4 Tips for Writing Food in Fiction

In my newest foodie rom-com, Best Served Hot, food plays a central role in the story (that's what happens when both of your main characters are restaurant reviewers). However, even if food doesn't play a central role in your story, you might find yourself including it anyway—after all, everybody has to eat.

(3 Ways To Incorporate Food in Your Fiction)

Here are some tips you might find helpful for fully seasoning your novel.

We might talk about food mainly in terms of how something tastes, but there's so much more to the experience of eating. Let's take a piece of crispy bacon. If you just say that your character ate a piece of bacon, you're missing the chance to really immerse the reader in your character's mind and world.

The first thing your character notices might be how it looks—maybe it's glistening with grease, a deep golden-brown—or how it smells—smoky. When they taste it, they won't note only the taste—meaty, salty—but whether it feels crispy between their teeth or bends a little with fat, the sense of touch. And don't forget sound, whether it's crunching or sizzling! Using all five senses goes a long way toward getting words on a page to make a reader hungry.

You can use food to say a lot about your characters. Let's take two characters: Jordan and Kai. Jordan is very picky about food, only eating a few select things like macaroni with butter and chicken nuggets. Kai's favorite food is their grandmother's dal makhani, which they savor because they don't have time to cook very much, subsisting mostly on takeout, which is not nearly as good.

I haven't said anything about them that doesn't have to do with food, but I bet you have an idea of at least some of their character traits. Similarly, the way you use food in your narrative can show the reader things about your characters. Maybe the way your character picks at their food and doesn't have much of an appetite can show that they're anxious, or the way they cook cake after cake for loved ones can show how much they care for others.

In Best Served Hot, my characters eat a wide range of food, from caviar at fancy restaurants to burgers at fast-food stands. In order to figure out what they'd be likely to eat at each of these places, I delved deep into restaurant reviews of similar joints, Yelp pages, and Instagram hashtags, thumbing through photos and descriptions of delicious-looking and -sounding food of all types. If my characters ate only things that I'd eaten, my book would be a lot more boring for it.

And sometimes more general research can really inform your book. Like, if your character is cooking something, you'll want to look up recipes or watch cooking videos to make sure they're doing it all correctly so that you don't get dinged by avid cooks. If they go out to eat a cuisine you're not super familiar with, you'll want to research menus and the cuisine to make sure what they're eating lines up.

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Think out of the box! Food doesn't just have to be for eating. If you're writing romance, food can be used in all sorts of fun ways in a makeout or sex scene—that adage of a good kisser being able to tie a cherry stem into a knot with their tongue is a classic for a reason. If you're writing a mystery or a thriller, food can be used as a vehicle to kill—what food would cyanide, which is supposed to taste like bitter almonds, be best suited to? I bet it would blend right into a dark chocolate amaretti biscuit.

And in science fiction and fantasy? There are so many avenues you can take! How has humanity's food changed in a far distant future, or in space? What do people in your secondary world eat, or how has magic in our world changed food? I can't wait to see how you use food to build your world.

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