Food and drink is an important part of creating a realistic fantasy world, for all your characters should need to eat and drink at some point. Depending on your society, food and drink may feature heavily or barely (maybe drink will feature frequently). Either way, it is a good idea to pinpoint the essence of what food and drink means to your characters and how they enjoy it.

Developing your character’s love or hate of certain food and drink will make them much more endearing to the reader. But first you must know what types of food and drink is available in that society.

You need to consider:-

• What food grown on the land they live on
• What types of plants/food is unable to grow
• What they are able to import or trade from other neighbouring lands
• How this effects their relationship with neighbouring lands
• How important drink is to your society
• How food is cooked/made/spiced/sweetened
• How drink is made/brewed/spiced/sweetened

Food

There are many different ways to cook food, from frying to stewing, from broiling to steaming. Have a look at some cooking techniques.

It is possible to cook many types of plants and animals so you need to decide which ones are relevant for your world, and if it is necessary to create new ones. If you do need to create a new type of animal or plant, you should make it clear why you have done this – it should not be for the sake of it. Maybe the world you have created is extremely warm and therefore certain types of plants or animals would not be able to survive there. Have a look at these meat animals to help broaden your mind on the different types of animals possible for consumption. You can also use that list to base your creations on.

Drink

Consider whether water would be deemed as suitable to drink in your society or if only certain classes of people drank water (clean/unclean etc). Ale, beer, cider, wine and mead were all popular in the Middle Ages and many were spiced with different kinds of fruits, herbs and spices and sweetened with honey. Obviously the fermenting process that many alcoholic drinks need would need to be considered, even if it is never explained in your story. Find out more info on alcohol here.

Incorporating it into your story

There will be obvious times in your story when your hero and other significant characters will need to eat – at some kind of resting point or when visiting a King/Lord or when a celebration is taking place – and there are other times when you can insert eating and drinking alongside something else a character is doing. Whichever way you do it, you should make sure that it is possible for the reader to get some kind of insight into the types of food and drink eaten by the people in that society. Remember that higher classes will eat and drink differently from lower classes, and some things that may be available easily to one city may not be to another. It is up to you how you structure the agreements made around food and drink so that your story will not only seem realistic but so that it is also interesting for the reader.