesting. Otherwise, I would be a more terrible monster. Thanks for your concern, though.
And they don't talk about the brain's cellular degeneration. Myelin sheathes decaying at the axons. We get zombie rulers.