Food in Speculative Fiction

 I reached over 51,000 words for National Novel Writing Month, I’m three books away from two hundred for the year, and I finished Assassin’s Creed: Origins. The remaster for Assassin’s Creed III isn’t working on my PS4 for whatever reason, but I have a bunch of other games so it all works out, I think.

Not sure which book I’m reading next, which is a bit frustrating. I’ll get to something though.

Now let’s talk about FOOD!

Food in Speculative Fiction

I recently re-read Master of the House of Darts, which takes place in the Aztec Triple Alliance, and the main character at several points eats tamales. Tamales date back to pre-European colonization, so that’s fine. What did bother me (though not in a critical way, like it was something the author did wrong) is that despite several references to the meat in the tamales, I didn’t know what kind of meat it was that the main characters were eating. After all, chickens, pigs, and cows were not native to Mesoamerica, and would not have been eaten or even seen at this time. So what kind of meat was it? This led to some research on the history of tamales and the meats that would have been available to pre-Columbian civilizations.

[The answer is: deer, quail, frogs, turkey, and antelope.]

Which makes me think about the all-important topic in fiction: what are your characters eating?

One of the most memorable scenes in fiction for me is the third book of the Arthur Trilogy, King of the Middle March, in which our medieval English characters are in Venice for the Fourth Crusade and are invited to a feast. They are completely flummoxed by the food they’re served, and it has the most unflattering description of shrimp I’ve ever read (“fat pink worms in armor”), along with confusion as to what a cherry is (someone there tries to jokingly tell them that it’s a bloody red cow’s eye). Because of course, being from medieval England, that’s not what they ate–they had meats and a few vegetables, but not that much seafood, or those kinds of fruits.

And I sometimes think about Avatar: The Last Airbender, and how Sokka really likes meat, whereas Aang is vegetarian. And of course Sokka likes meat–the Water Tribe lives near the polar ice caps, where there isn’t a ton of vegetation at all. Any plants you get are probably from the ocean, and even then not a lot of those, because the water is so freaking cold it’s not worth diving to the bottom to get it. Easier to just hunt animals that live on the surface of the ice, or come up close to it in the water.

The writers of these stories put thought into this: what do the characters in this world eat? What can they eat, that makes sense with the world that we’ve built? It’s a thing that you’d be surprised not that many people think about. You can say, all you want, “This fantasy/sci-fi world is a desert,” and okay, fine, but what do the people there even eat? If you don’t have an answer for that, you should figure that out before you get any further in writing out this fantasy story. 

I’m not suggesting that you do hardcore research into agriculture (although if you want to, I’m not going to stop you). If you write pumpkins into a fantasy story, in a temperate forest setting, I’m not going to call you out and say, “The soil and climate isn’t quite right!” I don’t know. But in extreme climates, like desert, or tundra, or volcano, or tropical island, I hope you, the writer, has an idea of what can and can’t grow there. You can get away with a lot if you handwave it as “Magic pumpkins,” or whatever (at least, in my view you can), though you have to at least tell me that if you’re writing about pumpkins growing in Arctic conditions.

The basics of it go like this, in a fantasy, science-fiction, or historical setting: what animals or plants live around them? Certain fungi can also be edible. Are they good to eat? Where and how do these things grow? Can they be domesticated? Or only hunted/foraged?

These can be hard questions! It doesn’t require a degree, but it requires some thought, I think. I’m curious, for instance, as to what dragons eat in a lot of settings, for instance, given how massive they are–sure reptiles (assuming the dragons are reptiles and not something else) don’t have to eat as much as mammals, given their different system of body heat regulation, but they do have to eat, and when they do it’s often a lot.

And if you get into really weird fantasy and science-fiction, you can get some interesting questions and answers. In a world where there aren’t a lot of large mammals producing milk, are there are other animal products besides meat you can eat? Is there something like honey from a different kind of animal than bees in this world, that the creatures create surplus that humans can eat?

Or do something nuts, like that upcoming Netflix anime about people dungeon-diving and eating the monsters they find? And if you’re trapped in a fantasy dungeon, I guess you’ve got to eat something…

Figure this stuff out. Look at the things people in the real world eat in different environments–it’s very different from modern American food today! Just put some thought into what the characters eat, and what they’d be able to eat in the environments they find themselves in, especially if they live in habitats far from the usual fantasy ones based on Europe.

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