Episode 51: Transcript
Episode: 51: The Delicious Significance of Food in Science Fiction
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and everything else. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:09] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer who thinks rather a lot about science.
Annalee: [00:00:14] And today we have an episode that I have been really excited about for a long time. It's about food in science fiction and fantasy. So obviously some of the most memorable scenes in our favorite stories revolve around food or they're set at feasts, but meals aren't just a convenient setting or a way to have action because food means more than just a tasty morsel in a science fiction or a fantasy story. It can actually tell us a lot about a community. It can be involved in world-building. It can help us understand an alien culture or alien taboos. So we're going to dive into all of that and we are incredibly lucky to have a very special guest, Mary Anne Mohanraj.
[00:00:56] She is an author of a ton of books, but most recently she wrote A Feast of Serendib, which is a Sri Lankan-American cookbook, which I am super excited to make some recipes from. She's also the author of The Stars Change and she's published her stories everywhere from George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards series. She has an essay in Roxane Gay's Unruly Bodies. She also, in her copious spare time, founded the speculative iterature magazine, Strange Horizons, and she's the executive director of DesiLit and the Speculative Literature Foundation and she's a professor who teaches fiction and literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. So thank you so much for being with us, Mary Anne.
Mary Anne: [00:01:37] Thanks for having me on my favorite podcast.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:41] Wow! Oh my God, thank you.
Annalee: [00:01:43] Mutual admiration. So now let's start the show.
[00:01:47] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Annalee: [00:02:14] So we're going to start by talking in general about sort of tropes around food in science fiction and a little bit about kind of our favorite and least favorite ways that those tropes get deployed. One of the things that pops up a lot in scifi is that food kind of allows a story to do a short-hand signal that some particular group of people or group of nonhuman creatures is basically gross and other. They're not us. And the first thing that comes to mind for me is that monkey brain scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. And the reason why I bring that up is it's kind of, even though the people in that scene are all humans and it's not set on another world or anything like that, they're treated like aliens. And so our white characters have come to some kind of fake Asian culture and they're served monkey brains.And of course all the white people are like bleeeh. And so we're all supposed to know as the audience that we're in the most scary place possible because they're eating monkey brains.
[00:03:19] And then you see versions of that exact kind of thing in Star Trek where anytime Klingon food is served, all of the non-Klingon look like they're going to barf. And then one of my favorite examples, which is in Peter Jackson's early movie, Bad Taste, where some humans infiltrate an alien society where the aliens bond by barfing in a bowl together and then drinking it and the humans have to participate. So that's the most extreme version of this particular trope.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:49] We actually have a clip of Commander Riker having to eat disgusting Klingon food.
TNG Clip: [00:03:55] Commander, you’re not eating very much.
Riker: I’m not that hungry.
Is the food all right, Commander?
Riker: It’s delicious. Pipius claw was excellent. I also enjoyed this Bregit lung.
And the Rokeg blood pie?
Riker: Delicious.
Good. And you'll also enjoy this!
Riker: Isn't that gagh?
Very good. You did some research on our nutritional choices.
Riker: Yes, but… it’s still moving.
Gagh is always best when served live.
Mary Anne: [00:04:35] Well, I mean what I love about Riker and the gagh is that is that he likes gagh. Right? I mean, gagh, I'm not sure I'm pronouncing it right, but—
Charlie Jane: [00:04:44] It's like wriggling around…
Annalee: [00:04:45] Gagh!
Charlie Jane: [00:04:46] It’s like… gagh!
Mary Anne: [00:04:48] Right, right. He's told that gagh is best served live and then he's like, all right, fine. These separate worms I'm going to be like totally on board with that. Picard also likes it and it's such a nice change with NextGen. It really sort of embodies the difference in how that generation of Star Trek was approaching their role as ambassadors and diplomats and explorers.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:11] Yeah. It's like a challenge, but then he rises to the occasion.
Mary Anne: [00:05:15] Yeah. And I think, you know, there's that moment in Deep Space Nine, right, where Jadzia has ordered like 51 cases of gagh for Martok’s birthday party. But when the shipment arrived—
Charlie Jane: [00:05:27] Aww.
Mary Anne: [00:05:27] I know! It's super sweet. But then she transitioned into Ezri and Ezri couldn't stand the thought of eating it. But it’s not… I thought they did a really nice job of it's not that gagh is so awful. It's that Ezri’s very young and naive and has a lot to learn and so it ends up reinforcing that instead of marking otherness.
Annalee: [00:05:52] Yeah. I really think that that's absolutely right, that we have a lot moments in science fiction where others are marked out by food, but then we see communities coming together through sharing food. And I think that's the, I mean I think that's really the key here is if someone offers you gagh, do you take it and enjoy it or do you kind of make a barfy face? And that’s… those are two different choices that that science fiction stories can make.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:21] Right. And you know, science fiction is full of weird gross out humor, especially stuff that's sort of aimed at kids. One of my favorite bits is in The Last Jedi where Luke kind of milks that creature and then drinks the blue viscous junk directly from its teat. There was also a thing in a recent episode of Legends of Tomorrow where John Constantine scoops up… somebody has just been exploded into like… a human being has just been exploded into like a pile of goop. And John Constantine scoops up some of it and drinks it so he can use it for a spell.
Annalee: [00:06:51] Ewww.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:51] And it's this insane gross out moment. And you know, that kind of gross out humor is great. What's not as great as when it's used to kind of, prop up a kind of xenophobic idea or basically kind of reinforced tropes around real life. You know, people having food that's like weird and gross. Like what Annalee mentioned with the monkey brains.
Mary Anne: [00:07:10] I was sort of… I started thinking about Romulan ale and how it plays out. It comes up over and over again as a marker of sophistication that Kirk drinks Romulan ale. It’s an advantage of being a thousand light years from Federation headquarters. Even though it's illegal, he can get it right. So.
Annalee: [00:07:30] And then of course there's Deanna Troi who shows how much she's part of the crew and is really a human, even though she's a Betazoid by being obsessed with eating chocolate and pancakes and she's always eating these very stereotypical American comfort foods, which apparently have survived far into the future, which kind of makes sense. I mean pancakes are pretty great.
Mary Anne: [00:07:51] Chocolate is forever.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:54] Chocolate… well, we hope.
Annalee: [00:07:54] I mean it's part of the colonial project, so I assume we're going to bring it into space too. So another thing about food in science fiction, and I think especially fantasy, is that when we see people eating together or maybe making food together, it's a way of thinking about the social contract. And I think one of the places this comes up really obviously is the red wedding moment in Game of Thrones where these different groups are breaking bread together and there's a kind of implied social contract there that this is a time of peace. When we break bread together and we have food together, that means that we've put our swords aside and then what's so horrible is, spoilers for a thing that happened long ago, of course, the guests are slaughtered. And it's this terrible moment that's made even more terrible in a show and series of books full of slaughters because it happens at a feast and it happens at the shared table.
[00:08:54] I think that kind idea runs through a lot of fantasy scenarios. Like again, it's a kind of shorthand for talking about what kinds of social connections we have and when we break them. And I keep thinking also about the scene at the very beginning of the anime Spirited Away where the protagonist's parents have taken her to this abandoned theme park and they start eating this magical food that we don't know how it showed up and they eat it and eat it and eat it until they finally turn into pigs, leaving their human daughter alone with the spirits. And again, it's like there's some kind of boundary violation that's going on here and it's being represented through this kind of crazy consumption of tasty dumplings in this case. Which, I've been there, like I never turned into a pig, luckily, but I've definitely eaten the dumplings pretty fast.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:43] Yeah, I mean, part of what's interesting about the George R.R. Martin thing in like the red wedding and so on is if you read the book Catelyn Stark is very careful to make sure that they eat some salt and bread the moment they arrive at Fuckface's house, I can't remember his name, but I'm just calling him Fuckface. Lord Fuckface. Lord Fuckface—
Annalee: [00:09:59] Which we have permission to do because he slaughtered people after letting them be guests at his table.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:04] He’s totally Lord Fuckface. Anyway. And it's a whole thing where she's like, as long as I eat salt and bread, the moment I show up here, we're under his protection, we've got the guest right. And then he turns around and slaughters them and George R.R. Martin in those books is constantly showing feasts and constantly describing food. It's become like a joke at this point, the extent to which he describes food over and over and over again and it's always kind of reinforcing these social bonds and showing how people are living. And it's kind of setting you up for the inevitable thing where they run out of food, presumably, once winter arrives and then there's none of that food anymore that he spent all this time showing you and telling you about.
[00:10:39] But it is also this kind of tradition of hospitality and there is this thing that goes back to the myth of Persephone, but also a bunch of legends about fae where if you visit someone's realm and you eat their food, you have signed a bargain, basically.
Mary Anne: [00:10:53] Right.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:53] You've agreed to either stay in hell or stay in faerieland or work for somebody. There's like a million stories like that. And I feel like modern fantasy plays with that a lot.
Mary Anne: [00:11:02] Well, and I think there's sort of cultural traditions that, I'm not enough of an anthropologist to be able to tell you like how much this is based in reality. But there's certainly a, I don’t know, a mythos around the idea that like back in the village, if someone shared salt with you, if they broke bread with you, they then couldn't hurt you. Right? And there was also an obligation of hospitality that if someone came to your town and needed food… if they show up at your door, you're supposed to feed them. And I think that sort of speaks to the village and kin ties, friendship ties, a little bit, and also precarity, right? If you're in a world where people are starving to death frequently, that becomes very important because maybe you're going to be the one who's wandering and showing up at somebody's door next month, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:11:57] Right.
Mary Anne: [00:11:57] [crosstalk] food. And so I think fantasy, in particular, draws on that, right? So we all kind of grew up with that in the background of that's what the medieval world was like, or that's what the old world was like. And then, you know, I think a lot of George's project with Game of Thrones was to kind of tear down the mythos and the kind of romanticized mythos of all of that. So whether you appreciate that or not. And I think he's talked explicitly about he wanted to show that world as he thinks it was where people would make often quite brutal moves and not be held back by some veneer of civilization. I have huge problems with the word civilization. So anytime I say it, I put big quotes around it, so.
Annalee: [00:12:44] I hear them.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:45] I can hear the air quotes.
Mary Anne: [00:12:47] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:12:48] Also, I think one of the ways that scifi and fantasy kind of take this idea to its extreme is we have a lot of scenarios where people are about to be eaten. You know, they're about to be turned into the meal. So the violation isn't just, I killed you at the table, but I ate you.
Mary Anne: [00:13:03] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:13:04] This came up and Star Trek Discovery, when we find out that in the mirror universe they're eating Kelpiens, or they're eating parts of kelpiens, which is even somehow more disturbing cause they're only eating one tiny part. And then, of course, in a lot of fantasy narratives and fairytales, people are about to be eaten. So there's that confusion of like, are you food or are you a human? Which I think goes—
Mary Anne: [00:13:29] I wonder whether part of the charge of the whole sub-genre of erotic dragon porn et cetera kind of gets a little of it’s power from that. And I think with dragon porn perhaps some of the charge is like here is a creature who under normal circumstances would eat you, but they think you're so hot that they're going to have sex with you instead.
Annalee: [00:13:48] Yeah.
Mary Anne: [00:13:48] Like, that’s a fantasy [crosstalk].
Annalee: [00:13:49] Or both.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:51] Or both, maybe.
Annalee: [00:13:52] Yeah, there's definitely an erotic charge to being eaten. Um, you know, as we've all seen in our copious internet consumption.
[00:14:03] So the other thing I was going to mention briefly is that I think food also, and we kind of touched on this earlier, where food brings people together in scifi and fantasy. And when we were talking about like everyone eating gagh together, you know, that's a way of showing that people have become allies.
[00:14:21] And I think we see it again a lot in fantasy. Nicola Griffith’s novel Hild, which is a historical recreation, it's not really fantasy. But there's so much attention in that novel, which is about the early life of St. Hilda, and there's so much attention to how they make food on these small proto-medieval farms. And how they make butter and how they make wool, which isn't really food, but of course it's from their animals. And so it's like this way of talking how communities come together.
Mary Anne: [00:14:53] Right. I mean, I love how domestic that book is, right? It's very slow paced. It very much is, as you say, how do you make better? How do you like… it's power comes, I think, from the minutia of the day. And she does it beautifully. It's one of… it's a terrific novel. It also makes me think about like when you have those teaching scenes, essentially, like when you're talking the reader through this is essentially, how do you make butter, have it not be an info dump because it's also teaching something about character and the people who are there and so on. But there is a reader pleasure that comes from learning, right? And so a pleasure that comes from seeing someone progress through levels. So in the same way that if you have a magic school where someone comes in and they don't know anything and then every year they advance and they learn more spells, or if it's a fighting thing where they come in and they're clumsy and they learn how to use bow and arrow and so on. I think part of the growth of mastery in cooking and domesticity is something she does really well in that book and it's super satisfying to the reader, right?
Annalee: [00:16:01] Yeah, it is. It's really satisfying. And we're watching her learn more about her world as well as just how to make food. And that's partly her learning about what are all the social relationships that allow this food to happen and allow them to sell the products that they're making because that's what they have to do. I mean, it's a kingdom, sure. But they also have to produce a product that people will pay for.
Mary Anne: [00:16:24] And it is a child and it's a child learning how to navigate her community and then Griffith connects it to power, right? And to having this knowledge of people is kind of what enables Hild survive and manipulate, right, and be able to sort of take on power for herself in a very dangerous situation. That mastery of food and community directly enables her survival.
Annalee: [00:16:49] All right, let's take a quick break and when we come back we're going to talk all about Mary Anne's own work.
[00:16:54] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Annalee [00:17:08] All right. So Mary Anne, your latest book is a cookbook. It's called A Feast of Serendib and you call it a Sri Lankan-American cookbook. So tell us a little bit about the process of putting that together and how that was different from writing a novel or writing a short story.
Mary Anne: [00:17:25] Sure. I mean, so, food is love. Like I feel like I need to like preface with that. So, and I don't know that everyone feels that way, but that's certainly how I grew up. And when I first started writing about in food and fiction, often it was more like bad food showed that someone was mad at you, right? Here's a wife who knows her husband is cheating on her and so she makes him cold rice and he knows as he eats this, he knows that she knows and they're not talking about it. And for years he's going to suffer this, right?
[00:18:02] So the first cookbook I wrote was actually A Taste of Serendib that I wrote, I don't know, two decades ago, right out of college. And it was writing down what I knew of my mom's recipes and what I've been able to figure out about Sri Lankan food mostly by like I'd go home and she would be cooking and I tried to write the recipe down and she would grab a handful of stuff to try and throw into the pot and I would like stick my hands under that and catch it and then take the seeds and measure them and then come back and put it in the pot. Right. Like over and over again. Because she didn't measure anything.
[00:18:34] So I was able to write those recipes down. I gave it to her as a Christmas present and I was so proud of myself. I was like, I don't know, 23 or something. And she started going through the book and saying, well, you've got this wrong, you got this wrong. And so I threatened to do a second edition with [inaudible]’s corrections and red all the way through and she… it would have been great. She didn't go for it. So then I kind of left it aside for a long time, right? I cooked, but I wasn't planning to become a recipe writer or do another cookbook. But then when I was diagnosed with breast cancer five years ago, and I'm fine now, but when I was diagnosed, I had this kind of panicked moment of like all the things that I wasn't going to maybe get to tell my kids.
[00:19:15] And I wanted to like make videos to record. And when I finished treatment I found myself obsessively cooking. And it really wasn't a decision. It was, just like the sense of here's this vast amount of food knowledge, Sri Lankan food knowledge, all of this food that I love that I grew up eating that I didn't know how to make and it was going to be lost in the next generation, right? And that's knowledge that is part of the oral tradition. It's kind of closely held, right. My mom would never have published her recipes because that was part of a woman's value. That was your hoard is that you're a really good cook and you're not going to tell anyone your secrets. And so she wouldn't have shared that. But there are other people who did write down recipes and, so I was…
[00:20:05] I ended up going online. I bought cookbooks. I watched YouTube videos from people in Sri Lanka, but also the diaspora in Australia and the UK. And there's been very recently a surge of people who are starting to teach this food. And so, I dunno, I just, I got completely obsessed with it. And, I mean, I know you guys get obsessed with sciency things or whatever else there is. So it’s a different kind of science and it's this, the way the Sri Lankan hoppers go with pulse sambal and sini sambal is something that has been refined over thousands of years. Based on what are the ingredients that are available in this area and how do you make them go together really, really well. And, so that’s a very deep knowledge, which I find very exciting.
Annalee: [00:20:52] Yeah. That's so interesting. I feel like it's a form of world-building in a sense, or maybe sort of recreating history.
Mary Anne: [00:21:01] Yeah, no, I think that's fair, right? I mean, and I mean if you set out to create a planet, you're thinking, okay, I want mountain ranges. I want storms. I want, it's going to be good for the drama of my story if I have it be very cold and so on. And then you make a couple of decisions and then suddenly you realize, oh, okay, that's going to now lead to all of these consequences, right? Because worlds are these interrelated systems.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:26] Right, it’s literally an ecosystem.
Mary Anne: [00:21:28] Right, right. So you end up having to think about food the same way though. That if I'm looking at Sri Lanka and I'm looking at a recipe and I'm like, oh, this is interesting, they're using limes. My mom used lemons. Why does she use lemons? Oh, well she was an immigrant in Connecticut in the 1970s and limes were not easily available. And so she adapted and she used lemons and that changed the food just a tiny bit. And then she adapted again. She couldn't get coconut milk, so she was using cow milk for her curries. Cow milk isn't as sweet, so she ended up starting to use ketchup with instead of just tomato paste or tomatoes, because that added a little sweetness back in and it brought it closer to the right balance of salt and tang and sweetness, right?
Annalee: [00:22:14] Amazing.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:15] That is amazing.
Mary Anne: [00:22:17] It's fascinating. And so like, and there's all kinds of… And of course there's, once you factor in colonialism and the influences of, Sri Lanka was colonized by the Portuguese and the Dutch and the British and they brought Chinese laborers. All of that is very visible in the cuisine of the island. And if you pick up like the classic Daily News cookbook, you will have huge sections that look like they're lifted out of a British cookbook of that era. Of, say, the 1800s. And even today if you go to a lot of the restaurants at the hotels will have high tea, right? And you get the British tea sandwiches and the cucumber sandwiches and scones and then right there along with all of that, you will have huge fried prawns with a hot sauce. So, that’s how you know how you’re in Sri Lanka.
Annalee: [00:23:07] That sounds so good.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:07] That sounds amazing.
Mary Anne: [00:23:09] Yeah, it's awesome.
Annalee: [00:23:10] Is that why your book is subtitled a Sri Lankan-American cooking to reflect that specific context?
Mary Anne: [00:23:17] Yeah, it's definitely not. I mean, you know, we touched on appropriation earlier and there's certainly… it’s such a complicated topic, right? Because there's fusion. There is just playing with other people's cuisine is I think, terrific, right? Generally I'm all in favor of that and that's how food evolves, right? And as you get access to new ingredients, as you're exposed to new techniques, you bring that back. I was making, I was making mas paan earlier today, which are like little beef curry buns. I'm going to be making a couple of different ones for an event on Friday, so I'm making caramelized onion buns and something else and probably a jackfruit and chickpea bun. And so I wanted to be able to distinguish them so they didn't all look like buns and I didn't tend to vegetarian a beef bun. So, I went online and I looked for different bun styles and I found one that I think is probably a Chinese style where you slice the top several times to make like a flower shape and you sprinkle sesame seeds on it. And okay, now I have a Sri Lankan bun with a slight sesame flavor added and a very different appearance than you're used to. And I'm totally serving them on Friday and they're going to be awesome.
Annalee: [00:24:30] Oh yeah.
Charlie Jane: Annalee: [00:24:30] Wow. Booking my plane ticket right now.
Annalee: [00:24:34] I should, yeah, I should confess or acknowledge that both of us have had your food many times because—
Charlie Jane: [00:24:39] It’s amazing.
Annalee: [00:24:39] —I think the first time I met you was at Wiscon, which is one of our favorite science fiction conventions. And you were having an event and you brought a bunch of food that you'd made and you were like, here have some food. And I was like, this is amazing. Where did you get this? And you're like, I made it. And I was like, this is perfect.
Mary Anne: [00:24:56] Food is love, right? Like I love Wiscon and I love the people at Wiscon. And that’s how I show it, though, is by bringing the food. I actually had a library board meeting last night and I don't think it's typical that elected officials bring homemade sweets to board meetings. But I had pushed for this thing that had required a lot of extra work on the part of staff and the board and they did it and we were looking at the results yesterday. And so this is my, I dunno, my Sri Lankan female cultural training is that you show people that you appreciate them by bringing them food you've made. So, I don't know.
Annalee: [00:25:33] Yeah. One of my favorite parts in The Stars Change, your recent book, which is, I guess, linked short stories, is sort of toward the climax. And this isn't really a spoiler, several of the people who've been through really difficult stuff and they're having to band together to try to rescue some people. They all sit down and have samosas together. And the aunties all like make these samosas just out of nowhere. There's just this collective, we're going to all make samosas right now and we're all going to eat them. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that scene or the role that that plays in your storytelling.
Mary Anne: [00:26:10] I mean, it's funny, people notice that. And I think almost the most striking thing is that readers notice it. Because I think from my viewpoint, of course you can't set off on a major quest and where you're going into danger without fuel. Food is fuel and you might have to eat first, otherwise you're just going to be like falling over as you're running through, whatever, the area where—
Annalee: [00:26:32] The danger.
Mary Anne: [00:26:34] Yeah, right? So like any… I mean there's that saying about quartermasters, right? That the army marches on its stomach, right? So it's critical and I think it's sort of a sad lack in adventure fiction that in a lot of ways food is treated very poorly. It's not, all the medieval stories where, you know, what do you eat in a meal? If you're an adventurer, you eat stew. Because it’s such a cliché. If you were actually a medieval person of that era, you would have a wide range of things you made. You would not be having stew on the road every single night. So, I think actually Diana Wynne Jones in her, what is it? The Tough Guide to Fantasyland? I think she mocks that a little bit. I would love to see genre writers think this through a little bit. And you know, if maybe they don't know how to cook, maybe they don’t cook themselves, but think through in the same way that if you were writing an adventure and your characters are using horses, you have to think about the needs of the horses and you can't actually just ride the horses for 5,000 miles without killing them.
[00:27:45] So in that same way, you have to think about sort of the human bodies that your protagonists are living in and what are the needs of those bodies. And I'm not saying that we have to see every bathroom break or every use of a menstrual hygiene product. Although, you know, seeing it a little more often would probably not hurt.
Annalee: [00:28:05] Yeah, that would be good.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:06] That'd be kind of cool.
Mary Anne: [00:28:08] Yeah. But not using food is like, well it's like skipping over the sex scenes too. I have to say. It is… it feels like a really weird lack and a missed opportunity to show how people approach this and it lets you reveal character and it provides a place for character interactions.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:26] What I usually see in fantasy stories, I feel like this happens a lot in Xena: Warrior Princess where like she hunts or she fishes, she catches some fish and then we see them roasting and eating the fish. And that's the thing is like, you know, part of how you know that they're tough is that they catch their food, they catch their dinner.
Annalee: [00:28:42] Oh, but you know what's a funny example of that? In Lois Bujold, okay. Now which one is this? I can't remember. One of the Miles Vorkosigan books, she has them going out and fishing on the lake and then they spend all day, they're not catching anything. And then towards the end of the day, I think it's Miles who pulls out a stunner. And like just stuns a bunch of fish.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:05] Oh wow.
Mary Anne: [00:29:07] [inaudible] he's like, yeah, that's what we always used to do in the end. Right. Like fishing isn't really about catching the finish. It's about being out on the water, et cetera and so on and like having this contemplative time. So it was… Bujold is actually really smart about this kind of stuff.
Annalee: [00:29:23] Yeah. She's really great. She's got a good eye. I think it's also true that there's a kind of romanticization that happens when you have characters who are on the road and the food they eat is simple wholesome food.
Mary Anne: [00:29:36] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:29:38] And there's this part in Ursula Le Guin’s more recent novel, The Telling, that always stuck in my mind cause it pissed me off where her characters kind of are in the city and we know that the city is kind of corrupt and terrible because everyone eats food that's very highly spiced and very processed and very… It, basically, it just sounds like yummy food. But then out in the country they have simple bread and cheese and fruit and that's kind of the valorized areas, when you're having this simple food. And I was like, but I want the spicy food. But I think that's part of that, romanticizing the simpler folk, kind of idea.
Mary Anne: [00:30:15] Yeah. And, I mean, I think Le Guin, she struggled with that I think sort of all through her life in some sense, right? As the daughter of an anthropologist, I think you do see that romanticization of the simple life a lot in her work. And it's something that she kind of was constantly thinking about civilization and what made civilization and contrasting it. And I think, if you look at her work and then also Delany in his Tales of Neveryon, he has similar conversations about the village, cooking in the village, living together in the village. And I think both of them are trying to interrogate it. I think Delany does this somewhat more successfully on that front, although I say this is an ardent Le Guin fan.
Annalee: [00:30:59] Oh yeah, me too.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:00] Oh yeah, same, of course.
Annalee: [00:31:00] No… it's not an overarching complaint. It was more just that I was like, I’m pretty sure…
Mary Anne: [00:31:07] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:31:07] I'm pretty sure country people eat spicy food, too. You know, that was what I kind of was reacting to.
Mary Anne: [00:31:13] Well, and it is a little problematic in the same way that when you look at Hunger Games, right? The way that the people of the city are portrayed as… how do you know that they're bad? Is because—and that they're morally troubled is that they have a lot of attention paid to clothing and ornateness and that's a sign of decadence, right? And that's—
Charlie Jane: [00:31:36] And they eat fancy food. It's like in Asterix when they go to Rome and they're suddenly eating lark tongues and sparrow eggs and stuff. And it's like, oh my God, what the fuck are these people eating? And then they go back to their village. It's like the feast where they're just eating roast boar all the fucking time.
Mary Anne: [00:31:51] Right.
Annalee: [00:31:51] Roast boar, the simplest food.
Mary Anne: [00:31:55] Well, and there was this analysis reading about Hunger Games, and one of the things that's so interesting about that series is that certainly when I read it, I read it as a pretty liberal story. You know, here are the downtrodden kind of rising up against the wealthy in power sort of thing, but it's actually very popular among a large conservative segment and they see it as, oh yeah, the people of the city are clearly the corrupt liberals, right? They're the ones who are decadent and who are indulging in all of these pleasures of the flesh and it's the wholesome people in the countryside who are staying to the true way. I thought that was fascinating. I don't know that she intended that, but there's a set of people who see it that way.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:39] So you mentioned before that like leaving out the food is like leaving out the sex scenes. How is writing about food similar or different from writing sex scenes?
Mary Anne: [00:32:47] Yeah, it's funny, I recently… I've been working on some essays about food and I drafted one recently and showed it to my group for critique. And I had not yet written any of the sensory description because I was kind of, I was kind of trying to think through the ideas. And the ideas I was sort of struggling with a little bit in terms of family and whatever else and people were disappointed. A couple of people were like, oh Mary Anne, we love your sensory descriptions. And that’s what's one of the best things. And I had to sort of say like, I actually add those later. For whatever I'm writing, whether it's a sex scene or whatever, my process, which I'm not saying this is a good process, but that's sort of the way my brain works is it kind of starts out kind of intellectual and character based. And so I, I tend to write dialogue and I dunno, people working out their issues first. In my first draft, it's a very bare bones first draft and then the second draft is where I go in and put in, hopefully, or I try to put in a rich layer of sensory details. So that's setting and food and the body, all of that.
[00:33:51] When you do that, it does inform and change the story, right? So you have to be open to what that might do to the piece overall, if that makes sense. You would expect that it's just going to be color and it doesn't matter, but it actually really does matter.
Annalee: [00:34:07] Yeah.
Mary Anne: [00:34:07] So if I could do it all at once, I would, it's just somehow not how my brain works.
Annalee: [00:34:12] Well, thank you so much for joining us and tell us where people can find your stuff online and offline and all that.
Mary Anne: [00:34:19] My name, Mary Anne Mohanraj, that's my website. You can read masses of short fiction there for free. Science fiction, fantasy, mainstream lit, et cetera. A Feast of Serendib will be coming out officially March 6th. I'm going to be traveling all over the place, so see the website. See the website for the book tour info. We are… Ben Rosenbaum and I are doing a book tour starting in Boston at Readercon and we're going to be driving cross country to Chicago hitting like, I don't know, 16 cities on the way. It's a little intense, but it's going to be really fun this summer and then we're going to hit a bunch of others. I'm going to visit a bunch of other cities between now and then as well. So Bay Area, Seattle. Oh, I don't know. Lots. Lots. Lots of places
Annalee: [00:35:04] Awesome, great. All right, well thanks again.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:08] Thank you so much.
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Annalee: [00:35:24] You've been listening to, Our Opinions Are Correct. Thank you so much for tuning in. You can follow us on Twitter at @OOACpod. You can support us on Patreon, which would be really nice. We’re there as OurOpinionsAreCorrect.
[00:35:41] Thank you so much to our amazing producer, Veronica Simonetti, who is here at Women's Audio Mission, making us sound like we're not completely incoherent slobs. And thanks to Chris Palmer for the music. You can always find us on the usual places to get podcasts. On Libsyn or Apple Podcasts. And if you leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, that really helps people find us. And you'll be hearing from us again in two weeks. So thanks for listening. Bye.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:08] Bye!
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