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Why Do Fantasy Novels Have So Much Food?
- atomical 9y agoRedwall was one of my favorite series. I saw Brian Jacques at a book signing. He had a very entertaining personality and was really excited to meet his young readers. I didn't realize other books had so much food.
- Infernal 9y agoJust reading the headline I immediately thought of Brian Jacques. I devoured (heh) those books as a kid.
- Covzire 9y agoSame here, Redwall and scones in particular.
- Nadya 9y agoI loved the Redwall series! My friends and I actually learned the Royal House of Riftgard script [0] to pass notes in class. To this day I can still read/write it as an "alternative" alphabet. [0] http://redwall.wikia.com/wiki/Royal_House_of_Riftgard_Script http://redwall.wikia.com/wiki/Royal_House_of_Riftgard_Script
- ycombinete 9y agoAll I've wanted, my whole life, was to taste Meadow Cream. I have no idea what it is, but I know it's delicious.
- Gargoyle 9y agoBlog devoted to making meals from Game Of Thrones: http://www.innatthecrossroads.com/home/game-thrones-recipes/recipes-by-meal/ http://www.innatthecrossroads.com/home/game-thrones-recipes/... Blog devoted to "revisiting rpg rations": http://cookingtheperiodway.blogspot.com/ http://cookingtheperiodway.blogspot.com/ Somewhat related, blog from the food stylist for the recent Hannibal and American God series: http://janicepoonart.blogspot.com/ http://janicepoonart.blogspot.com/
- savanaly 9y agoI personally tend to skim sections on food as they are boring to me.
- logfromblammo 9y agoI thought everyone knew to not eat the food in Faerie. Unless Mr. Valabar prepares it, of course. Eating food is something everyone does, and is an important cultural indicator in the real world. When your book is essentially a travelogue of the hero's journey, of course you're going to describe the food. For the rest of the age, tourists are going to just show up in Mordor and order a bowl of authentic Master Samwise's coney stew. And they'll visit Lonely Mountain to order lakemen's cram, whether the locals still eat it or not. It'd be like going to Mexico and never eating a taco.
- mathgeek 9y ago> It'd be like going to Mexico and never eating a taco. Just remember that there's only a very small subset of "tacos" that actually represent historic/traditional Mexican cuisine, and it gets even more controversial when you try to define what it means to be Mexican (does Tex Mex cuisine count?) -- it's really a fascinating history.
- notsofastbuddy 9y agoI'm making my way through Wheel of Time right now. There probably could've been two fewer books if the descriptions of food and female characters' breasts were edited down.
- abakker 9y agoIt's everybody's clothes in that series. Seemingly, the women change more often than men, but Rand has a different coat in every chapter! It slows things down, but adds some nice visual context.
- tdburn 9y agoHa ha seriously though after a few books in I started reading only the first line of each paragraph!! Way too much description of everything
- zokier 9y agoYou say way too much, I say the main attraction of the series.
- ehnto 9y agoI definitely find myself reading the same way occasionally. Usually it's when authors start listing things. Jules Verne's 20,000 leagues has a habit of listing types of fish, which would be fun if I had any idea what they looked like. Ready Player One had a moment where for two full pages it was a literal comma separated list of pop culture references. It was one of many such lists although not normally so long.
- bookofjoe 9y agoIn the sartorial vein, Philip K. Dick's hilarious descriptions of his character's zany outfits are themselves worthy of an essay. From "Ubik" (1969): "pinstriped clown-style pyjamas";"a sporty maroon wrapper, twinkle-toes turned-up shoes and a felt cap with a tassel"; "Square and puffy, like an overweight brick, wearing his usual mohair poncho, apricot-colored felt hat, argyle ski socks and carpet slippers"; "...his electric-yellow cummerbund, petal skirt, knee-hugging hose and military-style visored cap"; "He wore fuchsia pedal pushers, pink yak fur slippers, a snakeskin sleeveless blouse, and a ribbon in his waist-length dyed white hair"; "black oxfords, wool socks, knickers, cotton shirt, camel's-hair sports coat and golf cap"; "a pinstriped, blue-black, double-breasted suit, suspenders, wide floral necktie and white shirt with celluloid collar."
- cafard 9y agoOnly fantasy novels? To take an example close to hand, Flaubert's Sentimental Education describes a fair number of elaborate meals.
- megaman22 9y agoIt's big in historical fiction, as well. Patrick O'Brian goes on at length about burgoos and wine, and soused hog face, and suet pudding, not to mention the infamous toasted cheese that Killick is always whipping up in it's special sterling silver chafing dish.
- sevensor 9y agoDepending on where you draw the lines, this is perhaps slightly outside the genre, but not a mention of Alice in Wonderland? Also, SF often uses food and drink for atmosphere, from the replicators in Star Trek, to the yeast-derived meals in The Expanse, to diner food on Gibson's Bridge.
- stcredzero 9y agoFor the same reason that there's so much high school in Anime?
- gascan 9y agoYou mean the target market of fantasy novels is chefs?
- stcredzero 9y agoNo.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoBecause...fantasy readers enjoy food? Who doesn't? Am I missing something subtle here, or are you actually going "HURR DURR FANTASY FANS ARE FAT"?
- stcredzero 9y agoAm I missing something subtle here Yes. or are you actually going "HURR DURR FANTASY FANS ARE FAT"? No.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoThat's good, then. Would you care to enlighten us, or are you just going to be smug and inscrutable?
- herpes 9y agoThat poster might be saying it’s a life experience that most people can relate to. I suspect most of anime’s audience has attended high school.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoMaybe. A lot of high school anime is marketed directly at teenagers, though. If their intention was to say "it's something everyone understands" rather than "it's something relevant to the target market specifically," they picked a bad example.
- bryanrasmussen 9y agostarving artists picture what they most desire might explain some of it. But probably it is just a naive attempt at world building, and doing what others before one has done.
- pwaivers 9y agoThis didn't really answer the question though. The only two reason's given were LOTR and Redwall, and it was not expanded on much. I was hoping for a more concrete answer.
- kevinmchugh 9y ago"because Tolkien did it" is very often an answer in the genre
- Null-Set 9y agoIt has been argued it stems from a tradition of using food as an allegory for sex in fairy tales. http://www.slaphappylarry.com/food-children-literature-fiction/ http://www.slaphappylarry.com/food-children-literature-ficti...
- projectramo 9y agoDon't forget the Dragonlance cookbook. Brandon Sanderson pointed out that showing meals is a great way to demonstrate worldbuilding and culture at the same time in a scene.
- Chardok 9y agoI never thought of that but yeah George RR Martin definitely uses it to portray the culture of the kingdom: from the spicy pepper-infused Dornish cuisine to the "bowl o' brown" from the flea bottom of kings landing, it really is a fantastic plot device to convey a great deal of information so concisely. As a consequence I can't read his books while even a little bit hungry.
- Kuiper 9y agoAs a fantasy author, I am constantly looking for ways to provide description that engages all five senses. In most fiction, the vast majority of description is focused on what characters see, but if you really want to place the reader in a setting, it needs to feel tactile. When a character walks into a boggy marsh, I don't just want to describe the tepid pools of water; I want to describe the pungent stench of rotting wood, and the texture of the soggy ground underfoot. It's one thing for a character to remark on how hot and humid it is; it's another to describe the feeling of the wet, vaporous air as beads of water are condensing on your skin and coalescing with your sweat. Food is great at engaging all five senses. Not only is it one of the few places where you get to talk about taste, but food gives off aromas. Eating food is a tactile experience: you can feel the stickiness of a sweet jelly as you lick it off your fingers. Food has a texture that you can feel on your tongue, and it feels different in your mouth depending on whether you allow it to slowly slide down your throat or stuff your cheeks with it. And kitchens are full of sounds that add richness to the setting: you can hear the crackling of a fire, the sizzle of a piece of meat dropped onto an iron cooking surface, the delightful shing of a carving knife being sharpened. You hear things at the dinner table, too: the delightful crunch of biting into a cracker, or the clattering of cutlery on plates. A baked pastry will make different sounds when you bite into it depending on whether it crust is hard or thin and flaky. Fantasy is often viewed as one of the most immersive genres, largely because it spends so much time on providing detailed description that not only tells you what is happening in the world, but giving you a sense of what it feels like to live in that world. This often means that fantasy novels are longer and slower paced, but one of the reasons that many people enjoy large fantasy tomes is that they enjoy the feeling of being transported and immersed in another world.
- ericsoderstrom 9y agoI usually end up skimming/skipping lengthy food descriptions in fantasy books. They don't add much to character or plot development. I like the idea of 'engaging all five senses' but think there should be more intentionality in it than just engaging senses for the sake of engaging senses, which is often what food descriptions seem like.
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- bllguo 9y agoNoticed this as well. I've learned to identify pretty quickly whether a section is merely descriptive. Being able to skim is a pretty valuable skill imo. That's not to say that such detail isn't valuable, of course. But, at least for me, there's a time and place for it. The first time I read LOTR I skimmed past the food and the songs, as I cared more about the plot, but I did otherwise on subsequent readings.
- gascan 9y agoOther characters only get stew, which is oddly omnipresent. In her satirical travel guide to fantasy literature, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Jones jokes that stew "is the staple food in Fantasyland, so be warned..." I'm a novice cook, but if you've got a hodgepodge of foraged ingredients, some kind of stew is definitely what I'd be making. Hard to imagine an intrepid adventurer having the time or equipment to cook much else. I mean really, when was the last time you cooked a perfect omelette or steak over a campfire on the lam?
- logfromblammo 9y agoSteaks can be cooked on a stick. Omelettes can be cooked in a can. The last time I ate campfire-cooked pizza was over 20 years ago, but it was still a pizza. The most annoying part was carrying the oven over the portages. It folded up, like Skidbladnir for cooks.
- chrisseaton 9y agoThis is about foraged ingredients though. How do you forage flour to make a pizza dough?
- hyperpallium 9y agoA lightweight bushwalking oven would be great. Fresh bread.
- flukus 9y agoThere are plenty of options, from a dutch oven (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_oven https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_oven) to a light weight pot or even some al-foil. Damper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damper_(food) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damper_(food)) is an Australian tradition that can be cooked on nothing but campfire ashes.
- hyperpallium 9y agoDutch ovens are necessarily really heavy aren't they? To spread the heat uniformly. Though there's a "camping" one at that wiki link, I wouldn't fancy backpacking it. The aluminium one they mention would be lighter, but still not very light (for same reason). I'm not sure about alum foil, but sounds worth a try. the melting point is high enough, but so thin... There's a (NZ) maori tradition of roasting by wrapping meat/veg in leaves (foil would do), then burying in coal and heated stones. Might work for bread, too? If the idea of an oven is uniform heat (idk, is it? IANAC), that buried in coals & stones seems pretty good, with foil to keep ash out. If hot air is part of an oven (again, idk), maybe a little space at the top could constructed too. When I've attempted damper, I've lost a lot, in the form of charred skin. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.
- cyberferret 9y agoIt translates to the big screen too. I remember being highly distracted during the first LOTR movie, when the adventurers pile in and raid Bilbo's pantry for an on the spot feast - I was thinking "How come a tiny, friendless Hobbit who lives a typical bachelor lifestyle would have such vast quantities of perishable food in his pantry? Enough to feed a horde of hungry humans like that?". I look back to my own bachelor life in the past, and I barely had a sandwich in my fridge!
- walshemj 9y agoHobbits like food :-) and Bilbo is described as a Gourmand in LOTR
- SubiculumCode 9y agoApparently you have not met a Hobbit.
- dragonwriter 9y agoHobbits are explicitly noted for being particularly fond of and interested in food, and Bilbo is a wealthy bachelor with, even for a Hobbit, an unusual interest in food. Being surprised that he has an inordinate quantity of food is like being surprised a wealthy single geek has an unusual quantity of computing equipment.
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- Jach 9y ago"What do they eat?"[0] is an obnoxious and repetitive question certain readers will ask when engaging a fictional world... but even when you don't consciously ask it, your brain will likely notice the answer's presence / absence while it determines the level of immersion you feel. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvwlt4FqmS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvwlt4FqmS0 explores this in the context of video games...
- chiph 9y agoTolkien wrote LOTR in the late 1930's, right after the Great Depression. I would guess that the UK weathered it better than places like the US dustbowl states, but it really made an impression on people. My grandparents would have a pantry full of canned food, yet claim they didn't have anything in the house to eat. And my mother who went through wartime rationing in the UK (she picked up coal that fell off the trains to heat their house), has similar behavior. So I'm not surprised if some of the older fantasy authors include lavish descriptions of food in their novels, as that would be an ideal for them.
- kevinmchugh 9y agoTolkien had already been through one war and was writing LOTR during the second. He was certainly familiar with rationing.
- bigger_cheese 9y agoI'm not sure if Neil Gaiman counts as a Fantasy author but In American Gods this is kind of referenced in a tongue and cheek way where it's insisted upon that they must share a drink of Mead before setting out on their journey 'because mead is traditional for this sort of thing'. Though that also harkens back to mythology which is a large part of the novel.
- Terr_ 9y ago> Jacques said that his book’s fictional meals stemmed from childhood food fantasies during the years of British rationing. He also wrote books (i.e. Redwall) with blind children in mind, which might explain some of the emphasis on the taste and texture of the food.
- Animats 9y agoTry Korean dramas. When there's food, you get detailed close-ups of the food.
- baud147258 9y agoFrom what I've seen, the last Final Fantasy game had a lot of food close-up.
- danidiaz 9y agoA science-fiction novel in which food is central to the plot is "Alastor: Wyst" by Jack Vance. The characters are bored by the tasteless food they usually have to eat ("Some gruff and deedle, with some wobbly to fill the cracks!") and go on expeditions ("bonterfests") in search for tasty, natural morsels.
- Freak_NL 9y agoThis goes back all the way to Homer's Odyssey. Half of that work is Odysseus or Telemachus and whomever they've met eating copious amounts of meat and bread, and drinking quite a lot of wine. Yet not a vegetable to be found anywhere…
- tempodox 9y agoApart from the Reptilian aliens, who actually eat little mice for celebration, people in Star Trek hardly ever touch their delicious food. Which frustrates me no end, but it does give the impression those people must be affluent beyond imagination, systematically ignoring food like they do.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoIn TNG/DS9/VOY it's both true and false at the same time. True, they're affluent in the sense of living in a post-scarcity economy with matter replicator technology; however the food they eat while in space, despite good looks, generally tastes like crap - as the characters frequently mention. Apparently 24th-century replicators are still not advanced enough to create something tasty, so they try to eat food from grown ingredients whenever they can.
- vkou 9y agoThe more likely explanation is that they are all organic, artisanally-prepared food hipsters.
- snrji 9y agoReading fantasy novels has always made me hungry. Not kidding.
- wan23 9y agoI was really surprised to see the butter pies from A Tale of Time City as the first example here. I don't know anyone else besides my mom who has read that one, but I distinctly remember being envious of the children from the future who had such tasty snacks.
- ezoe 9y agoIn Japan, we have a "Potato Police" who blame the typical medieval fantasy novels which features the potato. For the potato didn't exist in medieval period.
- bluGill 9y agoThe potato was first cultivated before 5000bc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato It wasn't in midevil Europe, but most fantasy is a whole new world so there is no reason to say potato shouldn't be in any novel.