Food and your Story

Seasoned writers often recommend that, if you want to enrich the scene you're writing, you include food, What can food do for a story?

Sometimes food drives the plot -- the poisoned glass of elderberry wine in "Arsenic and Old Lace", for example, or the cookbook in the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man".

Sometimes the food drives the theme -- for example, the lavish descriptions of food in "The Hunger Games", or the lavish presentations of chocolate in the movie "Chocolat".

Sometimes the food develops the characters -- the residents of the ecocollective "Barn Swallows' Dance" in my Gaia series eat mostly vegetarian diets they've grown and raised themselves.

Sometimes the food sets the mood -- if a character picks at his food, we know him to be upset or distracted; if he gobbles the food, he's rushed or famished.

Sometimes the food simply engages the senses in its descriptions. A character eats freshly fried, breaded cheddar cheese curds -- are you hungry yet?

So let's play with this: You have a character, female, college age. She hasn't been able to eat for several hours, because she has been involved in a clandestine operation to stop the bad guys who wish to hijack a large political event. The action she and her group have taken has been marginally successful, and the group chooses a restaurant to eat at.  She feels ambivalent about what she has done, because she has had to exercise the secret power she dislikes having. What will she eat, and how will she eat it? Will she gobble the food? Savor it? Eat it mechanically, not really tasting it?

How will this differ from her co-conspirator, a college-age Japanese man who practices vegetarianism and feels compelled to use his secret power to fix the world?