imaginary food

[truepenny]

Talk to me about food in fantasy. (And science fiction, if you like.)

Readers, what kinds of details do you like to see? What makes a culture's eating habits come alive for you?

Writers (oh, please, writers, you're my only hope), how do you go about inventing cuisines and delicacies and what the street vendors sell? Especially when you are not relying on the old trick of, "I'll make this culture !Japan or !India or !France." How do you figure out what people eat?

Comments

Re: nonsense, sweet is very common

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

It's two weeks here.

And fer crying out loud, I'm not saying and have never said that sweets didn't exist. But by modern standards, they are a small percentage of the diet--and by western standards, a good deal of the world still does not eat sweet.

(A friend of mine, of Scottish and Indian descent, talks about how when she got back to Scotland after trips to visit her father's family, she would eat white bread for dessert because she'd become so unaccustomed to sweets that it tasted like cake. She's in her mid sixties, so this would have been, oh, fifty years ago?)

Hell, I'm old enough to remember when sweets were much less of a part of the American diet, and I'm not quite forty. So saying that sweets are very common by today's standards is really not accurate.