I don't think that's necessarily true. I think that it could be that you can transfigure food, just without the nutrient content and the like, but more than likely, it will end up reverting back to its base form.

 

"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..."

According to this, you can transfigure it, though the quality would be questionable.

 

The quote says that you can transfigure food once you have food in front of you ("you can transform it", "it" being food, means "you can transform food" - which we already knew from Hagrid's pumpkins). It quite explicitly says that it's impossible to make food with Transfiguration.

 

That's not transfiguration though, more conjuration.

 

Good point, hadn't noticed that. Though, isn't the pumpkin example the same as 'increasing the quantity'? I doubt that both the 'increasing the quantity' and 'transform' sub-laws allude to the exact same thing.

 

I agree with you on most fronts, Sesc. However, I am of the opinion that there must be a 'base form', in some areas of Transfiguration at least. Take the ferret incident. If there was no base form (in this case, Malfoy), you could theoretically transform any ferret into a perfect clone of Draco Malfoy, including all his thoughts, memories and unique quirks.

 

And that is what i've been trying to say. There has to be a base form, or else you could transfigure a rock, for instance, into a person, and then they would be a person. Just because something is transfigured, doesn't mean that there was never anything before. If that were the case, you could transfigure an object of food, and when the person who transfigured it died, it would remain as a transfigured object. In actuality, the object would just turn back into whatever it was before, meaning that there is a base form.

 

Therefore there is a base form, and everything that the people who agree with this have been saying is correct.

BOOM.

 

Stop being difficult fuck

 

Mate, if you haven't got anything intelligent to say, don't say anything. Makes you seem more stupid.

 

Then I say it intelligently for you stop being difficult fuck.

 

Oh good lord...

:facepalm

 

Base form is not required for Untransfiguration to work. All you need is prior form. A spell or process which reverts a thing to what it was before. Does that mean that what it was before is the thing's true nature, underneath what it is now? No more than a broken pair of glasses, capable of being returned to the state of being a working pair of glasses, is really a working pair of glasses underneath the shattered glass and broken frames.

Therefore, no, you cannot transfigure any rock - or ferret - into Draco Malfoy, because those rocks and ferrets haven't been Draco Malfoy in the past. But that doesn't mean that the rock that Draco Malfoy is turned into is Draco Malfoy underneath a ferret (except, perhaps, that his soul still exists, given that we know that souls exist in HP. But that is peculiar to human Transfiguration). It just means that you can revert the ferret into the object that it once was.

That is: even if you change an object completely and fundamentally, you haven't erased its history.

 

Yes, but that means that anything that has been transfigured, is just something on top of something else. Therefore, there is a prior, and base form to the transfiguration.

 

^ And that is the intelligent way to say "Stop being a difficult fuck."

 

Are you retarded?

I was once a foetus. Now I am a 22 year old man. Does that fact that a foetus was my prior form mean that underneath being a man, I am really a foetus?

Jesus.

 

It does, actually. When I scraped my knee, you aren't just seeing blood, but the 25-year old layer underneath my 26-year old dermis.

Like rings on a tree, son.