In this ongoing series, we ask SF/F authors to describe a specialty in their lives that has nothing (or very little) to do with writing. Join us as we discover what draws authors to their various hobbies, how they fit into their daily lives, and how and they inform the author’s literary identity.
I have a lot of fruit trees on my little, suburban lot. It’s a postage stamp lot, and packed in as tight as can be are six citrus trees, two pomegranates, two pears, two plums, two peaches, a jujube, three grapevines, a barbados cherry, two olive trees, a loquat, an elderberry, passionfruit vines, blackberries, raspberry… Let me think. I think that’s most of them. Papayas come and go, as well as other annual fruits and vegetables, and I love to draw bees and butterflies with flowers and herbs, but when I think of my garden, the first thing I think about is the lemon tree next to my front door that blooms in the spring and hands me hundreds of golden jewels in the dark days of winter.
I think about the astonishing bloom of the passion vines, which have yet to produce edible fruit but should, and the bird nest hidden deep in my orange tree. I think about the fig tree, that rambling beast eager to consume all available landspace, and beating her back into her corner. I think about the season of the fruit trees, where I prune in the spring, where I watch the flowers and leaves break through the bark in a burst of life right when I am most thoroughly weary of even our mild winter, down in south Texas, to the long season of fruiting, and then harvest, and then sleep.
I think about how every day I go into my yard and without much effort encounter a butterfly or wild bee, there. I think about how many fantasy novels are written and read by people who don’t take even a moment to think about what the weather and landscape mean to available food. In some ways, the conspicuous absence when I read fantasy is found in the way food is grown, harvested, prepared.
Before modern transportation and refrigeration technology, the most important question of every single day was not who would marry whom or which rising star would overtake the court. The most important question was much simpler. Will there be bread to eat?
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Even a king could starve. Even the greatest emperor could not command a single pear tree. When Christ himself encountered a fig without fruit, he did not command the tree to produce, but instead removed it from the orchard of the world. No earthly power compels the tree to make fruit.
Before the modern systems, every knight errant could swing a plow with practiced hands, and understood the importance of the humble pea plant. Armies marched on their stomachs, as the saying goes, and the amount of labor that goes into every mouthful of rice even with modern technology is staggering. The struggle of food, getting enough, and maintaining it every day, all year long, in all seasons, is mostly absent from the literature I read, concerned with the exciting stuff like kings and vagabonds and rebel uprisings and the like.
The amount of work that goes into a single grain of wheat, a single loaf of bread, has been lost to us. We have divided up that labor across different industries such that we see a farmhouse table in our minds populated with edible things, and we think nothing of the farm from which everything rose up to create that picturesque scene. We don’t see all the manual labor required to get the raw material of soil into seed into a form that we can eat and put on that table. Walk into any high school and ask a hundred students what the difference is between butter and margarine, or when a specific fruit or vegetable is in season, and wonder at this future we are building, disconnected from the material reality of our own biological nature, eternally present inside the ecosystem of the earth, never separated from it.
As a writer, I am drawn to the changing of the seasons as it is lived in my perennial trees. I am in awe of the abundance that comes, and the feeling of wealth when I gather buckets of figs and have to figure out how to preserve them—for they will rot in days if I do not. It is a hobby that comes naturally to an interest in fantasy novels and historical fiction. As a writer, I am inspired by this sense of space created by inhabiting my space through growing food.
I have grown a bit of corn from seed and dried it and ground it up into corn flour, and saved the seeds for another year’s cornbread. I have reached into the past to try and figure out how the people who lived here for a thousand years and more managed to survive on acorns and roots and pumpkins and peppers. We talk about world-building all the time, as writers, but we do it in our heads, where we can invent whatever suits us. When I build a world in my little yard, and it is an act of world-building, of managing forces and distances, constructing ecosystems and figuring out solutions to problems I unintentionally create, I am forced to face the hard truth of building a world.
I have lost plants. I have removed failed experiments. I have lost the harvest to possums and birds. I have pruned hard where I would prefer to prune easy. I have made mistakes. Yet, every season, I am building a world. I am watching the anole lizards climb the papaya trunk and sneak under the deck. I watch the birds blow through on their migrations. I see the butterflies being born from the cocoons that litter the yard around the passionvines and rue and sweet almond verbena. The cats come in the dark. The possums and vermin steal my harvest. I hunt them, and trap them, and try to think like them to reshape my little world. That sense of physical space has become as important to my writing as anything ethereal.
Want to be a better thinker about the systems of your constructed worlds? Want to be a better historian to better understand what happened before the stories hardened into histories? Embrace your landscape, and try to build it in your image, and succeed and fail to thrive there. If anything, it will make the story of the farmboy, and his quotidian world, more interesting than whatever eventual rise to power over other farmboys, where everyone is secretly a farmboy pretending at power.
Originally published in January 2017.
Joe M. McDermott is best known for the novels Last Dragon, Never Knew Another, and Maze. His work has appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His novel The Fortress at the End of Time, is available from Tor.com Publishing. He holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program. He lives in Texas.
I never liked studying history in school because I was not interested in people that made a big noise and seemed to be the prime movers of history. I wanted to know about regular people. How they lived, what their clothes and shelter and food were like. To me this fits with your garden. Today it concerns me that food production is a business activity with the only measure of success is investor return.
Also, we have mostly lost track of the outdoors. We don’t have to work around weather to know when to plant or harvest. What happens when a generation that has lost its connection with nature is forced to pay attention?
Depending on where one lives, I would also recommend to writers in the US to visit living-history sites such as Williamsburg, Plimoth Plantation or Sturbridge Village that have farm programs that demonstrate pre-industrial farming techniques and foodways. The people there are usually eager to help out writers doing research, and it may be possible to arrange to try plowing, harvesting, milking cows, etc. to get first-hand experience in the the labor involved.
It always bothered me that the fields of Pelennor were just grasslands in the Return of the King film. Why weren’t they farm lands, and what did the people of Gondor eat? Poor world building for budget reasons.
There’s some interesting commentary on this in this season’s anime; Restaurant to Another World (Isekai Shokodou) is about a real-world restaurant that can be accessed (via traveling magic door) from a vaguely-European fantasy world. Half the fun is watching the medieval-level characters react to “incomprehensible” modern food (because nothing can be refrigerated or transported long distances in their world, certain modern staples don’t even exist, and 21st-century ovens can cook hotter than even dragon flame).
I seem to be doing this every other comment I make on Tor.com, but the DiscWorld is a good example of this done well. Specifically, look at Anhk-Morpork’s sphere of influence, and you realise that the network of treaties are primarily there to ensure the populace gets fed.
Think about it: apart from rats and treacle, Anhk-Morpork doesn’t really produce food. Food always comes from elsewhere. Everywhere else always has mention that they specialise in some kind of mass farming, be it cabbages, corn, sheep, etc. Note that it’s also always made clear their principle customer is always Ankh-Morpork.
Never really thought about the fact that most books don’t include details like that until now. Huh.
I might be misremembering, but I think Feist’s Riftwar books make food supply a plot point a few times, and the Eddings’ make a stab at including it in their world-building, but those are the only other examples I can think of
@5 Used to great effect in Pratchett’s “Night Watch” book, where the delivery of all those products from all those different places end up becoming a major plot point and even a set piece for the action. I should point out that Ankh Morpork doesn’t produce treacle by the time of the stories, the deep treacle mines are purely historic by that point. Its indigenous food production is limited to the rats, and some of the more exotic gravels (for the troll market).
ZenEngineer @3 : “It always bothered me that the fields of Pelennor were just grasslands in the Return of the King film. Why weren’t they farm lands, and what did the people of Gondor eat? Poor world building for budget reasons.”
Tolkien did a better job of world building. He described the fields of Pelennor thusly: “…the fields of the Pelennor: fair and fertile townlands on the long slopes and terraces falling to the deep levels of the Anduin.” And a little far on: “The townlands were rich, with wide tilth and many orchards, and homesteads there were with oast and garner, fold and byre, and many rills rippling through the green from the highland down to Anduin.” “The Return of the King”, Book Five, Chapter One, “Minas Tirith”.
Moreover, Tolkien, who had seen something of war at it’s grimmest, gave some idea of what happened to these sweet farmlands when the tide of war washed over them: “Hard fighting and long labour they had still; for the Southrons were bold men and grim, and fierce in despair; and the Easterlings were strong and war-hardened and asked for no quarter. And so in this place and that, by burned homestead or barn, upon hillock or mound, under wall or on field, still they gathered and rallied and fought until the day wore away.” “The Return of the King”, Book Five, Chapter Six, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”.
@3, 7 – The thing about food in the LotR films that gets me whenever I do a rewatch, beside what’s already been said, is that when the hobbits run through a cornfield, it’s maize rather than wheat. I know that there is New World food in Middle Earth (potatoes etc) but when an English (e.g. Tolkien) writer talks about corn he is talking about grain in general and wheat or barley in particular (a Scottish writer would be talking about grain in general and oats or barley in particular). Maize is generally harvested later than wheat, so that’s going to throw the Shire’s entire calendar into disarray.
@8 Muswell…yes, indeed. And trust me, that criticism was heard loud and clear on every LOTR discussion board back when FOTR first came out. Perhaps someone else will remember what PJ and/or Richard Taylor eventually said about the odd choice to show “Indian corn,” i.e., maize, rather than what Tolkien had intended: wheat.
Meanwhile, I’m curious about Joe’s “postage-stamp” size lot. What size lot is it on which you can crowd that abundance of produce?
@9 – I remember the criticism well. Happy days. It provided a much-needed distraction from my A-level studies.
I believe that a food system is among the foundational pillars of fantasy worldbuilding. A comprehensively-built world is (among other things) one in which what people eat makes in-world sense to a reader who bothers to think about it. Food can be discussed a lot (e.g. A Song of Ice and Fire) or rarely (e.g. Malazan), but it needs to be a logical part of the established setting. Agricultural products in a place where agriculture of that sort is never mentioned, clearly-exotic products in a place with no hint of long-distance trade, and you have an incomplete world. Except when food is explicitly conjured or otherwise produced by magic, of course. And the consequences of disruption to food systems – e.g. war, cessation of trade, or permanent winter – should be clear.
That said, I nonetheless adore some stories which fail at this, including Narnia, the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, and to a lesser extent the Redwall series (where fruit and vegetable growing is mentioned, but never the grain in their breads, pastries, and porridges).
Enjoyed this article very much, and agree with it totally as it relates to world building in fiction. Two things always missing – or at best an afterthought – in fantasy and sci-fi are where food comes from and what actual work in the world is like. Stephen King is right – for some reason people enjoy reading about and always can relate better to characters via their boring jobs.
A great nonfiction book that segues very well with sentiments of the article is 1491 by Charles Mann. Long digressions in that book about the unique agriculture in pre-Colombian Americas, monoculture agriculture versus variety of cultivars, pests, etc. Really makes one realize and think about how securing food defined so much of pre-industrial society.
@2 Russell H. Sturbridge Village! Doesn’t get enough love. And for those living in the NYC/tri-state area, there’s Old Bethpage on Long Island and Richmondtown on Staten Island. Both are definitely worth a visit
S.M. Stirling pays a lot of attention to where food comes from, who produces it, and how it is used in his Emberverse and Nantucket series.
A lot of this stuff seems like “Ding!” level nitpicking. Like the board of a homeowner’s association suing someone for having the wrong color drapes. Location scouts found a cheap cornfield to shoot in. Adding a bunch of CGI villages and cornfields to Pelennor Fields for an already expensive effects driven sequence, so they could add nothing, makes no sense.
Good essay. Far too little attention is given in many books to the infrastructure that underpins fictional societies. Not only food, but distribution systems, industry, transport, and other issues.
@14 Stirling describes food so well in his books that he makes my mouth water as I read them.
And if anyone in the UK is confused as to how much labour it takes to grow even a single carrot, just wait until April for a crash course on that one.
The characters in Wheel of Time do a lot of worrying over the effect of the crazy weather on agriculture. Elayne’s priorities, putting finding a magical solution for the long drought over claiming her empty throne, are correct. At this moment in time Andor needs rain more than it needs its Queen.
A good article to read, as my sister and I make jam. Unlike pioneers, we have the luxury of freezing summer fruit, and making jam in wintertime.
I recently reread Lost Country Life by Dorothy Hartley, which looks at life near London roughly from the reign of Elizabeth I to the run-up to World War II. She quotes a lot of Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, which was in daily use for about the same span of time. It’s interesting to contrast the modern Wheel of the Year, with its tidy divisions of solstice and equinox and cross-quarter days, with the actual festivals of the countryfolk. They mostly happened after some big agricultural event or other, whenever that happened to be finished locally, and they involved whatever was available at that time. No special colors; no symbols in particular; the corn dolly, for example, seems to be a relatively recent elaboration of an old signal that means “This stack is finished.” People decorated with what they had on hand, settled down and ate whatever was most abundant or most apt to spoil, got up to dance or play vigorous games on whichever surface needed to be pounded flat for the next outdoor or indoor job, then went to sleep and got up the next day and went on with the year-round labor of producing, storing, and protecting their food.
I came away with the strong impression that everything those country people did, they did with a keen awareness that there were probably 50 other things they could be doing with the same energy; their decisions were based heavily on calories out vs. calories in.
I’m sure they didn’t think of it in terms of calories, but they knew all about pacing themselves and prioritizing.
A book on turn of the 20th century Russian life I own describes th frantic labor during the planting and harvesting seasons before the long, dark winter closes in.
The Warhammer universe must be one of the worst in this respect. There is an entire rat people living underground, and most people above ground aren´t even sure they exist, so they obviously don´t venture overground that much. How do they feed themselves? And numerous factions are described as if their whole culture is built around warfare and plunder, but you cannot plunder unless someone produce things to plunder first.
In one passage in LOTR Tolkien explains how Sauron is able to feed his armies, but in the Silmarillion he seems to have forgotten that aspect completely. Angband is described as breeding countless troops, yet it has little access to areas that could produce food, particularly not when it is under siege for hundreds of years.
Also, either dwarves must have had some manner of producing food underground that is never mentioned, or they traded for all their food, but in the later case, it should have been immediately obvious to other free peoples when Moria was lost because there should have been a constant stream of trade between it and the outer world.
Awesome re-post from the archives! I totally agree with the premise and as a once professional baker and chef food is dear to me. I even invented a “salt-wheat” to be grown in estuaries near the fishing village-hub in one of my shorts. There are SO many more things that go into even contemplating a sustainable hamlet… who’s the village weaver/mender? Where does all that crockery come from (if they use crockery at all)? Who brews/distills and from what fermenting largess does it come?
This article just touches on the seasonality of fruit (something we’ve been desensitized to with global trade and hothouses), but I spent time in a small village overseas where there still are festivals surrounding 2 week abundances of strawberries or plums, fattened animals born during spring rut and “aged to perfection” (local’s words, not mine..)
I always wished Frank Herbert had written a little bit more about the spice-diet of the Fremen. Were they just eating this substance that was worth more than gold in the rest of the system? Like…dirt? Sandworm feces…Mmmmmm…..
Also worth remembering (Gladiator, among other things, got this wrong) that farm crops looked very different in the past. Even sixty years ago, wheat would have grown twice as high by harvest as modern (“dwarf”) wheat does; accounts of fugitives hiding in ripe wheat, or of the wheat on the field of Waterloo hiding troops from sight, don’t make sense unless you know this. But look at paintings by Constable, say, and get an idea of how high wheat used to grow.
Farm animals, too, look very different. Most of all, smaller than they are now, after more than a century of scientific selective breeding. If you’re filming something like the awful Outlander or the worse Braveheart, you shouldn’t use modern cattle because the cattle back then were a third of the size, 200-250 kg instead of 600-800kg.
it should have been immediately obvious to other free peoples when Moria was lost because there should have been a constant stream of trade between it and the outer world.
The second time (when Balin was killed) it was just a tiny expedition that was wiped out; not really much trade going on. As for the first time, well, the dwarves had been having a hard time even before they woke the Balrog; the population might have been pretty small, so their loss might have been ignored in trade terms.
Moria lost its biggest and closest trade partner when Eregion fell. They may have become more reclusive after that but everybody did know when Moria fell. The sudden flood of dwarven refugees was a dead give away.
@24 I follow someone on twitter partially because they complain about depictions of livestock in video games.
@22/morgondag – to be fair to Warhammer, someone actually did have a few thoughts about this. It gets lost in the grim and dark, dark and grim narratives, but most of the Skaven populations centres are located under human and dwarf cities. The justification for this is that the Skaven food chain requires the constant influx of human (and dwarf) waste (biological and general) to feed the vast fungal and mould farms that feed their large population, supplemented by humans and dwarfs being a handy source of meat.
It’s also supposed to explain why the Skaven (who are supposed to be slightly more numerous, with magical and technological sophistication to match any of the other races) don’t simply rise up and catch the unsuspecting humans by surprise. Arguably one bloody night would be all they needed to redraw the political map.
I’m not sure the numbers would support this conceit, although all this is all moot, as one of Game Workshops’ summer events resulted in the bad guys winning and the world ending. Now the setting for Warhammer takes place in what amounts to the afterlife…
Oh, and thank you for the article. Not something I’d really considered properly before (despite growing up in a village surrounded by farmland). :)
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In the pilot of Fear the Walking Dead, the teenage student tells the guidance counselor who becomes a leader of the survivors that capital C civilization will go down FAST because no one knows how anything works. There is some lipservice to finding food in most dystopian novels, movies, TV, etc. but not enough. Those cans and sealed jars and bottles will keep a long time, but not forever, certainly not the lifetime of a child. At least Fear is beginning to deal with the fact that modern petro fuel denatures (it does so much faster than the show implies though) and there is no way to refine more that doesn’t require modern industrial processes.
Good timing. Our peach tree fruited this year* with a bumper crop, so the kitchen is covered in peaches waiting to be processed and/or eaten.
*California had a rainy winter for a change
If one wants to read about food as a strategic material and the vast colonial networks needed to support a metropolis like London or New York may I suggest “Replenishing the Earth” by James Belich and “The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation” by Avner Offer.
So, you must live in a squirrel-free zone. Squirrels are the demonic rodents from heck who take one bite of a small green apple, toss it down, take another one, throw it down, etc., until every last apple is gone before they have a chance to ripen. Rinse and repeat on every fruit tree you own. Sigh. Then there’s the dang deer and groundhogs.
We successfully grew strawberries this year, but we only ate one. Something small and determined got the rest.
Rereading this, I’m reminded of Day of the Triffids, which is characterized as a cozy catastrophe, but is really, really not. Two groups of survivors come into conflict at the end of the story. One is small, but began deconverting a farm-turned-vacation-home that first summer, and has succeeded. However, it’s a hell of a slog. There are only a few sighted adults, and salvaging the ruins of England for tools and materials becomes harder every year. The protagonist can see the end coming–some year when his group will no longer be able to both produce and preserve food and maintain their triffid-proof fence. The other is large and also began long-term planning that first summer, but they didn’t think any further than “stockpile preserved food, stockpile weapons, gather serfs.” The food is running out, but clearing land for farming also gets harder every year. Their solution is to break up their big communities and move groups onto other people’s working farms, but they are still unable to see the scope of the problem and they are going to destroy every community they take over. Meanwhile, a group that had both the numbers and the right knowledge base at the beginning has established a large and relatively comfortable community; they’re the ones flying helicopter surveys. (There are also ignorant groups with few sighted adults; they die early in the book, including the group that thought it was doing long-term planning.)
An interesting subversion of the food problem is Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives. Certain magitech (soulcasters) lets the user turn, well, any substance into grain or meat (bland, unappetizing grain and meat, but food nonetheless), as long as you have enough gemstones to power them. Thus, camp logistics are now about the supply of gemstones, the soulcasters (the secret to making them has been lost), and people to use it (only priests are allowed to do so, and long-term use has… unpleasant side effects). It’s specifically mentioned a few times that if you have soulcasters, it completely changes how you can wage a war.
@36: Yep, and that — along with the many planet-specific weirdnesses of non-soulcast cusine — puts Stormlight Archive relatively high on my personal Spectrum of Fantasy Food-System Realism. Its food systems are unlike anything in the real world, but they’re well-explained and make sense in that unreal setting.