Bittercon: Food in Fantasy and Science Fiction

Do authors pay enough attention to the practical constraints of their created worlds when describing what their characters are eating? Does anyone want a bug butter sandwich - or vat meat?

Is it wrong that one of my first thoughts upon reading this description was all of those magnificent feasts in the Redwall books by Brian Jacques?  Once upon a time, these feasts caused little me a great deal of consternation and longing, because while my elementary school teacher was reading those books to us, my immune disease was forcing me to subsist on turkey, rice, scallions, and grapes.  I was also terribly hungry all the time then, because I was busy growing nine inches in one year, after which I was still one of the shortest kids in the class.  So those lurid descriptions of piles of wonderful food made quite the impression on little me.

I love food.  And I know my food.  I’m a very good cook, or so I hear tell, and I’m notorious among my friends for always knowing the best restaurant in town for ny given genre of food.  My childhood unable to eat almost anything left me an extremely adventurous eater, and barring things I’m allergic to, I will try almost anything once.  More relevant to this topic, and to Redwall, I know what goes into what, because thats what keeps me from eating anything I’m allergic to.  Even at ten years old, when I was not the most inclined to thinking worldbuilding through, I noticed that a whole lot of the food at the Redwall feasts needed milk, cream, or butter, or eggs, which compels the question, where did our abbey mice get such things?  Do they have a pasture somewhere with cows that they tend to (and am I the only one imagining green habit attired mice clinging to a cow’s udder, trying to milk it?) is it milk from the lady rodents themselves?  Some of the food could be made with chemical substitutes, but do our utopian low tech woodland creatures have a full industrial chemical laboratory beneath Cavern Hole?  And what are the ethics of eating eggs when birds can think and talk just like the abbey creatures?

Then there are books where I just can’t figure out where any of the food comes from at all.  In Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series, for example.  When Tally and Shay leave the settlements and go zooming across the countryside, there is no visible agriculture.  The population is deliberately kept stupid, docile, and less than productive.  I can’t figure out how most jobs necessary for society to function at a basic material level are performed, much less food.

This question seems more relevant, at first glance, to Science Fiction than to Fantasy, because after all, most fantasy either exists in an expressly agrarian society, or takes place in a modern city.  The means of food production don’t need to be spelled out, because they’re apparent at first glance.  There are still things that should have been thought through, such as the Redwall example, or foods eaten wildly out of season, or crops unsuited to a climate, that sort of thing, though, and in Fantasy, it’s usually forgotten.  Food doesn’t matter until it gets to the table and can be an expression of culture or personality.  Discussions of food in fantasy often revolve around how it can add realism to a narrative, how taste and smell should be added to descriptions of a world.  Sight and sound, the senses most often used, can be appreciated at a distance, but taste is visceral.  It is literally in your face.

In Science Fiction, the “where does the food come from” question can be much more blatant.  Depending on the environment involved, food might have to be shipped in at great expense, or manufactured artificially.  The stereotype from the middle of the last century is the food pill.  There’s alien cuisine to be considered.  There’s what foods a character might miss in any situation that takes them away from those foods.

The description of this topic mentions types of artificial food and asks the question of whether anyone would want to eat it, which I think is a strange question to ask, and completely beside the point, given that in most cases, writers don’t want us to look at artificial food and think “ooh yummy.”  As to whether it would be realistic for characters to eat it, I can safely say that my own childhood food experiences and the ability I possess to imagine what it is like to be desperately poor and hungry have convinced me that if it’s what’s available, that’s what humans will eat.  Turkey, rice, scallions, and grapes got very boring very quickly.  I came to hate the sight of all four, yet every day I ate them without even salt, because they were all I could eat, and I had a body to fuel.  Starving people the world over probably ate their usually monotonous diets more enthusiastically than I did, because hunger really is the best sauce, and I was fortunate to know that I would always have three meals to look forward to.  Enjoyment doesn’t enter into it.

Part of the reason, I think, for the above pointless question is that many, but certainly not all of us, though probably a healthy majority of the people sitting around talking about food in Speculative Fiction at a convention, in the modern developed world are lucky enough to never know true hunger.  When food is always available, and in wide variety, and always has been for a person, enjoyment is one of the only questions about food left.  We’re free to choose our food based on what we feel like eating.

Equally important to why so often in Science Fiction I can’t figure out where any food comes from is that in the modern developed world city dwellers and suburbanites, rich, poor, hungry, or well fed are also by and large isolated from the means of our food’s production.  It’s easy to forget that food doesn’t just come from the restaurant and the grocery store, and since we take it for granted, it’s easy to forget about in worldbuilding.  This raises the question whether this is important in some way outside of simply telling a good story.  Is our societal tendency to forget about food until it’s in the kitchen or on the table somehow going to lead to the kinds of failures of imagination that could harm us in the real world?  Or is food in Speculative Fiction one more thing that some writers pay attention to and others don’t or in different ways?

Written for bittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic adapted from a panel at the 2012 Chicon, the text of which is quoted at the beginning of this post.