User blog comment:The Milkman/Everybody Shut Up./@comment-4826433-20120424200043/@comment-1221773-20120425010714

Modern races have the technology to synthesize a nutritious paste for food per ME2. And the quarians bring their liveships to Earth, the same liveships that produced most of the food for 17 million quarians for years. The vast majority of quarians and Migrant Fleet ships remained at Rannoch while only the warships and liveships (which were armed with dreadnought-scale weaponry) left for the battle for Earth. This means that the quarian fleet near Earth would be drawing on only a fraction of the liveships' total production capacity, so they should be able to grow plenty of real food for themselves and not even have to resort to the paste.