Guest post written by Interstellar MegaChef author Lavanya Lakshminarayan
Lavanya Lakshminarayan lives between Bangalore and Hyderabad, and grew up in the former. She is a Locus Award finalist and is the first science fiction writer to win the Times of India AutHer Award and the Valley of Words Award. Her work has also been longlisted for a BSFA Award. She spent ten years as a game designer, building worlds and crafting narratives for massive successes like FarmVille and Mafia Wars. She’s travelled across the world, but loves coming home to her two dogs and the legion of stray cats she cares for.
About Interstellar MegaChef: Looking for your one shot to rise to the “top of the pots” in the cutthroat world of interstellar cuisine? Look no further—you might have what it takes to be an Interstellar MegaChef!
When I started writing Interstellar MegaChef, a novel about culinary cultures in the future, I dove head-first into every food-related book and culinary reading experience I could get my hands on, from the food-science textbook Molecular Gastronomy by Hervé This to the modern classic, Chocolat by Joanne Harris. One of the reasons I chose to write a space opera about the many dimensions of food was that I hadn’t read any. And what I’d suspected all along became undeniable once I put my food-themed, rosé-tinted glasses on:
Feasts, good food and fantasy seem to go hand in hand. Feasts, good food and science fiction do not.
Most readers have a childhood recollection of encountering Turkish Delight in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis, and being every bit as intrigued by it as Edmund is in the novel. Pippin’s dismay at not having second breakfasts, the ales of Shire-wide fame at The Prancing Pony, feasts all the way from Bilbo’s birthday to Rohan, mushrooms, and lembas are memorable to everyone who’s encountered J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. And all the Asterix comics by Goscinny and Uderzo end with a banquet beneath the stars. Science fiction, in sad contrast, is usually good for a slurry laced with nutrient pills.
Where humans dare to tread, humans must eat, so there’s certainly food in science fiction. It simply doesn’t evoke the rich flavours and vivid nostalgia that fantasy food does. The vat-grown meat in William Gibson’s Neuromancer is a product of its world, but doesn’t exactly inspire hunger pangs. Klingon food is represented as inedible to humans in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I’ve never found myself wanting to acquire a Food Replicator to try the crew’s food, either. The Expanse features red kibble, and there are dystopian novels galore that offer you the choice between starvation and good ol’ nutrien’s—slurries, shakes, pills, and insects. The pickings are there, but they’re slim and unappetizing on the whole.
Aside from notable exceptions that I’ll get to later, most food in science fiction is a throwaway sentence, an all-encompassing afterthought that seems to get the chore of eating out the way amidst all the heavy-lifting of world-building, big(ger) ideas, and heroes’ journeys. Minimalism and efficiency seem to be the favoured approaches towards science fiction foods, regardless of tone, stakes, and settings across a slew of universes.
And this begs the question: why?
Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind Up Girl features massive food corporations fighting over food gene banks (presenting a scarily plausible bleak food future), but not every science fiction novel is dystopian, so why does food across the genre tend towards the depressing?
In his book Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer writes: “Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving, and identity.” A hallmark of science fiction is rich world-building, and much of the genre grapples with the very same ideas that Safran Foer makes synonymous with food. Science fiction covers an entire spectrum of human experiences, so why aren’t there more food traditions and culinary cultures that look beyond scarcity, embrace the whimsical, dissect the politics of food, and present it on a plate as a mouth-watering, irresistible exploration of identity?
When space opera protagonists find themselves in high stakes, saving the universe situations, why don’t they occasionally think to themselves (adapted to fire hazards in space, of course): “I wish I was at home in my nice hole by the fire, the kettle just beginning to sing,” as Bilbo Baggins does—not for the last time—in The Hobbit? And when things go wonderfully right, where is all the feasting?
Every fantasy reader has, at some point, been invited to a grand hall of mirth and merriment, to rest their weary heels in the calm before the storm, or to drink at revels in celebration of an epic victory. Beowulf features much boasting, bravado and battle in Heorot, a mead hall that is a symbol of Hrothgar’s power. In Homer’s The Odyssey, feasts are highly ritualistic displays of hospitality and wealth, the lotuses are as sinister as they are divine, and Penelope is beset on all sides by feasting suitors, struggling to keep peace in Ithaca while her husband, Odysseus, is lost at sea for the better part of twenty years. In more recent history, and with less heroic bravado of the toxic masculinity kind, a battle-weary orc named Viv opens a coffee shop in Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes, in a heartwarming tale of community.
Galleys on fictional spaceships are often where relationships grow, and much plotting and planning happens in their restricted confines, but while these spacecrafts come equipped with warp drives, often travelling faster than light, they’re woefully underdeveloped in terms of advances in their kitchen equipment and culinary offerings. On occasion, we get treated to Dr. Chef cooking bugs so well that they sound delicious in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. Sometimes, we encounter exotic off-world foods like the ethereal pastry-evoking food named “pakra” in Nophek Gloss by Essa Hansen. More often than not, we’re left with no appetite for lightyears at a time.
While foods across genres often reflect their worlds, foods in fantasy are both powerful and tantalizing. In Chocolat by Joanne Harris, pleasure takes the form of chocolate and faces off against the austerity of fasting at Lent, reflecting themes of conservatism, xenophobia and misogyny, peppered with a hint of magic. In Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivale uses food to mirror her protagonist’s true feelings, and the kitchen is presented as a safe space in the face of domestic repression. The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili (translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin) is a sprawling family saga that holds a magical family hot chocolate recipe at its heart.
With a lighter touch, Zen Cho lends personality to each of the gods in Black Water Sister through their favourite food offerings, solidly rooting the novel in Malaysia and lending oodles of texture and flavour to its setting. Nghi Vo describes home-cooked meals vividly, and it feels like readers are being invited in for dinner through the The Singing Hills Cycle. And every manga and anime I’ve ever read or watched leaves me hungry, going to bed with visions of ramen, oden, sushi, melon pan, onigiri and bento boxes dancing in my head.
I’ve never dreamt about functional, efficient laboratory-developed nutrient pills.
The fascinating, heartwarming, and evocative foods in fantasy are limitless—they leave a distinct impression on both world-building and character journeys, all while inspiring cravings and takeout dinners in readers. Food is used to reflect experiences, flesh out the culture of a world, spark yearning and nostalgia. Food becomes a bone of contention, forms the basis for othering, offers an escape into daydreams, is a source of respite or celebration on long and arduous journeys, and hides a saucerful of secrets. Food is symbolic—guest rights and pacts often bind revellers at a feast, a tradition that’s gloriously shattered at the Red Wedding in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Eating experiences span humble meals cooked around a campfire in the wilderness to joyous, hedonistic celebrations.
Science fiction foods skew utilitarian far too often, and as all these instances across fantasy demonstrate, mouth-watering food isn’t simply an indulgence; when used cleverly, it can be a powerful narrative device without sacrificing its flavour.
Food is also fundamental to human existence, and not from a place of biological need alone. The recipes of the gods find their way into some of our earliest stories—consider the significance of ambrosia in the Greek and Roman myths, or amrita in the Hindu pantheon. The proverbial forbidden fruit is a powerful symbol in Abrahamic religions. In Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Richard Wrangham argues that the technological innovation of fire, resulting in eating cooked food, was a pivotal factor in human evolution. Tom Standage postulates that farming shaped our notion of civilization in An Edible History of Humanity. In more recent history, the quest for spice triggered an age of human exploration, which eventually led to colonisation. Wars have been fought over salt, once one of the most precious commodities in the world, and the geopolitical history of this now-basic seasoning ingredient is well-documented in Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History. Canned food was developed to feed armies on the march; the Green Revolution helped ease poverty and famine in many parts of the world, including India, but introduced new deficits into crop gene pools; food lends itself to several of our present-day crises, from food poverty to generating an enormous carbon footprint. And in a nation like India, vegetarianism is often enforced through militant or vigilante acts of violence, reinforcing religious and political divides.
To explore the geopolitical history of humanity, with its technological innovations, transformations of civilization and all, is to explore the geopolitical history of food, and it seems reasonable to argue that this must hold true for the future, as well. Why doesn’t food—and not just functional or minimalist food, but delicious, glorious, whimsical, expressive, edible food—find its way more frequently into science fiction, a storytelling tradition that examines our many possible futures?
Consider the rich tea cultures in Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch Trilogy, Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot novellas, and Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe books. Leckie uses tea to symbolize the superiority of Radchian culture, as a status symbol that takes many forms across strictly observed Radchian customs. Chambers’ protagonist is a Tea Monk, who provides compassion and emotional support, accompanied by special brews for each of their customers. And de Bodard’s tea ceremonies create opportunities for conversation and debate between her characters, while also reflecting the wider world to which they belong, in which Confucian empires run the galaxy.
An old donut shop is a pivotal setting in The Light of Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, playing host to alien refugees, queer love, and delectable donuts. Sourdough by Robin Sloan features a whimsical sourdough starter and delves into cutting edge food tech in the Bay Area. The sentient cow in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams is both a brilliant thought experiment and an irreverent take on the ethics of food consumption.
In Andy Weir’s The Martian, growing the humble potato becomes pivotal to keeping Mark Watney alive while he’s stranded on Mars, but simultaneously parallels his tenacity when faced by overwhelming odds. Aliya Whiteley sets Skyward Inn in a watering hole by the same name—pubs and inns have always been associated with a sense of community and belonging, both of which are examined in the novel in parallel with themes of conquest and xenophobia (all while serving Jarrowbrew).
Food is an essential part of our journey; from our origins to the present-day, what we put on our plates has always represented who we are, where we come from, and who we aspire to be. I’d love to see the foods we imagine for the future take on fascinating new shapes and forms, reinvent our identities, call us back to our pasts, draw us into the unknown, and evoke the many faces of humanity, from the whimsical to the tyrannical. Instead of utilitarian, highly optimized, survival-driven deliverers of nutrition, I’d like to devour futures filled to bursting with flavour. I’m buying a round of Pan-galactic Gargle Blasters for anyone who’ll make it happen.
