My new standalone novel A Murder Most Fungal releases in just over a week, and I’m so excited for readers to delve into the city of Neo Kinoko and The Fungalverse through the lens of food and a chef protagonist! But this is a topic that has consumed my mind for years, way before the initial idea for A Murder Most Fungal was even conceived, and it boils down to a single question: How has cuisine been incorporated into science fiction and fantasy stories? Of course, there are many examples of this being done well, and other examples where authors have clearly missed out on the incredible opportunities that food offers to their characters, settings, and plots. I myself have spent countless hours of my life thinking about why food is so fundamental to the human experience (and therefore the fictional stories that we write and tell and read). But what exactly makes food so important to us?
With that, dear chefs, I’ve planned out the recipe and gathered the ingredients, but I need your help to cook up this tale with me. So, join me in the kitchen as we don our literary aprons, sharpen our narrative knives, and prepare a fictional feast for the senses.
This essay is part of the A Murder Most Fungal virtual book tour. Check out the full tour here.
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I’ll be honest right from the get-go: I’m a big foodie, probably more than most people. I love cooking and eating and going to restaurants. I love spending time with friends and family around a table, with a fresh meal in front of us for everyone to share. My modus operandi when I arrive in a new place (whether on a trip or moving there for the first time) is to first explore the cuisine—a trick I learned from the late, great Anthony Bourdain.
Looking back at my life, it all tracks. In my teens, I cut my teeth and my knives on shows like Parts Unknown, Iron Chef, Hell’s Kitchen, Top Chef, Kitchen Nightmares, and so many others. I even found myself salivating over the delicious animated meals in Pixar’s film Ratatouille or the anime works of Studio Ghibli. (Never before had fried eggs and bacon looked as appetizing as they did in Howl’s Moving Castle!) These were all massive-yet-unconscious inspirations for me, both as someone who didn’t know what the hell he wanted to do after high school, and as a guy from a small Canadian town who (unbeknownst to him) was on the verge of a culinary awakening. It gave me a something to root myself to culinarily, especially when my family’s relationship with food lacked a particular identity or openness.
So, it was inevitable that I would end up toiling away in a restaurant, which I did while studying English Literature at university in Vancouver, Canada. That hands-on experience of working in various parts of a restaurant—from front-of-house to expediting to cooking in the kitchen—opened my eyes and my palate to the awe-inspiring power of food.
I spent the next few years devouring dishes from cultures around the world; Vancouver is an amazingly diverse melting pot, with a lot of immigrants opening restaurants there. From variations of Chinese and Japanese food to South Asian, Southeast Asian, Mexican, Caribbean, Eastern European, Italian, Greek, Middle Eastern, African, and more, I became so enamored with the exploratory possibilities of unknown flavors, new spices, and strange ingredients. It was a crash course education in what regional cuisines from around the world could offer, and it was a full-blown sensory overload that taught me how food could not only look and taste, but feel, smell, and sound.
Food can be a feast for every sense.
But beyond that, the “unknown” factor really spoke to me. Bourdain’s TV docuseries—specifically No Reservations and Parts Unknown—showed me how food can act as a window into the unknown. A culture unknown, a language unknown, a history unknown, a geography unknown, a people unknown.
So, there I was, a nineteen-year-old in Vancouver, envisioning a wider world through the countless plates I was wiping clean. And as I grew older, I began to travel more, living abroad in Germany and eventually Ecuador, all while visiting dozens of countries in between. But I also started connecting some dots, that what I was experiencing by traveling to new places in real life was similar to what I’d experienced growing up reading fantasy and science fiction. On one hand, there is a desire for escapism, and on the other this unparalleled sense of adventure. But in both cases, arriving in a new world and slowly uncovering hidden mysteries, it offers this magical mix of wonder and nerves.
For example, I realized that, yeah, of course, the hobbits I’d read about in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were unknown entities to me—as a people and culture and representation of hobbits present and past. And by reading more and delving deeper into Middle Earth, I was able to find more commonalities with this fictional race. Even though I’d never in my life had “second breakfast” or “elevenses” or “dinner” and then “supper,” I love food so much that I could understand why they would choose to eat seven meals a day. I began to comprehend what those concepts said about the importance of food within hobbit culture, and how food is a central pillar of what makes a hobbit a hobbit, and what makes one hobbit a part of a broader hobbit community.
I then applied this same line of thinking to numerous stories and series, like Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, where the woodland creatures of Redwall Abbey hosted elaborate feasts that brimmed with delectable depictions of soups and pies and cordials. Or George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books, in which descriptions of food and feasts filled up paragraphs and pages (and were often met with death). Or the cozy café fare of Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes, where the smells of freshly brewed coffee and freshly baked cinnamon rolls would leave my mouth watering.
Like an ingrained memory rooted in a smell or a flavor, these stories (and many others) lingered in my mind in large part because of the food. And just like with the people I’ve met and the places I’ve been to all across our own planet, food was a primary node through which these characters and the fictional worlds they inhabited became easier for me to understand and empathize with.
And so, when I started taking writing more seriously—fleshing out the fungal setting that eventually became The Fungalverse, Mushroom Blues, and now A Murder Most Fungal—food became an integral part of my worldbuilding process. All of these connections I’d made over the course of my adult life coalesced around these stories I was beginning to create, and this race of mushroom people that inhabited my fictional world. Because even mushroom people have to eat, right?
With that in mind, it forced me to tackle fundamental questions about food through the lens of story: Why is food so evocative, both on an experiential level and on a broader cultural, historical, and geographical level? What can food as a storytelling tool/system provide to characters, plots, and worlds? And how can food create a deeper sense of immersion for readers?
So, I’m going to break down those three questions, one by one.
First, the EXPERIENCE. I’ve touched on the ways in which food can open doors, but I believe there’s something more substantive there. Once you walk through the wardrobe and into the unknowns of Narnia, will the Turkish delight seduce you into blinding yourself to the reality of this unknown place, or will you deny it and dig deeper to find the truth? For if you choose the latter, a culture, its surrounding geography, and the history that shaped it can reveal itself to you, bite by bite.
Cuisine contains multitudes, and within that culinary chronicle, you can discover a wealth of information. A single dish can evoke geography through the ingredients themselves: a fish from the ocean, sea salt harvested from a coastline, boiled taro root grown in the tropical wetlands. Those three ingredients alone speak volumes, telling us that this culture is likely coastal or seafaring, that their proteins are primarily seafood and their starches tropical tubers. This can be applied to any ecology, and you can extrapolate from there. Are your race or people (or even creatures) a plains culture, or a mountainous one, or forest dwellers? Do they inhabit a semi-arid part of your world or somewhere more temperate? If we’re getting even more fantastical, do they live in the sky, or under an ocean?
On top of that, geography and the access a culture has available to them not only dictates what they eat, grow, and hunt, but their customs, their belief systems, their community and familial structures, and so much more. Food is a resource, and resources determine much of what shapes a culture. In the long view, all of these things can combine in world-altering ways, where cultures become societies, which become nations and in time empires, and those empires seek more than they have access to—thus they go abroad in search of resources to plunder and other peoples to conquer.
And that shaping of culture (locally, regionally, and beyond) takes place over time, with food being a mechanism through which the history of a community (and eventually a culture) is molded. Our languages and methods of storytelling developed around fires, and down the line at dinner tables. We congregated and developed a sense of family and community around shared meals. Celebrations and gatherings across millennia were commemorated with food, drink, and revelry. Countless wars were fought over territories and expansionist aims, built upon a desire for salt, water, spices, tea, and other food-related resources. And even many religious rituals involved sacrifices or offerings of flesh or food, often to satiate gods of harvest, agriculture, fertility, and survival—if a harvest failed, people starved.
For that is what food is at its most basic level: sustenance and survival. And as a result of that base function, it has informed language, community, mythology, art, religion, identity, and more, becoming more complex and all-encompassing in its influences over time.
But what’s more important is that this cultural stratigraphy is built upon moment after moment of lived experience—every person who contributes to their own identity as well as the collective identity (be it a family, village, community, town, city, state, nation, society, what have you). Every meal cooked and served is a further development of multi-tiered cultural identity, from the passing on of a recipe and the preparation of ingredients, to the taught and learned skills of how to achieve an intended end result, how to utilize certain cooking tools and utensils, or how family and friends interact with each other and a meal. Each subjective experience centered around food or cooking accumulates and solidifies into our conscious perception of who we believe we are, in relation to ourselves and others. Food is like a leavening agent, allowing the cakes of our identities to rise and take shape.
As a quick example, I’ll lay out a scene from my upcoming novel A Murder Most Fungal, where the main character, Pocho Jiro, is the head chef in a kitchen of fungal chefs. This kitchen environment is a condensed expression of the culture of these mushroom people, including how they communicate (brain-to-brain communication via an interconnected fungal network, as well as verbally), the strict hierarchy of the staff (and therefore the broader societal hierarchies), how respect (or disrespect) is conveyed through honorifics, gestures, and body language, as well as the religious and the spiritual connections these fungals have with each other, their gods, and the very food that they eat (with Pocho praying to a goddess of the seas for bestowing him with a fish that he will cut up and serve). It works in so many ways all at once, and I was able to weave together all of this density through the POV character’s immediate experiences and backstory. It says so much about Pocho, but also his employees and fungal culture at large.
Ultimately, these kinds of things are markers of who we are, both as experience-driven individuals and as members of communities. And these markers can be built up as well as broken down, on scales both small and large.
Speaking of building up and breaking down, let’s get to the STORY. Because, on a more technical/writing craft level, food offers fantasy and sci-fi writers a ton of incredible and valuable storytelling tools and opportunities (to cause trouble for their characters and their worlds muahahaha!!!). After all, food is a peak multisensory experience, evoking visceral emotions and reactions in the eater—and isn’t that what good stories are meant to do to readers?
Donald Maass, a veteran literary agent and fiction instructor, wrote an excellent book on this topic called The Emotional Craft of Fiction, where he explored the importance of balancing emotion and entertainment in stories (among other useful writing lessons). He writes:
“Some people may read fiction to be frightened, but they never read it to be brought down. They may wish to be challenged, but they don’t want to be crushed. They may read for amusement, but they still have heart.”
I believe that food perfectly encapsulates this emotion/entertainment equilibrium. More importantly, that this equilibrium can be accessed and manipulated through character, world, and plot for the purposes of emotionally manipulating your readers (sorry, not sorry), as well as providing them with an entertaining narrative.
What do I mean by this?
Let’s take character for example. A lot of human tension stems from interpersonal relationships—our interactions with other people and the drama around clashing personalities, love and romance, friendships forming and falling apart, dynamics at home or in public, the hierarchies of workplaces, politics, and so on. And how many of these connections often revolve around food, whether consciously or unconsciously? How many conversations between characters take place over a meal or a drink? How many romances bud at a candlelit dinner table? How many kings make grand speeches at an equally grand feast? How many families chat in their kitchens or dining rooms? (This is story gold! More inherent tension, more inherent drama!)
Now, take those relationships, figure out an ideal food-related scenario, and amplify it for emotional, dramatic, and entertainment effect for the benefit of your characters, in conjunction with the world and plot.
Pulling a moment from my novel Mushroom Blues as a test case for this, we have the main character, Detective Henrietta Hofmann, in a restaurant called Danban Diner with her fungal partner, Koji Nameko. Henrietta is mycophobic (she has an irrational aversion to and disgust of mushrooms), and so she finds the thought of eating mushrooms to be repulsive. But Koji has spent much of the story up to that point breaking down her prejudices against his people (and fungi in general), so he orders a bowl of rice and mushrooms for her. It’s a sort of “rip the band-ad off” kind of moment, and Henrietta is anxiety-ridden as a result. But there is a natural push-and-pull of emotion and entertainment going on, where many readers would directly understand (or at least empathize on an emotional level with) this person who’s grossed out by eating fungi. And it’s also entertaining in the sense that her exaggerated reactions are quite humorous, especially with Koji providing a combination of sarcasm and encouraging feedback.
The scene also reveals a lot about both Henrietta and Koji, as well as their developing dynamic with each other. Inklings of friendship start to bubble as Henrietta places a bit of trust in Koji. And Koji is able to establish himself more confidently in a partnership and workplace dominated by humans.
At the same time, even though the food that they’re eating and the setting that they’re in are not center stage (the two characters are), they act as tools for me (the author) to reveal even more to you through small details: the state of the city they’re in at that time, where fungals are dealing with food shortages and are scrounging to survive, therefore rice and mushrooms are the best options most mushroom people can get access to; the history of the world, where the owner and chef of this restaurant has lost limbs, reflecting the devastating war that had ended just two years prior; and the personal history of Koji, who opens up to Henrietta upon seeing a photo of himself and his father with the diner’s owner (amongst dozens of other photos).
So, in a single scene, I was able to use food as a catalyst to reveal more about the characters and the world, while also moving the plot forward via the character/relationship development of Henrietta and Koji (giving them a chance to reflect on their investigation while also building their rapport as a “buddy cop” duo).
That kind of tool in the writing toolbox is so useful, especially when authors are working with limited word counts and a need for scenes to efficiently and effectively multitask, moving the story forward in more than ways than one.
And for my money, food is one of the few cultural touchstones that is so widespread—such a common shared experience—that we can all more easily relate to a scene (regardless of how fantastical or science fictional it may be) that involves food. It’s something we all understand, and can therefore be more willing to engage with or believe.
Which brings us to, the IMMERSION!
This is the part where we as authors have a unique opportunity to truly enhance the experience for readers—and what better way to immerse them than by tapping into all of their senses? I’m a big advocate of incorporating broader sensory descriptions into stories. And look, I get it, books are a limited medium in that our primary presentation is words on a page—with that, we’re only able to engage one sense: sight. (Yes, touch is involved in turning pages, except you can’t actually feel the words themselves. If only!) But syntax, description, metaphor, simile, and more reveal the extraordinary power of prose to evoke far more than the physical limitations of the art form. Which is why I always seek to crank up the sensory experience in a given scene, highlighting smell and taste and touch as much as possible, such that sight and sound are not as dominating. It will never be an even playing field of senses every time (this is scene dependent stuff), but just being aware that effectively describing things in all their sensory forms can create more connective tissue between the reader and the fictional scenario they’re attempting to imagine in their minds.
After all, you’re trying to trigger reader immersion by engaging their memories and imaginations.
And that’s where food can really take things to the next level, because food is intrinsically immersive—it requires time, energy, and focus, it involves physically engaging your body and your mind, it stimulates you in various ways simultaneously. But food is also a potent mnemonic tool, with smells and tastes more easily able to conjure deep-held memories and nostalgia and points of reference than other senses. So why not take advantage of that, applying it to your stories to make your atmosphere, environment, milieu, and characters feel more alive and believable for the reader?
’Cause I’m not talking about writing a story about a chef or a restaurant or something that revolves entirely around food, like I did with A Murder Most Fungal. You can be very casual about the inclusion of food in your world, whether it’s background details in a scene taking place in a busy street or someone’s home, and then adding sensory information about food stalls or a homecooked meal. You can get weird with it, too. Show how different the food in your fantasy or sci-fi world might be, delivering quick descriptions of a meal or dish that is analogous to something we know from our own world, but the name has a strange twist to it, or the ingredients sound wildly exotic and alien yet the preparation is familiar.
I did this in A Murder Most Fungal, showing how animals in this part of my fictional world are also affected by mushrooms. You’ll find fungalfin tuna, or mold-speckled moths, or octopi with fruiting bodies growing from the tips of their tentacles. Because if pervasive fungi are a part of the environment and ecology that these fungal people inhabit, it would make sense that the local flora and fauna would also be affected, right?
These are the kinds of things that readers can come across in a story that provide small pieces to the larger, unique puzzle that is your world—the hope being that you’ve made it feel like a natural part of your world, such that it’s seamless and immersive as opposed to clunky and jarring.
Adding to that, you can use these food moments or off-handed mentions as a gateway opportunity. It’s kind of like the worldbuilding that you as an author don’t actually have to build, because you’re leaving a breadcrumb for a reader to infer a whole loaf out of; essentially, activating a reader’s imagination and allowing them to become an active participant in your world.
This is why things like cookbooks based on fictional properties exist, such as A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Game of Thrones Companion Cookbook or World of Warcraft: The Official Cookbook. Whether it’s Westeros or Azeroth or countless others, these are worlds that have captivated fans in myriad ways, but food is a fundamental part of their immersion and their ability to trick their minds into believing those worlds are real; it feels lived in because people farm, hunt, forage, and eat, even if it is fictional people eating fictional food.
Readers really care about this stuff, so writers should too. After all, once your book is in a reader’s hands and they open its pages, your world can begin to exist in their mind as much as it does in yours. And if your story is going to be rife with emotions and entertainment, why not make it tasty too?
So, think about what food means to you, to the culture and place you grew up in, to your family, your friends, and your community. Understand the role cuisine played in shaping you as a person, not just in terms of sustenance and keeping you alive, but the values and customs, the language and love, the senses and sensibilities that were imparted upon you through food. And on top of that, reflect upon the history imbued into the recipes and dishes that were served to you, or that you helped cook. Nothing can erase that—it is who are you and where you came from, through food.
Food is an unspoken language, but it speaks through our senses. Food does not tell us how it feels, and still, it conveys an abundance of emotion, memory, and knowledge. Food is a story, yet its chronicle is impermanent, written in full stomachs and even fuller hearts. Food is us, and we are food.
Now, go forth and feed your imaginations, feed your characters and your worlds, and allow readers to feast upon your narrative creations.
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