Is Food a Storytelling Medium?
A short essay written for Story Futures at SUNY Purchase
Taste is an underexplored sense in conversations around storytelling. They typically focus most heavily on mediums that revolve around sight & sound, hence the magazine of the same name. Touch enters more rarely into the conversation through interactive media, and even Smell-O-Vision had its brief time in the spotlight. In her video “Edible Memories” Marije Vogelzang talks about the way olfactory senses unlock memory, and using food to create a stronger, more tangible connection between audiences and story. This raises questions about just how much potential food has as not just a storytelling device but a storytelling medium.
To start exploring this, it’s worth looking into the ways food has interacted with storytelling in the past. Of course, culinary habits are often a component of building characters. In the simplest form of this, a character’s eating preferences will often be reduced to one favorite food that can function as a familiar goal, like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their endless pursuit of more pizza. A character’s prowess at cooking can inform details about their identity, such as Bob Belcher’s deep passion for his craft on Bob’s Burgers. Gluttony is often used as a signifier of debaucherous hedonism. Dietary restrictions are used to convey self-flagellating asceticism.
Food can also be used as a powerful world-building tool. Some readers might find a lengthy feast description boring but they can contain implicit information about how a world functions with hidden details about everything from class differences, cultural and religious traditions, to supply chains. Even when it’s something the audience has never personally tasted, there is power in these descriptions. A contemporary reader of Little Women has probably never eaten pickled limes, but Amy’s obsession with these ‘sweet’ treats might conjure a familiar feeling of childhood nostalgia while highlighting the gulf between how people live then and now. This is even true of fictional foods. JK Rowling’s description of ‘butterbeer’ in the Harry Potter books is so powerful it has spawned countless attempts to concoct a real world recipe.
There are many more examples showing the power of food inside storytelling, but what about the value of food as storytelling? The desire to experience other cultures and ways of life through food can be seen everywhere. People have endless conversations about finding foreign food with what they call ‘authenticity’ usually meaning a fidelity of tradition untainted by the influence of our own culture. It might seem like somewhat silly behavior in pursuit of the best meal, but what they’re really attempting more often is a kind of culinary tourism. Eating peasant food from across the globe as a means of escapism perhaps not that different from reading a book. There are entire online communities devoted to scouring through historical recipes and trying to experience foods as our ancestors did. Historical recreations sometimes use food as a tool for building immersion, like packing rations similar to what soldiers would have been forced to survive on during the American Revolutionary War. Extending this idea into the realm of fiction, theme parks like Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge build entire menus around the idea of experiencing daily life in another universe. Some franchises like Game of Thrones publish their own cookbooks so fans can attempt these immersive experiences at home. Even just a simple food pairing can elevate an entertainment experience this way. Alamo Drafthouse theaters will sometimes hold “dinner party” events showing movie screenings with an inspired menu, so viewers can enjoy a movie like Goodfellas while being served pasta during the movie’s signature food scenes.
Returning to the original question, can food be considered a storytelling medium like a book or a radio serial? It still feels hard to say. A key component of virtually all these examples is external context. Food is frequently used to deepen storytelling and expand it outside the confines of traditional media, but it is difficult to think of a time when it ever really stands on its own as a story. In examining this question it is hard not to think about John Layman’s comic book Chew, about a detective named Tony Chu who has an ability he refers to as cibopathy. Chu can eat any object and immediately gain a sensory impression of its entire history, the meadows where a cow grazed, the cold metal of the slaughterhouse, the demeanor of the chef who prepared his burger. Obviously mankind is not on the verge of developing this superpower anytime soon, but the story raises interesting questions about just how much information there is in a bite of anything we eat. How much capacity do we have to perceive that information? Is recognizing it something we can train like a skill? Some people spend lifetimes doing exactly that, focusing on wine or whiskey until they can tell you with a sip where and how it was made. These are rare traits. However, they make it slightly harder to dismiss the storytelling potential of food. All food is telling some kind of story, but our own conscientiousness as eaters limits how well we can understand it.
