This week: Preservation Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Old people shouldn't eat health foods. They need all the preservatives they can get.
—Robert Orben
Alcohol is a good preservative for everything but brains.
—Mary Pettibone Poole
The length of the life of the consumer of the product is, to the vast majority of food manufacturers, not nearly as important as the product’s shelf life.
—Mokokoma Mokhonoana |
The thing about food is: left alone, most of it goes bad in hours or days. There are exceptions, but most foods require varying degrees of preservation.
Today, we have refrigerators, freezers, and canning technology. This wasn't always the case, and a great deal of ingenuity went into making foods last longer. It's how we got things like jam, cheese, pickles, and jerky.
When writing fantasy not set in our technological era, though, it can be tempting to handwave food preservation with some sort of magic. Magic is a big part of fantasy, so yeah, you can do that. Or if you're writing science fiction, you can invoke a stasis field (a technology so advanced to us that it might as well be magic) or imagine something like a replicator from Star Trek (also magic).
But I think that misses out on a lot of opportunity. Food is very close to a universal requirement for living beings. Sure, maybe you've got plant creatures that survive on photosynthesis, but most animals and even some plants also need to eat. So it helps develop your setting if you give some thought to how food is produced, processed, and preserved.
It may be that our first attempt at preserving food for later was cooking. While the food would still go bad in a fairly short time, it still lasted longer than raw. Salt played a big role in preservation, historically. And sometimes, you even get controlled rot: the food's going to go bad anyway, so why not make it go bad in a way that's not going to make you sick?
For most of human history, we didn't even really know what made food rot. It just did, like some evil magic or curse. It was only when we found out about microorganisms that we figured it out (to some extent, anyway). But even before then, we were using these microbes; for example, yeast in the baking of bread.
Exactly what methods were used for food preservation depends on culture and geography. Those living in colder climates had some advantages with natural refrigeration, not to mention the food found and/or grown would be different in different regions.
Point is, nothing lasts forever, but by ingenuity or trial and error, we can make food with a longer shelf-life, even without the preservatives of modern technology. And a lot of that is going to be reflected in the culture. Not everyone in a pre-technological fantasy setting is going to hunt and kill fresh game every day, or have a garden to choose fresh vegetables from. And they probably don't have refrigerators or stasis fields. So what do they do? Think about that, and you'll know more about your setting. |
Some preserved food for thought:
| | | Her Guardians [13+] #2120184
They did their best to protect her. For the Pink, Fluffy Unicorn Contest.
by Kit  |
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Last time, in "In a Name" , I talked about how characters get named.
S🤦♂️  : In my fantasy settings, all names have meaning, based on Latin, Greek, Egyptian, Celtic and North tongues. I pick one aspect of a character's personality, and then name them based on that, with suffixes and prefixes indicating country of birth, or city/town/etc.
Solid way to do it, I think.
So that's it for me for now! See you next time. Until then,
DREAM ON!!!
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Fantasy: November 12, 2025 Issue [#13441]
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