During a recent conversation along the lines of what people wanted to see more of in Epic Fantasy, one of the recurring themes was food.
This got me to questioning why? There were caveats, of course, largely to do with it being essential to the plot, rather than gratuitous food porn. Even so, it seems like an interesting desire to see something like that in there.
On reflection, it seems that although people reading and writing Epic Fantasy are doing so for the escapism and very fact that it is not the real world, there is a growing difficulty in maintaining suspension of disbelief. We now all live in a very switched on world. Our brains, even when we are fully immersed in a story, won’t be fully disengaged from the basic realism.
Your characters are on horseback? Those horses will need rest and water. They will not be able to gallop apace for 48 straight hours, no matter how exquisite the scenery.
Your characters are human or humanoid? Unless you’ve come up with a specific scenario that states otherwise, they need food.
Now, if you can work this in so that the food is not only functional, but also relevant to the plot, you have a greater chance of preserving that suspension of disbelief and allowing your readers to fully engage themselves in the world you are creating for them.
In Urban Fantasy it can be much easier, as restaurants and coffee shops are a more everyday way of life, and are likely to occur naturally in the story. Epic Fantasy may have the occasional tavern, but it seems the focus there is more on drinking mead (or whatever other drink you’ve thought up) and getting into a fight / casually encountering your mentor for the first time. The focus, therefore, is entirely different and may even seem out of place, should your hero instead choose to peruse the menu.
Despite the difficulties, I like the idea. I’m in the middle of pre-writing something that is more in the High/Epic Fantasy genre, so I’m looking for places where it naturally fits in. It could be an interesting experiment.
If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions (or even things that are definitely best avoided), then let me know!
C.K. Martin / Cas Martin 
One thought that occurs is that eating is a very sensual experience. Tastes and flavours can call to mind things that you haven’t thought about in years. So, food can provide an excuse to give a little detail about a character’s life.
Similarly, what and how someone eats can tell you a lot about them. Think of (the popular conception of) Henry VIII: a fat, smelly man taking a single bite out of a chicken leg and throwing the rest over his shoulder to his dogs. Contrast that to, say, scenes of half-starved peasants just outside the city gates subsisting on unleavened bread and shrivelled-up turnips and you’ve got all the explanation you need for a peasant revolt somewhere along the line.
What and how people eat also tells you about the kind of place they are in. Do people lean back and chat with their friends while they’re eating, with a pint of beer in hand, or do they hunch over and guard what they have? Do they eat alone, with their family (just their immediate family, or…?), with their comrades-in-arms, with the other citizens of their hamlet? Do they get the best of the food, or do they have to wait until everyone else has taken their pick of the best bits? What do they offer to strangers? And so on.
Food for thought, anyway (hurr hurr hurr).
Ba dum tish!
You’re right though, for something that has so much potential, it is very much overlooked as part of the world-building process. I’m definitely going to try to use it to show social interactions and connections, rather than sounding like I’m quoting a Martha Stewart recipe or something! 🙂
I think that often when people do write food in fantasy they seem to use it as an opportunity to invent a new food, rather than the way they use it in context. Of course, that can be half the fun. Thanks for giving me some good places to start!
I think the reason why it’s overlooked is in large part because of fundamental flaws in what fantasy writers often call ‘world building’. Every book I’ve ever read that was praised primarily for its world building has actually been very, very shallow: the writers seem to think that creating 80 fake religions and a sterile timelime stretching back 20,000 years is a worthwhile activity, when in my opinion they would be better off focusing on a handful of things and digging deep with them — like with the social aspect of food — and letting the wider setting stand largely by implication.
I blame Tolkien. Or, rather, I blame the fact that so many writers in the epic fantasy genre try to emulate Tolkien, forgetting that he was a professor of linguistics who was trying to craft an ‘English mythology’, and they’re… not.
(I hope this doesn’t come across as too confrontational or anything. This is just one of those issues that gets me worked up out of all proportion to its importance. And, of course, tastes differ, different people want different things out of their fiction, etc., etc. — there’s certainly plenty of room for that sort of ‘inch deep, mile wide’ world building in the market.)
Not too confrontational at all. I think you’re right, there have been a lot of writers who think epic simply means more, more, more. Instead, if you focus on a few key areas and really dive deep on them, I think the reader will then assume that your more casual references will have the same level of depth to them. This creates the impression of more world building, without having to play a numbers game. It also means there will be a certain richness to your story that you can’t get when essentially providing masses of surface rather than substance.
Setting Tolkien up as the model to emulate is probably the wrong thing, especially now that so much time has gone by, turning his originality into tropes. It would be like deciding to try to build a new car and copying Henry Ford. You’ll have the basics there, but it won’t be cutting edge, no matter how much you jazz up your character’s names to make them unpronounceable.
I’m certainly glad to be having this discussion now while I’m still in the pre-writing phase. Editing is my least favourite activity, so the more I can get right to begin with the better.