Writing Every Day 20: Food

This one will be shorter than previous installments, because there's a whole lot of cooking to be done tonight. Before I jump away for a bit, I wanted to take a moment and talk about food, fiction, and RPGs.

Food occupies an interesting place in genre fiction. Pick up any Brian Jacques or George R.R. Martin book and you'll find passages dedicated to describing the elaborate meals in which the characters partake. Science Fiction and Cyberpunk talk about food as well, though they tend to use it to illustrate the bleak future of synthetic foods or disgusting ingredients that go into the food substitutes of the future.

Food is an effective touchstone. Everyone eats, so everyone has a sense of the experience of what these meals could be like. For the Game Master, food can give you another tool to manipulate the players and their experiences. While I don't advocate devoting a whole session to describing a single meal, I think the occasional reference to cuisine can go a long way.

Are your players exploring a foreign city for the first time? Dress it up with streetside vendors offering unusual local delicacies. You don't have to look far for inspiration* Are they returning home after a long campaign abroad? Then offering them some familiar comfort foods can help cement the fact that they're finally home.** If the game is a dystopian cyberpunk, having a session that takes them to a high-quality restaurant that uses real ingredients, rather than vat-grown meats and processed kelp bars, can illustrate the luxury of their surroundings.

Foods can also add authenticity to a location. Places with a strong coastal population often fish and gather sea life for their standard cuisine, while inland you'll see more red meats and crop vegetables or tubers. Religious food restrictions can also be interesting, from temporary ones like the prohibition on red meat during Lent to broader restrictions against pork in Jewish and Islamic traditions, or the avoidance of beef in parts of India.

You get the idea. Food is a simple but powerful way to manipulate the sensation the players have during the session. I'm not one of those "event" Game Masters who prepares appropriate meals for the current game—in general I've got too many things to worry about to go to that effort—but I've heard of others who've done so and had a great time.

Okay! That's it for now. Think about how you can use something as simple as a meal to give your players a more vibrant and authentic experience in the game. Until next time, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die.

Hey, maybe next time I'll talk about death in RPGs.

*This was the first Google result, and I'm in a hurry. I am not a fan for the way this author treats these local delicacies. Everything is weird to someone else.

** Feel free to take items from this list to sub them in for the previous one. As I said, everything is weird to somebody.