In many of the best texts, as in life, people eat. Why bother documenting this pedestrian need in poetry or prose? Well, we spend vast amounts of time doing it, food’s a part of our culture that also becomes part of our bodies, it’s tremendously intimate, and, above all, feeding them makes characters seem more alive.

In Toni Morrison's Beloved, we see not just the eating but the cooking and preparation of food. In the first two chapters alone, flour is checked for mealworms, mixed with soda salt, lard and water (in that order) and kneaded into biscuits, which are then burnt and eaten anyway, with jelly whose wax seal is broken by Denver after recovering the nearly broken jar. But true to the deadened state of things in the house at 124, we get nothing about the taste or color of that jelly. Corn is broken early from the stalk and eaten green, the only course at the non-wedding of Sethe and Halle. Paul D recalls with pleasure the moment of biting the kernels, "how quick the jailed up flavor ran free." Food is not always delicious, it can be burnt and miserable or exquisite, despite being unripe. However it tastes, it parses the emotions of those who cook and eat it.

In Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, a cup of tea has a powerful presence in Henny's, initial homecoming — a would-be calming cuppa is more a tempest in a teapot, and eventually, in the story's denouement, tea takes an even darker turn. The planting of a reference to tea at the beginning and the later recurrence makes tea more impactful as an image. This sort of thing is relatively easy to set up, because of the regularity with which people eat and drink, making food an ideal recurring motif.

PROMPT

What are your characters eating? Is it relevant to the unfolding story? Could it be? If so, track the food across the story and make sure it has a regular and nonrandom presence. Reap what you have sown by coming back to food, possibly the same foods, possibly different ones, across the course of the story. If there's nothing to eat in your narrative cupboard, dream up two or three foods or beverages that your main character consumes, and plant mentions of them across the arc of the story. Use them and the potential sensations associated with them — flavor, color, smell, texture, even sounds— to convey emotional states.