from chocolatl to soylent green

[rm]

So I'm finishing up my SF/F end of the world piece and am thinking that next week's is going to be on food from the sublime to the horrifying. This is one of my less well thought-through ideas, but strikes me as hillarious. Anyone got any thoughts?

Comments

[phaenix-ash.livejournal.com]

i think it's brilliant and i can think of tons of examples and traditional myths (i.e. don't eat the fairy food!) but is it just an overview or...?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Just random books SF/F with memorable food stuff, all of which came to mind only because of my obsession with finding the perfect hot chocolate because of various fictional ones.

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

Pan galactic gargle blasters and Ol Janx Spirit!

...yes. I'm a dork.

What?

[schpahky.livejournal.com]

Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine of course. Not SF per se, but speaking of heightened reality.

[raaven.livejournal.com]

The incredibly detailed meals Steven Brust describes in his Dragaera books.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

There's a short story by Ursula Leguin, which I forget the title of but can look up when I get home if you decide you want to use it, about these colonists on another planet who have to take all these pills to be able to digest the local food. But the most recent generation of kids keep having terrible allergic reactions to the pills, and they can't eat anything and get sick all the time, and they're so weak everyone is afraid the population is going to die out. But in the end, the doctor finally figures out that the kids have adapted to the local food, and so can no longer eat the "earth" food and pills, and that's what was happening. And the whole thing is this big metaphor for food=home.

why oh why do i remember these things?

[phaenix-ash.livejournal.com]

all the stuff in HP (pumpkin pasties, cauldron cakes, butterbeer, pumpkin juice, etc etc), lembas in LOTR (i always thought it must taste like nilla wafers). lots of references to red fruit in fairy tales, nettle wine, dandelion wine (which while i'm sure they exist somewhere are still not the norm), references to salt in fairy tales, the fruit on the tree of knowledge, delirium's chocolate people filled with raspberry jelly in sandman "brief lives". you already know about all the chocolatl references in the golden compass et al. elf or fairy wine has tons of different references too, said to be revitalizing but if you drink it you'll pine away for it the rest of your life or be unable to leave faerie. spice in the dune series. cherry cordial and plum preserves in anne of green gables though that's not SF/F (i just always wondering what cherry cordial was like). eggs on horseback in heinlein's world and eggies in a basket in v for vendetta. :) the memorable hangover meal of pickled eggs and kippers in gaiman's neverwhere. the aliens eating rats and guinea pigs in V. puffballs and chokeberries in king's dark tower series (actually there are several memorable meals in those books, from feasts to surviving off the land and a character who eats raw frogs occasionally).

i think that's way more than enough but i know i could think up more if i tried. of course, i also second the gargle blasters.

this also reminded me of someone i used to know who would go out with people for a hemingway-dedicated movable feast where they would have each course at a different restaurant and go all over town trying different things.

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

Back to Courtship Rite, in which both the revered dead and the unfit get eaten, including various ceremonial funeral rites; and Gene Wolfe has cannibalism in some of his New Sun books. (Okay, meat is on my mind....)

Re: why oh why do i remember these things?

[fuyukodachi.livejournal.com]

Dandelion wine is sweet and light, much thinner than muscatel, but a little broadly similar in flavor profile.

I don't like sweet wines, so I was unimpressed. One of my lovers rather enjoyed it, however.

[fuyukodachi.livejournal.com]

Anubis carefully slicing and eating the dead girl's heart during the autopsy in American Gods particularly touched me. If you want to continue to talk about cannibalism, the scene in World's End of Sandman with the Necropolis people preparing the dead for sky buriel and eating without washing their hands as a sign of respect was also very nice.

[fuyukodachi.livejournal.com]

I hadn't even read your post when I made mine about eating the dead.

Clearly, this is the direction of this article!

[justpat.livejournal.com]

If you're limiting yourself to the books, remember that in Make Room, Make Room soylent is nothing more sinister than soy and lentils.

There's also the cow that wants to be eaten in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

[storyjen.livejournal.com]

Similar to the aforementioned LeGuin story, in Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, there's a story about a family that's gone to colonize Mars, where the father gets paranoid about the changes that the planet is working on him and his family, and resists eating food grown in Martian soil unti the Earth-food runs out and he has no choice. (As it happens, he's right, and over time he and his family grow dark and golden-eyed like the native Martians, but as the change happens they no longer mind.)

Do you want to count vampire stuff in here? Quite aside from some scenes in The Vampire Lestat of Lestat et al. apparently using humans as living chalices for "wine" (even poisoning said "wine" with absinthe in Interview with a Vampire), if you don't want to go Anne Rice, Octavia Butler has a recent vampire novel out, Fledgling, in which vampires and humans are portrayed in a symbiotic relationship - so, the blood is food, but there's a whole relationship component that comes into it (including quite a fun polyamory take, which I wish I had remembered in time for your romance article) that makes it much more interesting. Then, too, Octavia Butler also wrote the short story "Bloodchild," in which humans serve as host animals into which insectoid aliens implant their young (thus also serving as "food"), in which she also explores some relationship questions that are interesting.

Stranger in a Strange Land, and becoming Water Brothers?

This wanders into the realm of schlock, probably, but H. Beam Piper wrote a series about humans and an alien species called Furries, in which some standard human rations (called TK3? don't remember now) became an important food source to the Furries (who called it The Wonderful Food). Don't know a whole lot about that series, except it's way less psychological and way more pulpy than many of these examples - still, for what it's worth, there it is.

Have fun....

[cookie-cm.livejournal.com]

A little late with my comment, not sci-fi but, The Cook, the Theif, His Wife and Her Lover, is all I can conjure in the immediate moment.

Not familiar with Chocolatl, but am with Soylent Green. But associations and streams of thoughts take me to: chocolate, eating the social mass, moulds, making chocolate moulds of the social mass to feed to the living social mass. Silly, but that's where I went and then some.

[cookie-cm.livejournal.com]

...moulds of the dead for the living, that is.

Re: why oh why do i remember these things?

[storyjen.livejournal.com]

Bendan wine and klah (analogous to coffee) from Dragonriders of Pern. Spice from Dune? (Or are you saving that one for an essay on SF/F and drugs?) How about the silver apples that bring immortality/healing from C.S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew? (Hmm, or getting back to the people-AS-food theme, in Lewis's The Silver Chair, the Gentle Giants invite the protagonists to their Autumn Feast, primarily so the protagonists can serve as one of the main delicacies that's traditional for that feast, man-pies.)

Hmm, in the Thomas Covenant series there's a healing berry called aliantha - he's always eating that stuff.