Food In Fiction Writing

Food is one of the cornerstones of life. What we eat not only feeds our bodies, it nourishes our souls and spirits. It serves as a code by which we assess one another: on a first date, being taken to McDonald’s sets an entirely different tone than going to Chez Fancy. Mind you, I don’t say one option is better than another; but the choice tells your date a lot about you, as does what you wind up ordering–the twenty dollar bottle of wine or the hundred dollar bottle, a Value Meal as opposed to a packet of nuggets from the Dollar Menu.

Our lives are surrounded by references to edibles, from Apple computers and Blackberries to bookstores named after Chinese restaurants. From the poorest among us to the richest, food is more than something to stuff in our mouths on our way to work or at the end of a long day. It defines cultures and supports ceremonies, marks status and crosses boundaries. 

English itself tramples all over boundaries, by the way. One of my favorite tshirts reads:

English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.

The language of food is a good example of that. The term “foodie”, first used in the 1980s, has become an umbrella term that basically replaces the more formal and precise “gastronome”, “gourmet”, and “gourmand”. Surprisingly, some people object to that muddying of the culinary language…but really, “foodie” is so much easier to say and a significantly more intuitive term. I’ve never had to explain what a “foodie” is to anyone, but I routinely get blank looks with the fancier words.

Other terms that muddy the boundaries include words with multiple meanings, such as “pot”, “bay”, “sauce”, and “dough”. Take a few moments, you can probably come up with a dozen more without even cracking a thesaurus.

Taking a moment myself to tie this back into writing–where can you use language to spice up your writing? Where can you bring some real meat to the table… okay, okay, I’ll stop. *ahem* More seriously, in fiction writing, bringing food terms into a scene can add significant life to a moment, depth to a character, illumination to a setting. John and Julie sitting in a generic table in a generic bar doesn’t do much for the reader; but if the bar is called “Saucy’s”, and the walls are papered with cartoons involving booze jokes, things get a lot more interesting. If the waitresses all dress like Hooters girls, that’s predictable; but if their outfits are patterned to look like various beer, wine, and liquor labels, well, that’s just neat. (Hey, I might just write a story about this bar… I’m starting to get interested in it!)

Back to the semi-speech, let’s look at the emotional side of the subject. Food ties into our emotional lives very deeply, and thus can be a powerful tool for hooking a reader into caring about a character. Using my own books as an example, in “Secrets of the Sands”, Idisio and Cafad Scratha sit down to a meal in the tavern of a poor, small town. Idisio is a street thief, Cafad is a noble; they both have very different experiences about food. The tavern offers roast lizard, because there’s a lizard merchant in town that’s been breeding up humongous lizards for years. In Cafad’s experience, lizard is a tasty dish. Idisio hates lizard–he’s had to survive by hunting down much smaller (and yuckier) versions along the edge of a swamp. That one dish gave me a chance to emphasize the difference in their overall worldviews. Since lizard is not an attractive dish to most Americans, I knew I’d be catching people’s attention with that as well–making them more sympathetic to Idisio because of the automatic yuck factor.

Later on in the book, Alyea of Peysimun sits down for a meal. What she really wants is heavy, hearty black bread and cheese, something that will really fill her up after a long day’s travel; but because she’s a noblewoman, she’s seated at a table serving relatively fluffy, light food–mostly vegetables and rice, very artistically arranged. So she status, but she likes to eat peasant foods. That made her more sympathetic to some readers, I think.

Keep in mind that I did not think about any of this at the time I was writing it. It’s only looking back that I can analyze the patterns and why something worked or didn’t work, and I’m taking all that into future books.

Let’s stop for a moment and do an exercise on bringing food into your writing as an emotional and sensual item–meaning that it evokes the senses, I am not talking about anything to do with whipped cream and plastic sheets here! Take a moment–yes, right now–and write down three meals you eat several times a month–hamburgers, hot dogs, breakfast cereal, oatmeal, tomato soup, grilled cheese sandwiches, sushi, whatever….

Now pick one of those meals to focus on. Think about what it’s like to eat that meal–chilled sushi rice, crunchy breakfast cereal, the texture of a greasy hamburger. Write down three descriptive words that fit the experience of eating that meal. It can be physical, like temperature or texture, and/or it can be emotional, like the comfort-feeling you get after eating a bowl of tomato soup on a cold winter day. Just three words….

You’ve just created the bones of a scene involving two people eating a meal. Since you know the food being eaten, the setting is pretty easy; a pasta dish can be set in an Italian restaurant, for example. Since you know what’s involved in eating the food, you don’t need to point out that “Julie got angry”–you can show Julie stabbing her fork into her pasta so hard the tines scrape the plate with that horrible screechy noise. Instead of “John was nervous”, John can grip his hamburger so hard that ketchup and grease dribble into his lap, or a piece of tomato squirts out into Julie’s face. Action replaces telling. If you want to get really symbolic, you can have Julie stabbing her fork into a plate of spaghetti and meatballs….

Also, remember that you can use dietary requirements as a major plot element. C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur series has a fantastic example of this; her characters live on prepackaged rations when necessary, but they are predators, so they have a freezer from which they pull out steaks and make real meals on occasion–and on one occasion they use the frozen carcass of (essentially) a dead cow as a decoy. Second example: one of the side characters, a creature called a kif, has an unusual dietary need: it needs to consume small living creatures. At one point several of the small rodent-like creatures it eats get free and escape into the walls, so to speak, where the little boogers chew the hell out of the ship’s vital wires, filters, and ductwork. That’s not so great when you’re being chased by much bigger ships with much bigger guns….

The main character, Pyanfar Chanur, refers to the beasties as “the kif’s Dinner”. She doesn’t care what the kif call them. That tells you a lot about her character, all by itself, and about her relationship with the kif under her command.

I could easily write another four thousand words (if not forty thousand!) on this topic, but I’m already well over my self-assigned word count limit. So rather than risk losing you through overload, I’ll stop here and revisit this subject another day…and as a side note, I had so much fun in the presentation at Chop Suey Books, and this subject is so big and so important to writers, that I might just run a regular series along these lines…at conventions, and locally, and in blog posts. What do you think? Would that interest you? Let me know!