Unreal Food
How food-based fiction makes for memorable meals
Hello there, our most precious people. We love having you back here each Sunday. This week we’re taking a break from the kitchen and getting cozy on the couch. That’s right we’re talking about food and fiction. A classic but overlooked mashup.
Cooking, whether it’s throwing together a salad or making a 7-course meal, is always a creative act. No two meals are ever the same. There are too many variables. Maybe the spice measurements are just a little skewed. Maybe you’re distracted when you chop the onions so chunks are all different sizes. Maybe you’re resentful as you stir the risotto. None of this finesse, this everyday art in cooking, gets enough attention outside of fiction.
Much of modern food discourse focuses on the outcome: how a dish looks, tastes, how it sits in the zeitgeist, how the algorithm responds. We forget about the journey. The thoughts that slip through our heads as we take that extra minute to toast the bread for our sandwiches because we need that crunch; how stirring red sauce on the stove top reminds you of sleepovers at your best friend’s house. It’s in those stolen moments while the water boils, the onions brown -maybe the second glass of wine gets poured- that the creative cooking magic happens. That’s where lightbulbs get turned on, where sensory memories come rushing back. Where you get wild with the fancy salt.
Cookbooks, even great ones like Brave New Meal, can’t completely capture that on the page. They’re the scaffolding to build these experiences on but only your mind and good food-centered fiction can capture those in-between moments, where the boring act of stuffing nutrients into our faces because something else. Something fun and unforgettable.
Good fiction finds the magic in the mundane and good food-centered fiction does the same for cooking. And lord knows that feeding yourself every. fuckin. day. can get boring. We all need a little help making meals feel more creative and less like one more fucking chore on an endless list of chores. So here are some of our recent favorite works of food-centered fiction to get your brains and bellies going.
First, here’s a piece for everyone who prefers to listen to their books rather than read them. And there is no one we’d rather have read us a book than the king himself, Mr. Levar Burton. In a recent episode of his fantastic podcast, Levar Burton Reads, he presents a short story by Isabel Yap from her book Never Have I Ever. “Milagroso” focuses on Marty as he brings his family to his hometown of Lucban for the annual festival to see a miracle: lab-grown, synthetic food made real. It’s gorgeous and describes a world that feels both inevitable, where natural food is deemed untrustworthy, and far off in the future. Give it a listen and imagine what it would be like to taste a real banana after decades with nutritional avatars.
Next up we’ve got a book we read a few years ago but has taken up permanent residence in our heads, particularly when it comes to stress baking. Sourdough by Robin Sloan follows an overworked software engineer who’s obsession with a delivery spot in her corner of San Francisco turns into a culinary odyssey full of loaves that do more than just rise. We think about sections of this book all the time and would kill for a chance to taste the soups Sloan describes. Plus, the parodies of the uber-precious Bay Area food and tech circles are fucking hilarious.
Last up is an all-time classic: Bunnicula by James and Deborah Howe. If you didn’t read this banger growing up, now is your time. It’s told from the perspective of Harold, the suspicious family dog. He’s certain the new pet, Bunnicula, is a vampire rabbit who sucks the juice out of vegetables. He just can’t prove it… yet. Matt wore his Bunnicula shirt on this week’s pod because real ones know.
If you’re going to go through the trouble of cooking for yourself, you might as well do it with a brain full of stories and a reverence for this everyday art. You can tell when the potatoes were mashed with malice. That’s just a stone cold fact. So this fall as you're tearing bread for stuffing or rolling out cookies, give your brain some food fiction to digest. Once you feed your imagination then you can go write down the magic of your grandma’s yuca or why fish sticks remind you of that car accident when you were a kid. There are stories in your sauce too. Just listen up.
Are there books or stories you’d love to see featured here? Drop them in the comments below, or send us an email. We’ll do another edition like this next month. Since you’ve decided to share some of your hard-earned money with us by becoming paid supporters to this newsletter, we want this community to be full of give and take. Each week we throw an intimate dinner party here in this newsletter and we want you to feel catered to. Do you need more wine? More bread? Hot sauce? Just holler, we’ll be right over.
Next week, get ready to unbutton the top of your pants because the recipe we got for y’all is gonna lead to some uncomfortably full bellies. We’ve been gorging ourselves for weeks and we can’t wait for you to join us.
It might be gettin cold outside but it’s warming up here in The Broiler Room. Just bus your own table please.
Michelle and Matt
Oh my goodness I LOVED Bunnicula in grade school! I think I need to reread it now.
Green grape pie? You've got my attention...