#1 – Food in Fiction

When writing a novel, it is important for us, as authors, to know our characters well. We need to know much more about them than we directly reveal to our readers. With that background knowledge of them, their makeup, their likes and dislikes, we hope that our readers will deduce a lot about them from how we make them behave in the story we weave.

One of the questions an author might ask about their characters is what kind of food they like to eat or to cook. Perhaps they are a ‘Foodie,’ cooking up great culinary delights to please their family or guests who dine at their table. Perhaps they are too busy to cook but love to eat good food and dine out regularly, or perhaps they throw together some weird concoctions just to satisfy their hunger pangs, with no sense of pleasure in preparing or eating their sustenance. At one end of the spectrum, we might be writing about a poor damaged soul, with no happy memories of delightful family mealtimes, at the other, a well-adjusted, happy individual who spends much time, energy and money on producing and delighting in delicious food.

Photo courtesy of Gillian Wightman, Edinburgh

From anorexia to obesity, the relationship your character has with food can reveal a lot about them and their history. You may not choose to discuss it much in your novel or short story, but knowing what that relationship is can go a long way in helping you and your reader get to know your character.

Food plays such an important part in everyone’s life, whether happily or unhappily, that it is fundamental to knowing a person well.

With that in mind, I got to thinking more about the part that food has played in fiction over the years.

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According to The Good Food Guide:

“Children’s literature makes for rich pickings when it comes to culinary descriptions: there’s moment after juicy moment in Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or James and The Giant Peach. The description of Amy’s ‘pickled limes’ in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women – ‘plump and juicy’ in their ‘moist, brown-paper parcel’ with their ‘delicious perfume’ – pops out from the pages. Other mouth-watering moments can be found in John Masefield’s The Box of Delights, or Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, and the fabulous tea party in Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland. C.S.Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe couldn’t fail to prompt a fascination with Turkish delight, and the great feast which magically renews in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is another enduring image.”

The Good Food Guide rounds off with: “one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, from the book of the same name by Douglas Adams. The restaurant ‘is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which is enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe. In it, guests take their places at table and eat sumptuous meals whilst watching the whole of creation explode around them.’ Now that alone would merit a place in The Good Food Guide’s Top 50.”

You can probably think of many, many more books where food features in fiction: Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest; Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; Dickens, A Christmas Carol; Chocolat by Joanne Harris; Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen; Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, and an endless list where food is mentioned in passing or dwelt on enough to make your mouth water.

Please do get in touch through the comments, telling me about your favourite Food in Fiction. Perhaps it’s a passage in one of the ones I mention here. Perhaps something else altogether. Please, do share. Share the part of the book you have in mind and what it told you about the characters. I might even include your thoughts here in

#2 — Food in Fiction

Coming soon.

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By the way, the 2015 Good Food Guide is now available. Wonder if I’ll find more literary foodie treasures there in the coming year.

http://www.thegoodfoodguide.co.uk

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