#food in fiction
nothing will remind you that eating is good and okay like fantasy books will. “and that night in the valley they brought out the best plum cake and sweet cream, trout and turnips roasted over the fire, mead and goatsmilk and fresh cold water from the spring-“ and it’s like yeah dude you’re absolutely right. then sometimes it’s like “as he slept that night in the woods, he sorely missed the valley, where they brought out the best plum cake-“ and it’s like man that sucks i’ll have some seconds in his honor
Redwall is a series so steeped in a rigid and grotesque racial structure that’s it’s a little dizzying when you think about it as an adult and go ‘wait, actually, that’s seriously problematic thinking about it in hindsight: with fifty damn books in the series is Gingivere the only non-Woodlander character who doesn’t end up reverting to evil?’
But it’s hard to hate on it because god damn those OATCAKES, am I right?
Seriously though, there’s a one-to-one correlation between ‘the privations of the Depression and the Second World War’ and ‘an entire generation of post-war authors for whom quality food in satisfying quantities was consistently framed as a reward worthy in and of itself’ and I think modern fiction’s habit of not having that same level of focus withholds from modern works a largely unrecognized but vitally important aspect of their appeal.
in many of these post-war books there are what you might call ‘way stations of comfort’ within the text: things might get hard, things might get tragic, but amidst the hardness and suffering there are moment of reprieve (for both character and reader) signified by the sharing of a meal. Even in Mordor Sam tries to present Frodo with a proper dinner until the ring’s degradation essentially robs him of all appetite—and that loss of appetite is presented as a truly evil thing, not just because Frodo is deprived of nutrients, but because its loss is major severing of an opportunity for him to still experience goodness.
It matters that the White Witch enchants Edmund with Turkish Delight (a rarity in sugar-rationed England). It matters that the terrors of Old Man Willow are washed away with a warm meal at the House of Tom Bombadil. It matters that Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin’s friendship is forged over a dinner of ragoo’d mutton and wild boar’s face, courtesy Jack’s ignorance of Catalan. And I think it matters too that in five Ice and Fire books the only meal I remember offhand is the one where everyone got murdered. Yet eve-though I haven’t read a Redwall book in probably twenty years, off the top of my head I can still remember the hot root soup eating competition, “silver fish whose life we take, only for a meal to make,” the sparrow warrior who was won-over by candied nuts, and the endless importance of opening a rucksack on a long journey and discovering a very fine hard cheese or an oatcake still warm from the ovens, carefully added at the last moment by a loving paw as you stepped out your door. I hated mushrooms my entire childhood until I read the Lord of the Rings and Mrs. Maggot’s mushrooms sounded so heavenly that my life was forever changed.
People sometimes mock the preponderance of food in post-war works, and they miss—here as in so much else—its importance, what exactly it is there to do, and just how meaningful you know food to be when you’ve starved for years and lived in a world where you had to make two ounces of butter stretch for seven days.
