July 30, 2024
What if I told you that food is a secret weapon many of the most popular book series use? While it might sound strange, there are actually several reasons you might want to describe a meal in your novels.
Marketing:
One of the oddest things that The Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and Harry Potter have in common is the careful and descriptive use of food and drinks.
Including food in your novels not only potentially activates three of the senses for your readers (taste, smell, and sight), but it can also be a secret marketing tool!
If someone enjoys your story and a specific food mentioned stands out to them, they may end up trying to create that recipe in real life. Then, a person who follows the blog of that cook or baker may get curious of the source of the recipe, and pick up your book.
All three of the series I mentioned have recipes (official and unofficial). Even fantasy video games (such as Skyrim) can end up getting that treatment.
The important things often mentioned for written works are the taste, texture/mouth feel, smell, and appearance. How the characters feel about the meal can also make it more memorable.
World-building and Plotting
It is common for writers to place evil kingdoms somewhere unsettling; such as a volcano, a rocky wasteland, a frozen northern climate, or even somewhere with endless night. I understand that the writers want a place as scary as the people that live there, but what do those people eat?
If they are somewhere without an inch of growable soil in sight, where do they grow food? Is it all imported? If so, what do they have worth enough to export in exchange?
Even if you argued “they all eat meat,” that meat would have needed something to eat too.
For the plot, let’s say you have an evil king who wants to kill everyone and take over the land. If everyone is indeed killed, who will farm the lands? There is a good reason that the lives of medieval farmers was often left relatively unchanged after new rulers came into power; they had new rulers to pay taxes to, but their job was still to farm.
However, farmers can also be used as a target in warfare. Salting the earth can not only kill current crops, but also make the soil itself unusable. This could disrupt the supply chain to your enemy, and starve your enemy into surrender.
For all of these reasons and more, just thinking about something as simple as food can drastically alter both world-building and plot.
How to go Beyond Stereotypes
If after reading all that, you are inspired to try it for yourself, one thing to note is that your food will have to stand out in some way, even if just by name.
In fantasy stories in a setting inspired by the middle-ages, characters often all eat the same things. Peasants eat bread and cheese, and royals have massive chunks of meat, and pubs have stew and beer. Unless you add some sort of change to those foods (even just by highlighting or changing a specific ingredient), adding those to your novel will not make the food memorable.
Although the mentioned foods might be norm in fantasy, do not be afraid to get more creative. For example, medieval peasants often ate:
By making use of different combinations, there are a lot of different meals that can come out of those ingredients.
The rich in medieval times had more money as well as easier access to trade networks which provided ingredients from distant lands, so naturally whole recipe books were made. For the rich, you can focus on the food being part of the show. Birds might fly out of cut pies(they place the crust on after, to give the illusion that the birds were in the pie the whole time), food might be decorated to look the same as it did when it was alive, and the pastries and other foods might be carefully turned into works of art.
For one final tip: don’t feel like you have to be completely restricted to the historic timeline you were inspired by. Just because you were inspired by the setting does not mean you have to be caged in by the rules of it.
Resources:
I’m Briar Crawford, a wordsmith on a quest to weave tales that transport readers to fantastical realms. Through my blog, I share the insights and resources I gather along my writing journey, hoping to aid fellow scribes.
