On Writing Food in Fiction
I have a habit of writing a lot of eating and cooking scenes into my stories. This wasn’t something I realized on my own—my writing group pointed it out, and after that I started to see just how often I use food in my fiction.
There are a few different reasons for this, I think. One is that I came of age reading fantasy series like Wheel of Time, Lord of the Rings, and Redwall, all of which feature frequent, detailed descriptions of meals. There’s also the fact that I spent most of my twenties working in food service and in the spirit of “write what you know”, I end up writing a lot of characters who prepare food for a living.
But, most of all, I think food can be a very useful device for fiction writers in both literary and genre camps. One of the presenters at the In Your Write Mind conference last weekend was Tim Waggoner, who gave a talk on writing with an immersive point of view. One point he made was that the strongest senses—sight and hearing—aren’t the most effective for immersing a reader because they’re powerful enough people can use them from a distance, or even through a screen. To activate our weaker senses—scent, taste, and touch—we need to be right in that environment, and this makes the reader feel right there too when you call on these senses.
Food is an easy, economical way to infuse taste, smell, and tactile sensations like temperature or texture into a scene. I also find that food can be an excellent characterization tool at both the character and world level. The kind of food a person (or society) eats can show insights into their environment, history, beliefs, and worldview. That means it does double-duty, giving your characters and world more depth at the same time it helps to ground the reader. Anything that can do that kind of heavy lifting for a story is worth at least playing with, in my opinion. Here are some other thoughts and exercises for using food to its full power in your stories.
Tips for using food in fiction
1. Avoid static descriptions.
This gets back to what I said in the intro about food being a good immersion tool. You’ll be able to show more of those tactile and taste details if your characters are actively preparing, serving, eating, or otherwise engaging with the food—not just staring at the delicious feast laid out on their table. Don’t just say the pizza is cheesy—show the cheese stretching when your character goes to take a slice, and how they respond when it pulls some of the toppings off. Not only does movement and action give the scene more energy, but showing characters interacting with food opens up more ways to show insights into those characters through how they interact with it.
One place I very often use food in my stories is when I need characters to have a conversation and want to avoid it turning into a “talking heads” scene (e.g., they’re just sitting there doing nothing but talking). Setting those conversations over a meal can be a big help. It gives characters something to do with their hands, adds natural time-fillers when they pause to take a bite, and can be a ready source for memory, context, or metaphor when you want to add layers and depth to the scene.
2. Be selective with visual details.
I love a good banquet scene in a fantasy book—but I’ve definitely seen writers go overboard. If there are lengthy descriptions going into detail about every single dish, that’s going to drag the story to a halt no matter how well you write it.
Following the first tip can help with this; if you intersperse action into your description it keeps the reader pushing forward. Even so, you want to avoid long passages of visual description and instead focus on those immersive details: the smells, tastes, and tactile sensations. This especially goes for familiar food. You don’t need to tell your reader what a hamburger looks like—unless there’s something unusual about it, in which case that’s the detail to focus on. If you’re writing a completely made up or alien dish, or one that your typical reader wouldn’t be familiar with, then you get a bit more leeway for visual descriptions (although you’ll still get more immersion bang for your buck from smell, taste, and touch than from how the food looks).
3. Connect food to emotions and memory.
I personally love olives; my partner despises them. If we ordered a cheese pizza and a black olive pizza showed up instead, I’d see this as a happy accident; my partner would refuse to eat it. That particular food would elicit a specific emotion from each of us, one that gives a smidge of insight into our respective personalities—and, in a storytelling context, could potentially be a source of productive tension, or a gateway into a deeper conflict.
That’s one of the great things about food in general—most of us have opinions about what we like and what we don’t. Sometimes very strong opinions. You can use those as an easy window for fleshing out a character. For example, if someone will only eat ice cream in a cup because they hate things being messy and sticky, that tells you more about the character than just their opinion on ice cream.
In many cases, our tastes and emotions surrounding food are linked to memories. Maybe a character likes their cookies slightly burnt because that’s how their mom always made them when they were a kid. Or, on the other end, maybe a character had too many tequila shots on their 21st birthday and the smell of it still makes them gag. This can be a great way to sneak in some backstory or character-building without needing to do a full flashback or pull the reader out of the present.
A few food-focused prompts
Exercise 1: Comfort foods.
To start this exercise, think of a character. If you have a work in progress this can be a fun exercise to get to know its characters better, but any will do. This character just had a very bad day and all they need is their favorite comfort meal. Take a second to brainstorm what that is. Do they make it or order it? Why is it so comforting for them?
Now, set a timer for 10-15 minutes and freewrite a scene where the character is either making or eating said comfort food while thinking about their very bad day. Aim to work in lots of taste, smell, and touch details, and use actions and interactions with the food to keep the reader anchored in the present.
Exercise 2: We need to talk.
For this exercise, we’re going to need two characters. Two close characters: relatives, partners, best friends, something of that nature. These two characters are at a restaurant, and they’re about to have an unpleasant conversation.
Take a second to decide who your characters are, what type of restaurant they’re at, and what they’re going to talk about. Once you have those details ironed out, write the scene of their meal and conversation, focusing on using their interactions with the food to show their emotions, control the pace of the conversation, or give insight into their history or personalities.
Exercise 3: Typical fare.
In this exercise, we’re going to look at a different way to use food in your stories: as a device to explore your story world’s culture and history. To start, pick a story you currently have in progress or one you want to write, and think about its setting. What is one dish that would be considered traditional or typical for the region, and when would it normally be eaten? Is it an everyday dish or something they’d just have on special holidays? What’s the history or origin of that dish being connected to that holiday?
Once you’ve brainstormed some of these answers:
Set a timer for 10 minutes and write a brief scene of a character eating the dish as a child or teenager. Who else is there with them? What’s the emotional tenor of the meal?
Set the timer for 10 minutes again, but this time write a scene of that character eating the meal as an adult. What’s different this time than when they ate it as a child? Do they like the meal more or less than when they were a kid, and why?
Finally, set the timer for 10 minutes one more time, but from the perspective of a different character, who has a different background and life experience than the first—maybe they’re from a different socioeconomic class, or believe in a different religion, or are from a different generation. How do those changes shift how they engage with the dish? Do they prepare it the same way? Eat it in the same kind of setting?
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