Food's Influence On Culture in Worldbuilding in Speculative Fiction

Speculative fiction requires massive amounts of worldbuilding in order to create realistic societies and cultures for the audience to understand. While there are many aspects of worldbuilding such as economics, religion, and politics that are highly focused on in the discussion of how to worldbuild, there are also elements of everyday society that are not discussed as thoroughly. One of these aspects is food. This includes both how food is produced in certain speculative fiction settings and how these different cultures interact with food items on a daily basis. In addition to the ways that food systems operate, this project looks into three major works of speculative fiction--Star Trek: The Next Generation, Battlestar Galactica, and the works of Tolkien--to analyze the ways that these pieces of fiction have or have not used food as a part of worldbuilding. Then, I use the research that I have done to demonstrate the ways in which the food system can be incorporated into a work of speculative fiction through the writing of my own creative piece, “Of Yoila and Yalia”. My research details the ways that speculative fiction tends to treat food as either a logistical issue or simply a differentiating cultural marker instead of a useful tool to build a culture and act as a foothold for readers as they access a world that is foreign to them. Through my research and the writing of “Of Yoila and Yalia”, I conclude that food is an important aspect of creating a society and a culture that is not only accessible to readers but is relatable and understandable. To overlook food is to disregard one of the most compelling elements of culture that people interact with on a daily basis and therefore miss much of what culture revolves around.