
Why Do Fantasy Novels Have So Much Food? - Thevet
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fantasy-books-food
======
Kuiper
As 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
I 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.

~~~
retsibsi
That's how I feel about visual descriptions in many books. I have a weak
visual imagination, so most of it goes straight through me without leaving an
impression. I wonder if non-visual sensory description is especially valuable
to people like me? I'm not particularly interested in food (or in fantasy for
that matter), but the snippets of description in Kuiper's comment helped me to
understand why those non-visual sensory elements can make a setting feel real.

~~~
rand_r
Stephen King’s “On Writing” has an illustration of the opposite approach to
this style: being judicious in description and still creating a rich
environment in the reader’s mind, with just enough of the important details.

It begins “Look - here’s a table covered with a red cloth.”
[https://www.google.ca/amp/s/mukundacharan.wordpress.com/2011...](https://www.google.ca/amp/s/mukundacharan.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/writing-
as-telepathy/amp/)

As someone like you who hates too much description, I’m comforted in the idea
that judicious description is a skill to be appreciated.

------
gascan
_Other 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?

~~~
Pfhreak
From my understanding, French kitchen gardens are called 'potager' gardens,
which stems from soup/food cooked in a pot. I suspect that a lot of historical
cooking was 'heat some liquids and what you have on hand in a pot'.

~~~
hinkley
It’s also a good way to get some sterilized water into your system.

------
notsofastbuddy
I'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.

~~~
bargl
Wheel of Time the best book is around a 7/10\. With some dropping as low as
3/10\. There are much better examples of more immersive Fantasy out there.
WoT, is a great example of a massive but mediocre series.

EDIT: The ratings are my opinion, but the downturn can be seen on goodreads
ratings and is discussed in the WoT community. While not all agree there was a
downturn, it being a point of contention in this series is an indicator there
was one for most people.

~~~
kbenson
As a completionist, the WoT series is one of only two that I've ever
_intentionally_ decided I did not want to finish. After six or seven books of
weird preteen level sexual politics and behavior, and stupid plot threads
because of if, I decided I'd had enough.

For reference, the other series was Twilight, and I made it all the way
through book three before I gave up in disgust at that waste of time. So maybe
that means WoT is roughly twice as good as Twilight in my eyes? I'm not
exactly sure that's high praise. Or praise at all...

~~~
vlehto
Wheel of Time is my go to example of bad fantasy literature. But there is
someone disagreeing in here. Maybe it's just sunk cost bias. But anyhow it
goes to show how tastes vary.

~~~
kbenson
To each their own. It's often brought up in discussions as people's favorite
fantasy series, or an example of a good series. I don't fault anyone for
thinking the former, but I think the latter requires a bit of justification if
not presented in purely subjective manner.

------
Gargoyle
Blog devoted to making meals from Game Of Thrones:
[http://www.innatthecrossroads.com/home/game-thrones-
recipes/...](http://www.innatthecrossroads.com/home/game-thrones-
recipes/recipes-by-meal/)

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/)

~~~
ereyes01
I tried making one of those Game of Thrones recipes, but Whole Foods told me
they don't carry aurochs shoulder anymore :-(

~~~
tempodox
Also, slug liver is really hard to come by.

------
atomical
Redwall 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
Just reading the headline I immediately thought of Brian Jacques. I devoured
(heh) those books as a kid.

~~~
Covzire
Same here, Redwall and scones in particular.

------
chiph
Tolkien 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
Tolkien had already been through one war and was writing LOTR during the
second. He was certainly familiar with rationing.

------
logfromblammo
I 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
> 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.

------
projectramo
Don'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
I 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.

------
Null-Set
It 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-
ficti...](http://www.slaphappylarry.com/food-children-literature-fiction/)

------
cafard
Only fantasy novels? To take an example close to hand, Flaubert's _Sentimental
Education_ describes a fair number of elaborate meals.

~~~
megaman22
It'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.

------
Freak_NL
This 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…

------
stcredzero
For the same reason that there's so much high school in Anime?

~~~
gascan
You mean the target market of fantasy novels is chefs?

~~~
stcredzero
No.

------
Jach
"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...

------
cyberferret
It 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!

~~~
dragonwriter
Hobbits 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.

------
bllguo
Noticed 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.

------
bigger_cheese
I'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.

------
danidiaz
A 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.

------
tempodox
Apart 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
In 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
The more likely explanation is that they are all organic, artisanally-prepared
food hipsters.

------
Terr_
> 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.

------
pwaivers
This 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
"because Tolkien did it" is very often an answer in the genre

------
sevensor
Depending 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.

------
wan23
I 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
In 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
The 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.

------
Animats
Try Korean dramas. When there's food, you get detailed close-ups of the food.

~~~
baud147258
From what I've seen, the last Final Fantasy game had a lot of food close-up.

------
snrji
Reading fantasy novels has always made me hungry. Not kidding.

------
bryanrasmussen
starving 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.

------
savanaly
I personally tend to skim sections on food as they are boring to me.

