Food is an integral part of life. Without it, an animal – including a human animal – dies.
For most ambulatory creatures, this is a pretty simple thing to deal with: an animal either gets the nutrients it needs out of the readily available sources in its local environment, or it dies. Maybe, over the course of thousands or millions of years, it evolves to live off more available sources of nutrients, or ones further afield. Species diverge, and mutate, and develop into regionally specific offshoots which allow it to range through more varied habitats, and so on.
Human society, however, operates on a vastly more compressed timescale than biological evolution. We don’t have to wait a hundred generations to mutate the necessary ability to digest a certain type of fruit or process a certain animal in a way which makes it edible. Instead, we develop the tools and the facilities to do so artificially, whether that means cooking meat over a fire, or selectively breeding animals in a way which gives them more meat to begin with, or altering genomes to make fruiting trees and grain crops hardier, more nutritious, and safer to cultivate. This means that human diets exist atop a vast structure of interlocking factors – and that if you plan on creating a culinary tradition for your fictional society, you need to keep a similar interlocking structure in mind when you shape that fictional menu.
The foundation of this structure is, as it is in many facets of human society, made up of two intertwined factors: geography and biology. To put it more bluntly, it’s about what you can find to eat, and what you need to eat to survive.
Temperature, soil quality, precipitation; all of these things determine what kind of plants and animals can grow in a certain environment – which in turn determines what sources of nutrients are available for the people who live in that environment. In societies which lack the ability to import food en-masse or fundamentally alter these conditions, this geographical factor creates hard limits to population size and density, often referred to as “carrying capacity”. This is why some parts of our world are more heavily populated than others, often by factors of hundreds. River deltas with watersheds rich with nutrients from decomposing plant matter and regular rains and temperate or warm climates allow the cultivation of immense quantities of crops, which in turn allow for the raising and harvesting of large numbers of food animals. The river deltas of the Nile, Pearl, and Ganges are all brilliant examples of this. Likewise, a vast expanse of “marginal” land may only be able to support herds of food animals if they are able to range wide distances to seek out new sources of food. There’s a reason why Mongolia is so sparsely populated, despite its immense size.
As you may have noticed, these conditions don’t just control the density and size of a population, but also its lifestyle. The farmers of the Nile and the Pearl and the Ganges are farmers because their geographical conditions make farming the easiest way of getting the nutrients they need to survive. The Mongolian Steppes, being far less suited for agriculture, demand that its inhabitants be pastoralists, raising and shepherding large flocks of food animals, and then moving with those flocks when new sources of food are needed. Land suited for dense agriculture creates densely-populated agricultural societies, anchored by cities, fortresses, wealthy kingdoms fighting over relatively small parcels of land. Land only suited for pastoralism creates sparsely populated nomadic cultures, constantly fighting over grazing right.
But this also plays another role, namely in the nutrients which are needed in the first place. Agrarian societies tend to have diets which involve more carbohydrates and less meat than pastoral ones. Part of this is simply because carbs are more available when you can simply farm field upon field of them, but a lot of it also has to do with the kind of work needed to produce that diet in the first place. I’m not a dietary historian, but I suspect that’s because subsistence farming involves a lot of hard work, but it also involves a lot of waiting. Likewise, keeping a flock of sheep in line means a lot of running around or riding on horseback on a constant level – and that’s not even getting into the business of scouting for predators and rival groups, and so on. It’s the sort of thing that needs a lot of muscle – and a lot of meat.
The result is a sort of self-reinforcing cycle. A society develops a lifestyle which both conforms to the available sources of food, but also creates a diet best suited for the work necessary to secure that food. This, I think, is the basis of “local” culinary traditions: the harnessing of the local environment in a way which allows for the maximum efficient use of what’s available to create the kind of capability needed to make that local environment’s food sources even more available. If your local area is only suited to raise sheep, you eat sheep (and whatever you can scavenge from the local flora). If your local area is best suited to grow rice, you eat rice. The same with lentils, wheat, barley, and corn.
This creates the foundation of a culinary tradition, something to build on.
So let’s build on it with a few additional factors: class, safety, and technology.
Almost every society with a material surplus has a class structure. If everyone has the bare minimum needed for biological survival, there will be those who have more than that – and will find means to ensure that they define themselves in a way which justifies their privilege. One of the ways which both justification and privilege manifests is a ‘class signifier’, the sort of thing which demonstrates that someone is a member of a privileged class. This signifier is something which marks the members of the privileged class as different in a way which the rest of society might find hard to achieve or acquire. In our own societies, certain colours of clothing or materials were restricted to certain social classes or individuals. Ermine for the Kings of Europe, Yellow for the Emperors of China. For a more informal example, beauty standards in western societies used to demand pale skin and high body fat when food was scarce and most people worked outside. Now, high-calorie food is plentiful, and most people work at desks or counters – which means that the beauty standard is the thinness and tanned skin which comes from the free time and resources needed to maintain them.
It ought to go without saying by this point that the food which gets eaten is just as similarly an important class signifier along the same principles. For example, meat was once a class signifier in most agrarian societies, because food animals tend to be a pretty inefficient source of nutrients. Even more efficient animals like chickens or pigs still need an immense amount of cereal grains to produce meat. Animals like cows are even more inefficient. As a result, you can kind of see a hierarchy of meats: sheep and pigs and chickens at the bottom, then cows, and then the truly exotic meats – ones which either have to be imported from elsewhere altogether, or require immense resources to hunt regularly, like deer. The amount of meat – especially red meat – which we eat as common people in our own fundamentally agrarian societies today is basically an anomaly which only begins with the agricultural revolution, and the creation of food surpluses so massive that we can expend immense quantities of otherwise edible plant matter as animal feed.
But any surplus, no matter how large, can be stored or processed improperly – and any food, even if it is stored or processed properly will inevitably spoil. This leads to the second factor at play: safety. Food which is prepared improperly is unsafe. Food which is left to spoil is also unsafe. It probably can be eaten, but doing so will just as likely kill you, which is naturally something people want to avoid. However, when it comes to most pre-industrial societies, even their most reliable sources of nutrition will be seasonal or otherwise intermittent: crops don’t grow in winter, you probably can’t kill a fresh sheep every time someone’s hungry, and fishing rivers freeze over when it gets cold.
There are ways around this, of course. The first is the creation of certain traditions which tell you which foods are unsafe and when. A lot of religious dietary restrictions come from this. The laws about not eating certain foods, or only eating certain foods at certain times, or preparing food a certain way often come from a desire to avoid eating spoiled food, food which has been improperly cleaned (and is thus dangerous), food which is difficult to prepare safely, or food which is inherently dangerous (most cultures have taboos against cannibalism because eating another human’s brain stem will cause horrible neurological diseases).
The second is to simply find ways to store food so that it lasts for longer. The method once again depends on geography. In cold climates, food is frozen naturally, or preserved in cellars. In hotter ones, or ones where permanent storage is less practical, they use salt to cure meat or the sun to dry it. A lot of the culinary traditions of our world involve people using the side-effects of their means of preservation – the texture of dried meat, the tang of pickled vegetables, the sweetness of jam preserves – to create new flavour profiles. After all, if preserving a food is going to make it taste different, you might as well use that to your advantage.
Societies will often alter their cultural rhythms to ensure that the food that can’t be preserved will not go to waste. The world is full of harvest festivals which primarily have this purpose. Celebrations are shaped by the availability of food as much as by any other factor, which is something to keep in mind when you’re thinking up new holidays and festivals for your society.
Lastly, we have technology, which can change which foods are available, which foods are the easiest source of nutrients, and make things that were not particularly good sources of food into useful ones.
Even the very foundational assumptions I started with are shaped by technology. Humans, biologically speaking, are omnivorous hunter-gatherers. We are supposed to live in small groups, ranging across vast territories, eating whatever fruits we can scavenge and animals we can kill: a diet of raw meat and wild berries. However, fire and agriculture change all of that. With fire, meat can be processed in a way (roasting) which makes it a far more efficient food source. With the development of agriculture – even without tools – humans are able to grow a reliable source of food, with such efficiency that larger and larger groups can live permanently on a given piece of land. From there develop complex tools, divisions of labour, permanent settlements, all that follows. Even “primitive” humanity is shaped by the technology which allows them to process and obtain food.
Of course, we’re not just talking about hand-mills and flint-knapping here. More complex technologies lead to even more sweeping changes to the fundamentals of a culture’s diet. Consider our modern world, where I (living on the west coast of North America) can economically subsist on lamb from New Zealand, avocados from Mexico, and Ukrainian black bread. For someone who lived two hundred years ago, that very fact would be mind-boggling. The idea of the massive international supply chains which underpin this diet – made possible by mass-produced steel, railways, jet aircraft, diesel-powered cargo ships, and computerised logistics networks – would be even more mind-boggling. The diet I eat would be impossible without any of those technologies – unless I was fabulously wealthy.
Likewise, the food surpluses which allow me to eat such a varied diet come from the development of industrial fertiliser and mechanisation. The fact that these foods arrive to my fridge relatively fresh comes from refrigeration and canning. The fact that I can take for granted that these foods will be fresh itself comes from the concept of food regulation – a technology in its own right. Technology is not just the process by which our modern diets have developed, it is also the process by which all cultures adapt their diets and their means of obtaining that diet to the geographical conditions of their local region. Pickling is a technology, cellars are a technology. Horseback riding, sun-drying, animal domestication, even the idea of being able to measure and categorise a climate in the first place, all technologies.
So, let’s bring this all together, with an example of how all of these factors shape one single part of our modern diet, one of my favourite parts, in fact: fresh oysters.
Not so long ago, eating oysters was considered only a step above eating garbage. They were the kind of food you fed to slaves, and the less socially acceptable kind of convict. There were multiple reasons for this. Primarily, it was because oysters were plentiful along the coast, easy to harvest, and spoiled quickly. This meant that where you could get oysters, they were common and therefore cheap – but trying to transport them fresh meant they spoiled quickly: they had to be eaten quickly, which meant they didn’t retain any of their value. A food which was cheap, disposable, and spoiled quickly – a perfect food for those considered to be cheap, disposable, and of little inherent worth in the first place. The fact that they were also a good source of iron and protein meant that they could be used as essentially low-grade fuel to keep convict and enslaved labour alive. Their association with the lowest and most despised underclass of society made them one of the lowest status foods.
So what changed? Technology did. In particular, refrigeration and railroads.
Refrigeration allowed oysters to be stored for longer. Train cars allowed them to be exported beyond the coastal regions, into inland areas which had never tasted fresh oysters before. Perhaps in the most on-the-nose possible combination of these technologies, high-class passenger rail lines began serving oysters from their refrigerated food storage cars, even while those cars – and the passenger cars attached to them – travelled deep into the interior. For the people whose only contact with oysters came from the menus of first class dining cars, the oyster became associated with high-class dining and expensive train tickets. The spike in demand and prestige this created was supported by the ability of new technology to supply oysters to new regions. Within decades, fresh oysters were so in demand as a class signifier of the wealthy that they became too expensive to be used as cheap food, even in their coastal areas of origin.
Fresh oysters are now $20 a dozen – if you’re lucky.
Safety, geography, and biology had made the oyster into a cheap, low-status food. New technology created the means to turn oysters from a common, but regional and potentially dangerous food into a high-demand, high-status, and more reliable one. It’s an almost perfect example of how one part of a society’s diet developed over time due to the effect of all the factors I’ve covered through the course of this article.
This is, as usual, a framework, not an exhaustive guide. It’s not so much a step-by-step tutorial on how to develop your own fictional culinary traditions as it is a set of guideposts which can help you move in the right direction. Worldbuilding is always going to be a complicated and deeply personal process. All I can do is tell you what I think works as general principles. The rest is up to you.
Belatedly, I realise that I’ve spent this whole article discussing about food in general, and almost nothing at all about actually cooking that food. Maybe that should be the next thing I write about? Or maybe I should go for something entirely different next month? We’ll see how the vote goes.
Paul Wang 