https://vittles.substack.com/p/always-coming-home-the-pleasures
"“For fantasy is true, of course,” Ursula Le Guin reminded us. “It isn’t
factual, but it’s true”. If fantasy functions as a commentary on the real, then
how should we read its food? In
Lord of the Rings, Tolkien made a distinction
between the familiar food of Hobbits and Men and the fantasy food of Elves and
Ents to foreground that while Elves and Ents were no longer of this world
(their semi-magical foods, lembas and Ent-draught, had passed from memory)
there was a temporal lineage between the world of the book and the world we
live in today. The Shire, in particular, is a stand-in for England, and a lost
England of a particular time ─ its feasts of cold meats, pork pies, scones,
thick cut bread, seed cake, mince pies, cream and berries would not look out of
place in an Eliza Acton or Isabella Beaton cookbook. Good times are associated
with abundance ─ the main crime of the Scouring of the Shire is the rationing
and theft of food, and the war’s end coincides with the most extraordinary
harvests the Shire has seen. You don’t need to have an imagination to work out
what Tolkien was really referring to here.
Food acts similarly in the
Redwall series by Brian Jacques, who, like
Tolkien, was affected by the scarcity of food during the war and the decline of
the British larder. The cuisine of Jacques’s woodland creatures is as nativist
as Tolkien’s (both try to exclude the New World, although Tolkien can’t help
but include tobacco and Jacques potatoes) except Jacques’s cuisine is more
radical. The cuisine in
Redwall did not exist when Jacques wrote it. It
completely eschews meat, focusing instead on native vegetables and fruits and
foraged items, decades before this became the remit of Noma or every trendy
wine bar in your city. The various sub-cuisines eaten by different creatures ─
the pie and tuber based food of the moles (West Country), the coastal cuisine
of the otters (Cornwall) ─ are stand-ins for the regionality vanishing from
British cuisine, as distinct as their accents. It is a vision of Modern British
as distinct as the ones set out by Alastair Little or Fergus Henderson.
Today’s newsletter by Eli Lee is about two other writers who use real food to
create imaginary worlds, and use those imaginary worlds to say something about
our’s. One is Lee herself, whose novel
A Strange and Brilliant Light comes
out later this month. In Lee’s world, a cuisine takes on the hyperregionality
of one single person, blending different experiences across time and space and
resolves them to create something completely new, something which is based in
reality and yet does not exist. The second writer is Le Guin herself, whose
novel
Always Coming Home (yes, I know) takes a real hyperregional cuisine and
fictionalises it, neither anticipating change (like Jacques) nor looking back
with nostalgia (like Tolkien) but re-imagining a California as it perhaps
should have been. It is a cuisine of utopia, but as Rebecca May Johnson, who
edited today’s newsletter, says, “Utopia does not come from nothing. We can
make utopias from the materials already there”."
Via Esther Schindler.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
