It happens to the best of us. 

Some professional nonfiction food writers have dipped their toes in the world of fiction to only sink. Sounds harsh, but writing about food is never writing about food, especially in fiction.

Just as The Office wasn’t about paper, all stories are about connection and what events mean for characters in their personal journeys. It’s easy to get swept away with what you think a story is about, but harder to dive into what’s underneath. Sometimes, you read a novel and know something is off, but you can’t quite pin it down. Chances are that there’s one thing likely happening, or not happening, in the story.

So if you’ve found yourself at a crossroads in your own work or want to learn from the mishaps of others, here’s the biggest mistake people make when writing a food novel, and how to fix it.

Focusing on the Food, but Missing the Real Story

Food is pretty seductive. People are endlessly fascinated by the behind-the-scenes of Michelin-starred restaurants, the lives of food writers and every other culinary-related job in-between. So a novel with even a hint of food in it will capture a reader’s attention immediately. 

But that’s where most writers go wrong.

They throw in savory specialty shops, fine dining restaurants and maybe even a handful of recipes and expect it to carry the entire story. Some writers bury their story under hypnotic cadences and a sea of anecdotes, thinking that it’ll be enough. But a cool concept and pretty sentences does not a book make.

It’s also just the setting with food as the props. So readers get excited only to find themselves in lots of hip places bombarded with endless details with a story that goes nowhere. Your novel isn’t a montage, and while it can be fun for a bit, readers want to sink their teeth into something. 

Why Writing a Food Novel is Tricky

Food is an intimidating topic to write about for a lot of writers, and they don’t want to look like amateurs. But if you study chefs, for example, they all have different methods and backgrounds. Some are passionate about recipes and the precision of their execution, while others lean into intuition and the mood of the day. 

Food writing can cover a variety of topics, including restaurant reviews, cultural criticism and feature articles about the people and movements behind the scenes. Yes, you want to stretch your skills, but don’t pretend to know more than you do. Readers can feel when you’re adding details just because. 

If you want to include something food-specific, but feel insecure about it, start researching and interviewing experts. You may use their knowledge, or it may serve as an invisible foundation for your characters. Regardless, the more you know, the easier it is to add tiny details throughout your story instead of a giant information dump that folks will probably skip.

Whatever your culinary background is, you can write about food and not be Samin Nosrat or Ruth Reichl. Promise.

How to Turn Your Story Around

After all of that, if you’re looking at your current pages and feel like you’ve buried your story with deliciously described smells and kitchen notes, don’t worry. You can turn your story around with a few tweaks. 

Here are a handful of questions to ask yourself:

• What’s happening between the characters? 
• How does the environment and surroundings influence their decisions and keep them from their goals? 
• What does the food reveal about your characters and how they see the world?
• If they don’t get what they truly want, what will they lose?

Still not sure how this would show up in your own story?

Well, if you have a chef who has recently lost their job and is on a journey to finding themselves again, you have to dig into their internal struggle as well as their external one. Writing a food novel is more than tasty dish names and an occasional recipe. There has to be a transformation at the end of the novel or else, why are people buying the book in the first place? 

Everything you introduce should have a purpose, or you’re just filling space. You can skip the elaborate descriptions of how people are working in the kitchen or how to cook the perfect roast chicken. That’s what cookbooks are for.

You can absolutely be detailed about a cooking method or specific dish, but it should be for a reason. Let’s say your main character adds milk to their scrambled eggs, even though they know it waters them down and makes them burn more quickly. But it’s how their mom cooked them growing up, and since she passed away six months ago, it makes her feel closer.

Food, like any other topic, is about connection and how we relate to the world. It’s easy to skip the story to get to the fun stuff, but you know deep down, there’s more to your book than that. When you dig into the meaning food has for your characters, you’ll tap into endless story possibilities and something worth your time to write.

Tell us in the comments: Have you ever experimented with writing about food, perhaps a food novel? How did it go?

Amanda Polick is a writer and book coach, who guides food folks through the writing process. Her work has been featured by Cooking Light, Food & Wine and Time. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee now, but a piece of her will be in California forever. To connect with Amanda, you can find her on her website.

The post Writing a Food Novel? Avoid This Mistake appeared first on DIY MFA.

You love to read other people’s recipes, and you’re no novice in the kitchen, but how do you actually develop a recipe worth making?

Recipe development takes time and a lot of patience, so be easy on yourself. There’s no one way to do anything, but here are some tips for creating recipes readers will swoon over in your novel.

Choose Exciting Recipes for Readers to Make

First things first, add a recipe or recipes readers are itching to get in the kitchen and make. In both Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala and The Secret French Recipes of Sophie Valroux by Samantha Vérant, the authors drop their shining recipes at the end of the book. The recipes they include are items featured throughout the story. So, it’s a treat for readers to find those delicious sounding recipes, like chicken adobo and pan-seared scallops wrapped in jambon sec and prunes with balsamic glaze, laid out from start to finish.

Then there are authors like Joanne Fluke, who is known for sprinkling tasty recipes throughout the chapters. The creations in Fluke’s Hannah Swenson mystery series (now also on Hallmark Channel’s Movies and Mysteries) were so popular, she made an entire cookbook out of them.

When choosing a recipe to include in your novel, make it one that’s important in your story. You don’t want to throw something in there just because. Add recipes that have significance for your characters and story. 

Also, readers will be more excited to make a recipe if they don’t have to spend a lot of time in the kitchen or money on ingredients. No one wants to spend $5 on a tablespoon of an obscure spice they’ll probably never use again or to be locked into a 7 hour cooking extravaganza. Be kind to your readers’ time and budget, and you’ll already have them swooning.

Research Similar Recipes and Create Your Own Twist

Just as the old adage goes that every story has already been told, every recipe has likely been created. With those creations also comes a lot of imposters. For Friends fans, you’ll remember the moment of horror when Monica realized that Phoebe’s grandmother’s famous chocolate chip cookie recipe was actually the recipe on the back of the Nestlé Tollhouse bag.

If you have a recipe in mind, even one that’s been in your kitchen rotation for awhile, do some research on it first. A quick internet search of “recipe stealing” will pull up heaps of stories about celebrities and non-celebrities alike who have been accused of taking people’s recipes without proper credit. The truth is, though, a lot of folks may not realize they’re taking someone’s work.

For some things, there’s primarily one way to make it, like Caesar dressing or pasta. Pull up a recipe for either of those though, and you’ll find differences in the thousands of recipes.

The unofficial standard for changing a recipe to make it your own is that 3 things have to be different from the original. It could be cook time, temperature, measurements, ingredients, or the process. 

Don’t let the sea of recipes already in existence overwhelm you. Instead, use it as an opportunity to create more flavorful, inventive and swoon-worthy recipes for readers and yourself.

Develop Your Recipes with Detailed Notes

Once you pinpoint the recipe or recipes you want to include, it’s time to hit the kitchen. Regardless of how many times you’ve made a dish in the past, developing recipes for readers is a different ballgame. The goal is to have a perfectly explained plan anyone can follow without additional help. 

Most people don’t realize the extra pinch of salt they always add or that halfway through the cook time, they rotate the baking sheet in the oven. In fact, that’s why when New York Times bestseller Julia Turshen co-authors a cookbook with someone, she watches them in the kitchen, instead of reading their recipes.

Don’t have someone to observe your cooking habits? Grab your iPhone and film yourself. Jot down notes as you’re watching with questions you think readers may have regarding process or even ingredient substitutes. 

For the recipe writing portion, list ingredients in the order they’re used and don’t forget to add time elements throughout the process. If you ever get stuck on how to map it out, grab a set of cookbooks or even scan food magazine websites for example templates. 

Hire a Recipe Developer

Have an idea for a recipe, but not sure how to create it? Bring in the professionals to help you. Most recipe developers are also food stylists and even bloggers. They regularly work with brands and individuals to create unique recipes for a variety of platforms. 

How do you find these folks? There’s nothing like a good internet search or even word of mouth. If you’re starting from square one, scan the acknowledgements of a food novel or cookbook, and you’ll find references to developers and testers. You can find the majority of those people mentioned at their own websites. 

Sites like Upwork or even LinkedIn can also connect you with freelance recipe developers who would love to craft tasty recipes for your book. Just make sure it’s clear about how and when the recipe will be used, and if there are any rights the recipe developer will own.

Get Recipe Testers

Now that you have your recipe, you need to test it. If you used a recipe developer, they may have built in revisions for the process and may even help you find testers. 

Developed the recipe on your own? Ask friends or family if they’d be willing to test your recipe and fill out a tasting note sheet. Sometimes, you may offer to buy ingredients or even pay folks to do this. 

The important thing is to get usable feedback. You’re looking for notes about cook time, temperature, equipment, ingredients, and how clear your instructions are. If you estimate that there will be 24 servings of cookies, but a tester ended up with 36, that’s important to know.

Some questions for recipe testers can include:

• Did you follow the recipe exactly?
• If you didn’t, where did you change the recipe and why?
• Was the equipment easily accessible?

You want to ask questions that allow testers to share where they deviated from the recipe and why. Most people use their instincts in the kitchen, so if one of your testers skipped a process, you want to know why and see if it’s worth changing the recipe for. 

Once you have your first round of feedback, decide how you want to adjust the recipe and have testers make it at least one more time. You’re creating a recipe to serve your readers, so the more intentional feedback you can gather, the better.

Feeling Confident about the Recipe You Choose

Creating recipes for readers to swoon over in your novel is daunting. You don’t know if it will work until the masses have their hands on it. But much like your novel, there are signposts along the way to help guide you. 

Use your instincts, but also the feedback of your recipe testers and developers. Getting your recipe into the hands of real people is the best way to know what’s working and what’s not. And don’t forget that you’re painting a picture along the way. 

As the late novelist Pat Conroy said: A recipe is a story that ends with a great meal. Give your readers just that, and you can be confident that the recipe you choose is the one they’ll love, even after they put your novel down.

Amanda Polick is a writer and book coach, who guides food folks through the writing process. Her work has been featured by Cooking Light, Food & Wine and Time. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee now, but a piece of her will be in California forever. To connect with Amanda, you can find her on her website.

The post How to Develop Recipes for Readers to Swoon Over appeared first on DIY MFA.

No. No. No. 

That’s my home. Those are my people. Wildfires are common in the West, but my gut told me this one was different. The fire that would be known as the Tubbs Fire, the worst in state history until then, had jumped over eight lanes of freeway and was ferociously making its way through Napa and Sonoma counties. 

Journalists were telling people to call and wake up their friends and families. My own friends were posting evacuation stories with their neighbors staying behind with hoses in hand, trying to save the neighborhood from the disaster. After more than 36,000 acres were burned and almost two dozen souls were lost, one of the biggest questions still seemed to be: Will the wine be okay?

Millions of visitors from all over the world come to sip the nectar of the valleys, and they flood the area with billions of dollars to do so. The question of what would happen with future harvests was valid, and the vineyards and people’s stories go hand in hand. To see the grapes rebound would also mean that the locals have found new ways to adapt, to innovate, to prepare for next time. 

Food and nature relentlessly intertwine, and it’s why their stories create the most beautiful tension. These are the stories that command you to your feet, but they’re often overlooked in food writing for memoir and fiction. So with examples from investigative journalism and real-life natural disaster, let’s open up the possibilities of how to use the natural world to create more meaningful and riveting food stories.

Heroes and Villains Emerge

I’m always surprised when writers are hesitant to create “villains.” On one hand, I appreciate balanced characters who keep you guessing with their “save the cat” moments. However, what seems to happen more often than not, is writers don’t want to make anyone the bad person, so everyone gets along and there are no true issues. Boring.

Beyond that, people don’t have to be villains. Situations can be their own offenders. For example, in Mark Arax’s piece “A Kingdom from Dust,” which was selected for The Best American Food Writing 2019, his focus was on one element of food often forgotten—water. His work is primarily around the water barons and the agriculture effects on California’s Central Valley. In fact, the idea that California is sinking is largely due to the overpumping of its farmland. 

This crisis is the culmination of years of legislation, back-door deals, and land grabs. None of which is surprising for the state with the most agriculture cash receipts. You could try to point the finger at a single person, but it might just be bent back at yourself. 

Now let’s talk about heroes. In Fire in Paradise, Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano bring you into the minute by minute accounts of what was, at the time, the most destructive fire in California history. With a heartbreaking detail, you find a retired volunteer firefighter trying to save the town’s gold mining museum, and strangers rescuing one another within moments of being taken by the blaze. 

Emergencies, like the Camp Fire, require people to give their all because time will run out. Small acts of kindness and quick thinking are compounded by a wildfire that would level the entire town. All of those elements produce instant tension within the story and cause you to ask yourself: What would I do? 

Moments of Reckoning

While it’s fun to dream of lavishly leisure meals and to paint pictures of quality time in the kitchen, every story needs some heat. There’s a moment where what has existed cannot be anymore. So, what does that mean for the people involved and how does that affect what appears on their tables?

From the moment I fell for the wine of Lugana in Northern Italy, I was met with stories of how the high-speed railway was set to destroy it. While it’s not a natural disaster, the man-made effects would devastate the region. The area’s white wine is distinct because of the climate and soil, so what happens when it disappears? How does it change a region’s identity?

Some moments of reckoning are more thunderous, like the Dust Bowl. A mixture of drought and over-farming manifested ten years of horrific dust storms and crop failure that caused many people to leave the Southern Plains. It was also the catalyst for the characters’ journeys in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. 

With the Dust Bowl, one disaster rippled into another disaster—such is the harmony of cause and effect. Somehow with food writing, it’s easy to forget that what appears on the table is decades in the making. People traveled great lengths to bring specific food to a region or to save what was being destroyed. To preserve a culinary tradition is to protect a history. So, what do the soft and loud moments of reckoning reveal about the root of your story? How does it alter what happens next?

Harnessing Nature for Your Own Work

Stories show us how to live. Who are the people we want to be remembered as? What kind of work do we want to leave behind? When nature is brought into your food writing, it can show you who (or your characters) want to be. When disaster is thrown in the mix, it reveals who those characters are. 

All stories need to reveal something deeper about the people in them. Food can be joyful and elegant, but it can also show us who we are when the natural odds are against us. Just like the Napa and Sonoma Valley wines after the Tubbs Fire, they wouldn’t be the same, but new flavors were forged. With every fire, flood, and drought, there’s an opportunity for transformation, and food writing or not, that’s where the magic of every story lies. 

Amanda Polick is a writer and book coach, who guides food folks through the writing process. Her work has been featured by Cooking Light, Food & Wine and Time. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee now, but a piece of her will be in California forever. To connect with Amanda, you can find her on her website.

The post Food and Natural Disaster: How to Ignite Tension in Your Story appeared first on DIY MFA.

Vivid details enhance your readers’ experience; after all, that’s the sign of a good writer. But at what point do the details not mean as much? When does lingering in the past devolve into pure nostalgia and stop your story from moving forward? And how can you fix it?

There are a few ways, and it starts with insider knowledge. Here are some tips to avoid nostalgia when writing about food:

Show Readers Behind-the-Culinary-Curtain

Food is captivating on one hand because truly good food seems elusive and something people believe only a handful of lucky souls truly get to experience. On the other hand, readers can buy an endless number of books, grocery store items, and kitchen gadgets to fit the smallest spaces. But the one thing readers want more than how to cook the perfect soufflé is access.

You may not craft memoirs like Ruth Reichl, writing about your life as a restaurant critic and the last editor of Gourmet magazine, but you have rich stories, ripe for the writing too.

What started as a blog chronicling a year of cooking through Julia Child’s Mastering The Art of French Cooking, Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia became a bestselling memoir full of calves’ brains, overwhelm, and one woman’s journey to who she really was. Do most foodies own cookbooks by Julia Child’s? Probably. Have most of them cooked through the entire book? Doubtful. Is it more intriguing to see how someone else does it? Absolutely.

Stephanie Danler’s fiction debut, Sweetbitter, is based on her own experiences working as a server in Manhattan. Your readers may not want to work in a trendy New York City restaurant as a 22-year-old trying to find their way in the world, but it’s certainly more fun to watch the drama unfold from a distance.

Most writers take readers behind-the-scenes because they want them to know what it’s “really like.” There’s a generosity that leaks through the pages and makes it impossible to be stuck in one place.

Create an Invitation for Adventure

Be honest: Who hasn’t imagined their own Eat, Pray, Love trip around the world? Walking off bowls of pasta as you wander the streets of Rome? Yes, please! Part of what makes a book like Elizabeth Gilbert’s so enticing is most people think: I could never do that. I’d love to, but I could never.

No matter where you go, food is the common language. We understand how it works and its purpose, even if we’re not familiar with every single tradition. So, an invitation to step outside of your comfort zone automatically removes any sense of nostalgia because you’ve never been there before. The landscape is fresh, and the cutting board is clean.

Bill Buford’s Heat is for every home cook who has imagined working the line and ended up under Mario Battali halfway around the world in Tuscany. This is why travel shows continue to fascinate audiences. The stakes are already raised as you have no idea what to expect, and you have to be open to whatever may come. 

You don’t have to travel around the world to create adventure. It could be a memoir exploring food culture in your own backyard or your protagonist could be on a cross-country journey for her grandmother’s vintage cake recipe. But whatever it is, it should give your writing freedom to explore new possibilities you wouldn’t have had if you or your main character would have stayed home.

Focus on What Food Experiences Reveal About Your Characters

Years ago, 6 editorial interns at Rolling Stone competed for a staff position on a national television show. One of the first pieces of feedback their editor gave them was that everyone wrote about what people were wearing at a show and the “feeling in the air,” but no one talked about the music. 

The mistake was assuming a common love of music would make people invested in the story. Was it political? Inspired by another local band? Representative of a shift in the genre?

The basic food experience isn’t enough to craft a story. (It hurts because it’s true.)

When you focus on how the morning light hit your mother’s face as she made French-pressed coffee or the feeling of home your character finds in a bowl of soup, you veer into nostalgia, leaving your reader on the other side saying: Why do I care?

Those details reveal nothing about the people in your story and how it connects to the overall narrative. It’s not that you can’t indulge in some nostalgia occasionally, but there should be a more pressing reason your readers are showing up.

Food52’s Amanda Hesser took a one year chronicle of her romance with her now husband and the recipes that made up the 12 months in Cooking for Mr. Latte. The time in the kitchen revealed what their changing relationship meant for Amanda’s own life, from how they entertained to what it was like meeting his mother for the first time. 

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club weaves an intricate fictional account of the lives of four Chinese-born women in San Francisco and the gaps between them and their first-generation American daughters all centered around a weekly meal. It’s the cultural experiences of these women that shows what this particular food ritual represents to these women and why it matters.

So as you’re crafting your own food narrative, with every adventure, behind-the-scenes look and mealtime, ask yourself: What is the change taking place and how does that move the story forward?

By focusing on what your characters or audience truly want in life, you won’t be able to stay nostalgic for long. Instead of static scenes full of reminiscing, true desire creates movement and an opportunity to craft more than the good ‘ole days for you and your reader.

[Editor’s Note: This is Amanda Polick’s first column at DIY MFA. She will be contributing a regular food writing column. Please join us in giving her a warm welcome!]

Amanda Polick is a book coach for food and entertainment professionals based in Nashville, Tennessee. When she’s not eating her way through her newest stack of cookbooks, this former actor and improviser can be found looking for her next favorite performer. Her work has been featured in Cooking Light, Food & Wine, and Time and is now a regular columnist for DIYMFA. To reach out or learn more, visit her website for free inspiration and book writing guides.

The post Food Writing Beyond Nostalgia appeared first on DIY MFA.

Grains of truth

Ever since the development of agricultural societies and the domestication of wild grains, some form of bread or cereal has been part of every diet: unleavened flatbreads (including things like tortillas in the Americas); loaves created by the use of yeast to produce a rise; boiled cereals, such as what we call oatmeal or cream of wheat.

Today, we’re all accustomed to industrially-produced flour, but in the past, the basic ingredient of bread was ground between two stones. The process often resulted in tiny stone chips and some amount of grain husks remaining in the flour. So the quality of one’s bread depended on the care that was taken to sift the flour. In the 12th-16th centuries in Britain, for example, there were even specific names for the bread that indicated either the type of grain used or the quality of the flour 

Paindemaine (and the slightly later term “manchet”) was the finest white bread, made from wheat flour that had been sifted three or more times – so it was expensive and generally eaten only by the rich. No breaking a tooth by chomping down on a tiny piece of rock for the aristocrats! ?

Wastel was also a good quality bread made of wheat flour; but most often, the flour had been sifted only a couple of times, so it was just a bit riskier to the teeth.

Cocket was a very early name for a lower-quality white bread, and the term appears to have been completely obsolete by the mid- to late-1400s.

If your characters were from the lower classes, they might have eaten tourte, which contained both the husk and the flour, or horsebread, in which the flour included ground beans, lentils, or peas along with any type of grain. Clapbread was either barley bread or oatcakes.

And don’t forget the trencher. A thick slice of stale bread was often used as a plate. At the end of the meal, diners had a choice:  eat the trencher themselves, give it to the servants or the poor, or feed it to the dogs or other domestic animals.

Flaked cereal as we know it today didn’t emerge until the end of the 19th century. Boiled cereals based on oats and wheat were long known simply as porridge. Another sort of boiled grain – grits – is of Native American origin and thought to have originated with the Muskogee tribe in the 16th century. Hasty pudding – a thick, boiled-grain concoction that often had raisins or currants and a sweetener added, to make it a dessert – originated in England from where it was carried to colonial America and adapted to be made with corn as well as wheat or oats. When made with corn, it might also be known as corn meal mush, if not sweetened, or Indian pudding if made as a dessert.

Meat and veggies

Meat on the table every day is a relatively modern phenomenon, largely made possible by the advent of refrigeration. Prior to that time, meat had to be eaten before it spoiled, or it had to be preserved in some manner – salted, dried, smoked, cured. In many cultures, the lower classes only had meat as small bits in a mostly vegetable-based soup or pottage. But all cultures developed methods for preserving meat. Is your story set in the American frontier of the 19th century? Jerky or salted meat were the preferred methods of providing protein for long journeys or for the winter months when game could be difficult to find. Be sure to investigate what meat was prevalent in the locale of your story. Was it wild game? What sort of game was hunted? Did people eat more fowl or fish than meat?

Greens, root vegetables, legumes – these exist pretty much everywhere in some form or other. Find out which ones were commonly available and which were delicacies in the place and time of your story. Is your story set in the rural American South? Poke Salad really is a thing – not just the title of a 1968 song. If your setting is Central America, people ate tomatoes as far back as 500 BC. The Spanish and Italians adopted them into their cuisine right away when the conquistadors brought them back from the New World in the early 1500s. But in France and northern Europe, they were thought to be related to deadly nightshade (and therefore poisonous) until much later in the century – cultivation in Britain began in the 1590s. And don’t forget – no potatoes outside Bolivia and Peru before the mid-1500s. If you’re writing about the Inca Empire, let your characters enjoy all the potatoes they’d like. But Europe and the rest of the world didn’t know about them until the Spanish brought them from South America.

The spice of life

We take spices for granted today and even complain if our local grocery is out of ground nutmeg when we’re stocking up for holiday pies. Not so in the past, at least in western societies. When spices had to be brought from the east by caravan, they were terribly expensive and so generally only attainable by the wealthy, who typically stored them in locked spice chests. You may be able to just make out the hasps for a small padlock in the picture. 

Food at war

Is your historical fiction set in war time? Supposedly, Napoleon once said, “C’est la soupe qui fait le soldat” (The soup makes the soldier). And feeding the troops has always been one of the great logistical problems of war. During World War I, British General John Monash is reported to have said, “It takes a couple of thousand men and horses with hundreds of wagons, and 118 huge motor lorries, to supply the daily wants of my population of 20,000.”

Depending on the time of the war in your narrative, what the men ate and what it was called might be very different. As an example, let’s just look at the US Army from World War I through the Vietnam War. In WWI, the threats to fresh food came not just from the rats and vermin that infested the trenches, but also from the risk of gas attacks, which would poison the food. So the army devised Trench Rations, which were meat of some sort (corned beef, salmon, or sardines) in sealed cans and crackers or hard tack, also canned. Multiple cans packed in a canvas bag were issued to each soldier. They were bulky and heavy to carry. The Reserve Ration, which came later in the war, added a packet of pre-ground coffee, some sugar, and a bit of salt.

By World War II, the main form of combat meal was the C-ration, which consisted of one meat unit (either meat and beans, meat and potato hash, or meat and vegetable stew) and one bread-and-dessert unit, each unit in a separate can. A soldier’s daily sustenance was 3 C-rations. The K-ration came in a box, 3 boxes per day, each marked as “Breakfast,” “Dinner,” or “Supper.” Note the little keys to open the canned meat.

K-rations were intended to be used by airborne assault troops, tank crews, and others on short-duration missions.

By the time of the Vietnam war, these rations had been replaced by MCIs (for Meal, Combat, Individual), which included a bit more variety in what they contained – though the ubiquitous cans were still present. Despite having a different designation by the army, MCIs were still popularly called C-rations. Today’s MREs (Meal, Ready-to-eat) didn’t appear on the scene until 1980.

Tip of the iceberg

As I said at the beginning, this is just the tip of the iceberg. What did the caravans on the Silk Road do for food?  What was served in the dining cars of passenger trains in the 1920s in the US? In Europe? What did people eat to try to survive during the Irish potato famine? What was the diet of the Crusaders during their journey to the Holy Land? Did they eat the local food once they’d arrived? What was the diet of the Hawaiian islanders when Captain Cook landed there in 1778? 

No, you don’t need to know the answer to all of these questions and the hundreds more any of us could think to pose. Just ask the right questions for your narrative and serve your characters proper meals.

Pamela Taylor’s inspiration for her first book turned out to be that final straw that pushed her to leave the corporate world behind for the world of words and imagination. Now an author and an editor, she loves helping others polish their stories almost as much as she enjoys writing her own. She’s a member of the DFW Writers Workshop and the Editorial Freelancers Association and has been on the judges panel for the Ink & Insights Contest for three years. You can learn more about her books at secondsonchronicles.com, and about her editing services at editing4you.com.

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