Writer Lara Vapnyar teaches at City College in New York, and this NY Times article reports that “her students often turned in work filled with sex and gore. One assignment she gave them was to write about food and how characters responded to it, to teach them how preferences, memories and quirks could make up a personality on the page.
“‘Beginning writers often don’t give their characters enough particulars,’ she said. ‘Food is something that readers can understand.'”
Doesn’t this sound like a good assignment? I’ve wanted food in my stories ever since I read something about the rich diets found in French fairy tales. Take “La Belle et la Bête” or “Beauty and the Beast.” Belle is trapped in the castle and does not see her ugly suitor except over a meal. Of course, he’s so pathetic she finally gives in to him, and voila, a happy ending. What a great story.
I always recall the passage in Solzhynitsin’s The Gulag Archipelago, in which he told how reading classic literature was often a kind of torture for prisoners in work camps, because of all the food the characters got to enjoy so frequently.