TnT: Food & Writing

[pipisafoat]

Contest 65 is open for submissions - where is your horizon?

Join the weekly chat post! This week features sports and dancing and randomness :D

---

We all write. We also all eat. Do you do both at the same time? Do you like to write about food, or does your writing (and reading) influence what you eat?

More than once, I've been so enticed by the description of some sort of food in whatever I'm reading that I have to make that for dinner. It's led me to try several new foods that either I hadn't heard of before or hadn't been brave enough to try before a character described how much they enjoyed it. At the same time, I find it's very hard to me to positively describe a food that I don't enjoy, even if my character does.

Comments

[clare_dragonfly]

Writing about food is weird for me. See, I was raised vegetarian and have never knowingly eaten meat, but I keep writing characters who are... not vegetarians. So I end up picking fairly random foods that I've heard about or seen other people eating or read about. It's somewhat easier in modern-day stuff, because I can always default to takeout (in my current novel WIP I've had the characters eat General Tso's Chicken and cheeseburgers), but in medieval or other era stories, I feel like it's obvious that I'm completely making up the dishes.

I guess I should be taking notes next time I watch The Supersizers so I can have lists of foods for different eras!

[silverflight8]

I have definitely written while I ate. Also, read books and browsed the internet (but not all three together, because of desk and attention space problems). It is much easier to read than to write while eating. I don't eat very well with my left hand; I keep forgetting to actually put food in my mouth!