Fantasy food and its social factors

Today, I put some pork ribs into a citrus and garlic marinade. They'll be dinner in about 48 hours. That preparation time -- plus the price of ribs -- always gets me thinking about the social demand for food, and its resulting value.

If you grocery shop and cook with any regularity, I'm sure you can spot the most grievous errors seen in fantasy writing. Travellers stopping to whip up a quick stew (which is a long-simmered dish by definition). Medieval peasants going to the butcher to buy a big succulent roast (which is an everyday food only for rich and/or modern humans). Freelance warriors enjoying lots of meat and good liquor (without any mention of how they can afford the stuff). When fantasy uses an Earth-like scenario, there's no reason for these things to happen other than author ignorance. The factors involved are all fairly logical and easy to predict.

Animals products are usually relatively expensive. That's because animals take a lot of time and effort to raise and/or catch. Someone needs to kill the animal and drain the blood. And the hide doesn't remove itself, you know! Meat is nutrient-dense and delicious, but it doesn't exactly grow on trees.

Once the animal is dispatched and cut up, the value of the meat is also affected by the ease of cooking. Organs and tough cuts of meat were traditionally food for the poor, while the rich got the tenderloins and prime roasts. Foods like meatballs and braised shanks (read: slow-cooked animal ankles) were ways of making a small amount of stringy meat into something tasty, but they required time and technique. We pay for convenience. When you buy chicken in the modern grocery store, you might be able to get a whole unprepared bird for the price of two cleaned chicken breasts. This can be inverted when a restaurant buys cheap tough cuts, prepare them into something delicious, and charges for the luxury of not needing to prepare the food yourself. And with cuts like ribs, the difficulty of preparation and small quantity of meat is offset by the demand for ribs' flavour.

Plant products, on the other hand, are usually inexpensive in their native growing area. They grow freely and in quantity, they don't run away, and they sustain themselves on the light, dirt and water that just happen to be there. Humans' staple foods are almost always a grain or a starchy root because large amounts can be cultivated and stored. These staples are commonplace and cheap, but often still revered because they're so vital to daily life. Even in our modern world where importing is commonplace, shortages or rice or corn make people uneasy.

When a plant product is expensive, it's probably rare, perishable or difficult to produce. A good example would be saffron, the most expensive spice in the world. Saffron is actually the styles from the centres of crocus blooms, fragile threads that must be harvested by hand. It's not a product that can be cranked out in any large amount, and it requires a lot of work to harvest. Another extremely expensive seasoning, truffle fungi, only grow wild on the roots of certain trees and in certain soil conditions. Truffles have resisted human efforts to farm them, and their rarity makes them "the diamonds of the kitchen".

Availability is pretty easy to figure out. When you can easily gather/store as much food as you want, that food won't cost much. Apples are only harvested in autumn, but they're easy to store and they make great preserves, so apples and apple products are never particularly expensive in the places they're grown. Early Canadan and American settlers considered lobster to be peasant food because the ocean coasts were crawling with the things -- catches of lobster were even turned into the soil as cheap fertilizer. We still have holdovers like lobster sandwiches from the days when poor people made do with what was common. It took a few centuries of increasing rarity (and royalty pointing out that lobster are delicious) to make lobster the luxury meal it is today.

In summary, the value of food is determined by four things: how difficult it was to produce, whether it's available all the time, how much time goes into the preparation, and how much people want it. All of this should be considered when a writer decides what the characters are eating. If the fantasy setting is similar to medieval Earth, then there's plenty of food documentation to help out.

Personally, I love the thought of experimenting with food demand factors. It's easy to mention a spice or a meat that's imported and very valuable, but there are so many more ways to play with fantasy characters' eating habits. What if a blight strikes the major local crops? The hero might have a hard time finding the food s/he's used to, and might need to look for an alternative. What if a fantasy world has small animals as the producers in its food chain, and plants are rare? Maybe the peasantry would eat lots of rodent meat while the rich flaunt the fact that they're vegetarians. What if a common local vegetable is found to reduce the risk of a terrible disease? Farming conditions would suddenly be a major concern.

I'd love to see more fantasy stories where the local food production actually matters, instead of food supply being a vague issue that the main characters don't really need to care about. Maybe it's because fantasy loves its royalty and privileged characters, and those people can usually eat whatever they want. But putting a little thought into the local food can reveal a lot about a place, its ecology and its culture. A meal can tell an entire story of its own.