forum Let us discuss...Food

Started April 08, 2018 by @doug

tune

Wordbuilding food is super fun

So, I created a food map for my story, which goes with the geography - it maps which crops are grown where. I've also developed the types of food that people in different places in the world eat. Lately I've been focusing on food culture, mealtime mannerisms and such. I don't really need help with my story's food. (it's actually become somewhat of a distraction for me, whenever I get bored of writing the actual story I just write about food.) I was just wondering how other people are incorporating food into their stories.

I've only worked on what each country's basic crops are, and what they tend to import. Haven't decided on creating actual meals yet, but that sounds like a lot of fun.

Ahh. You all seem so professional. I make it up as I go along…

Nahh I'm no professional. I just feel like I can't start writing until I've got a solid plan.

Oh I’m the opposite. I start and build it up as I go

I'm just obsessed with detail stuff - wish I could actually work on plot or character.

OMG yes! Food is such an important part of my story that I've spent an unhealthy amount of time on it, mapping out exactly what kinds of foods exist in the world and justifying it's existence based on location, climate, and culture (as well as another specific set of restrictions that I'm a bit too embarrassed about to get into here). Right now, I'm in the process of creating a recipe book of the most important dishes to each culture, as well as the favorite dishes of specific, important characters because food and the preparing of food are consistent motifs in the story.

For example, I have a character who is poor yet pragmatic. Before her mother died and she was kicked out onto the streets with her little brothers, she grabbed a small cooking cauldron to take with her, both for sentimental reasons (her father was a blacksmith and that was the first craft he ever made perfectly), and for practical reasons, too. She knew that as long as she had her cooking cauldron, she could turn a scant amount of ingredients into soups and stews that would last far longer than the ingredients themselves. Utilizing this knowledge, she came up with Hodgepodge Stew, a stew that is made from literally anything, but the staple ingredients are scraps of meat, vegetables, and most importantly of all, dough. The dough is rolled into balls and cooked with the rest of the ingredients to make dumplings, which along with the rest of the stew, makes for a very filling, caloric meal.

I have a recipe book too! I think it's really important to be consistent in the details like cuisine and food culture. One of the cultures in my story is obsessed with bread and they have a bunch of traditions around it - like the end of the bread is considered lucky, and if the dough does not rise it means the area is cursed. I'd love to actually make one of the dishes I came up with for my story, though I'm a rotten cook.

also, that soup sounds good.

That's incredible! I haven't even thought about my food lore to that extent, so thank you for opening me up to a whole other world of possibilites. Bread is also a staple in my world, and so is rice, so it would make sense for me to think a bit more deeply about why.

That reminds me, there's this cookbook app that I use for my recipes. It's called My Cookbook and it's super easy to use. There's a premium membership fee, but I found that the free version has everything that I need. It even has a shopping list feature that I use to keep track of all the different ingredients that are available in the my story's world.

That's really helpful, thanks!

Hodgepodge Stew is the greatest idea I've seen for characters who don't have much! To be honest, anyone with survival skills or who are in the military might use this (at least in a fantasy setting), and I feel like it might be one of those "hidden" things that middle and upper class folks don't know about, and anyone whose made it thinks it's either super common or "Oh man, I'm a genius!" which could lead to some interesting exchanges between characters.

I have cookbooks from all over the world sitting on my floor and I go through them tabbing recipes that would be in my universe.

Also eating utensils. I put more time into choosing those than creating my villain.

wow this is a super old thread… sorry i'm late to the party
in my world, safe food is a super hard thing to come by because most of it is irradiated. so in the beginning people would use this device to test if it was safe or not and if it wasn't it would be discarded. But, as time went on, people started starving to death and they had to hand out the irradiated food too (mostly to the poor though, the safe food went to the rich who could pay for it because even during the apocalypse, capitalism reigns). Because of this a lot of people would get mutations or even die just from eating food, so it's a very precious commodity