Skip to content

Your food should spoil

I thought I could live around the world just fine until I had my first culture shock thought: food would be way too different.

Brazil is so mixed culturally and my own blood test reflects the genetic orgy that comes along with it, so you’d think we’d be off the hook with going to another country, it just means more of this one specific part of our culture.

Turns out we do have quite a lot of traditional food in here, and I don’t just mean our inherit superiority with varieties of pizza. I mean adaptations like Pastel, which is a dumpling, with Spanish / Portuguese name, but but adapted from Harumaki when the Japanese couldn’t quite find the ingredients they wanted at the time.

Speaking of rarely spoken Japanese and Portuguese connections, I got another surprise when I was 12 when I learned the word for bread in Japanese came from Portuguese, Pan - Pão.

This kinda made me always want to look up the geographic evolution of culture through history. You do find that a lot with martial arts too, but today we’re talking about food, and not even how wonderfully it behaves like etymology, today we’re talking about those little adaptations from necessity.

Adapting ingredients

Adapting food because of ingredients is pretty standard to anyone that doesn’t want to go to the market or did not have the money to go to the market.

My mom did some wonderful food because we lacked milk, of flour, or eggs. My ex’s dad would make her Japanese food with sardine because other fish were too expensive.

I do think we’ll see this more often from now on, partially, of course, due to how influential I am to my five and a half readers, but also because of the explosion of Dungeon Meshi adapting recipes. But if you are going on the route of worldbuilding food, show how one ingredient is not cheap in that place but the dish still somewhat exists, or this is the only thing available. It can even be for darker reasons.

In Brazil, Feijoada I didn’t even know until writing this article that it is not originally a Portuguese dish. Hell, I didn’t even know one would put sea food in it. What we’re taught is that the remains of pigs were given to slaves and they would just… make do with it.

Today slave food is a weekend food for a lot of family reunions and we just die through the rest of the afternoon because it takes all our body strength to digest it. Dying together in a Sunday is a bounding moment in Brazil. Of course accompanied by our favorite national drink: Coca Cola.

Adapting for Travel

Here is one that we do not talk enough either… Adapting food for travel. We may see one little snack or another due to whatever beef jerky is in the USA, and all I know from it is I want to eat it, seems good.

But like my grandmother would say, empty sack doesn’t stand up, you need a lot more than meat being an asshat during your travels, and I’m sure they had it on their recipes, but I’ll give you a Southern American counterpart.

Wagoner’s Rice is probably my first introduction to food by necessity. Yeah, you had your dry meat, but also rice, a lot of salt, garlic and onions that are known for killing bacteria. And that is what they had for weeks, months of travel.

I love this dish but I couldn’t eat it everyday. Then again if I was desperately hungry and tired, that is all I would be dreaming through the day.

Our mountains aren’t high, officially by the word standards they aren’t even mountains, but whenever I go through them I think about how god damn harsh a small caravan on the winter frost… or the summer storms… or the autumn… spring at least would be pretty.

Adapting for Hunger

Humans will eat the grossest things out of necessity and surviving will always give them the time to think how to make that thing delicious to them. We talk about fire, tools, extracting the bone marrow, farming as major points on our evolution, but we don’t give enough credit about how our calorie expensive brain will tell us we need to chew something horrible to survive.

We take it for granted, but whenever you look at the origin of recipes, that is usually at is source. If we managed a way to eat yard grass we would have it on salad already and it would be normal to you.

Fruits are way bigger and sweeter than they ever were, go look at ancient water melon paintings. Corn, wheat, oat, this is all monster food compared than what it used to be, with a lot of interesting breeding by the way. Drop the smile, that is the term.

Some of them we were not even meant to eat it, you were in a “eat or you die” situation and sometimes you ate it and you died, because of natural selection is a bitch. And I don’t mean we are the best of the best either, for all we know we had three human mutations that could see infrared but they all died because they couldn’t eat boar.

Which means, yeah, people had to adapt by genetic lottery because this was the only dish in town. And when that was all you had, by god you wanted to keep it.

What is good doesn’t last… unless…

Well, with the mention about the wagoner’s, I assume you already pictured all it needs to be said about salt. Salt and vinegar are great, pickles are all about this: put it in a jar, hope it for the best. So are jams.

Honey is known to attract bugs and stuff but if you seal it, that will not let things spoil if you know what you’re doing. Honey by itself has that random internet trivia of a crazy archaeologist eating the evidence to see if it was edible for 3000 years, which makes sense when you study why honey lasts so long but I can’t tell you if it is true or not.

Regardless if true or not the 3000 years thing was obviously not the goal, but refrigeration does make us take for granted that a lot of those recipes begun with the goal of lasting way over a year.

“This tastes terrible”

“It was made by my great grandmother, she was a great cook, 80 years ago, when she was alive”

Wine didn’t begun with the goal of making piss-tasting grape juice be the action figures in mint condition of its time, it begun with “fuck, we still have a lot of grapes”.

Cheese itself is so amazing that I made my castles store it. It is kind of funny, actually. You can’t really store milk for a long time but you can absolutely make edible bricks of the stuff and shove it somewhere for a rainy day.

I also do like thinking how spoiled milk was somewhat dry and then someone said “eeeh, I don’t have much to look forward anyway” and then that happened again with blue cheese that, again, for all we know, was some idiot eating spoiled cheese with his mom yelling on the background until she found out he didn’t die. Considering how successful that was, that poor woman never heard the end of it.

Flour is just a way that you don’t need to boil beams for god knows how long. You can store it better, prevent it performing the miracle of life, and avoid some pests from stealing (though they would adapt), then it led to… everything basically.

Noodles? A way to preserve food that you can just make with water.

Lasagna? Some people with high IQ will say they’re just wider noodles. If you are reading this, you know who you are.

Pizza? It is just bread that used to be a plate (look it up).

Bread? Just flour that you make it grow the best you can.

Cookies? Surprising to me, just drier bread, according to some videos I watched about the Roman soldiers, and an awful variation of this was even used in North American Revolution.

“Dry the bread, we’re packing up to travel and we don’t want the food spoil”

“But captain Centurii, it is already baked, it is dry”

“Dry even further beyooooooond”

If we go by random stuff I read on the internet over the years, there is even some odd 18th century pies that were made to bake the meat while it was being preserved for weeks, and you weren’t supposed to eat the ungodly massive crust (though you could) that would dry so hard a lot of things wouldn’t want to eat it. It was just a method for when you needed to preserve already cooked food and all you had was flour and fat.

And in some cases, you want to just preserve things with grains.

Sushi is actually picked fish

Boy this is gonna make some people mad.

So this article has been a lot of “I heards” content thrown to see if sticks an idea to you and your characters, but I’ll end with one I was actually taught, in a class, by chef.

I love Japanese food, I love cooking Japanese food so much I could eat it everyday like the weaboo I am. I even had a class on Japanese food, but there are some things I just don’t like eating.

Raw fish, for example, I always think to myself, “I have seen a woman that lost an eye because of worms, I know i won’'t buy a de-wormer, is it really worth it for the feeling of a cold wet tongue?” and the answer is usually no.

This isn’t a problem in Japan, by the way, nowadays, their fishing goes through some very strict regulations to avoid that. Probably the only bureaucratic overfishing documentary I ever liked. Here they just don’t happen because you are usually supposed to not be in a rush and cook your fish. Also I wouldn’t really trust my government labeling it.

But if you are wondering “well, what about early on?” you might even find videos about how the Japanese on the 70s-80s would buy salmon from Norway because it had less worms or something. That being said, I really don’t know if it is true or a hell of a propaganda for some viking sashimi brand.

What I do know is that before you wanted fish asap to eat it raw, sushi was invented because they were trying to pickle fish in the most creative way I ever seen. The recipe I was taught involves using a lot of vinegar, salt, sugar, on the rice after it is cooked, some konbu if you have it.

That isn’t the original recipe, it is just how you’d want to approximate to the original without waiting too long. The original recipe is by far the most creative engineering on preserving food, that illustrates the mix of a fishing society that got rice introduced to them. I’m fascinated by it. It was having the raw fish put on a barrel, seal it with rice, and fill as much as you can with vinegar, and that would even kill the worms.

If you are wondering why rice, well, they had a LOT of fish, you don’t want to make it all vinegar, but you had a lot of rice to store anyway, so you could just use the vinegar to fill the gaps.

It would soak up the vinegar over the months just like the you might want to try to save your phone. Salt would be spread evenly to the food and the surroundings, preventing stuff to crawl in wanting some snack.

The fish is already come out tasty and soft, you wouldn’t feel the need to cook it any more than you feel the need to cook a pickled cucumber.

It was supposed to last two to three years, and by the time you take the fish out, well, you are left with a fuckton of rice that you won’t just throw away, you cook the rice, and now you have it already flavored. Win-win.

And while you are at it use those dried sea weeds that are also a way to preserve them.

There you go, pickled fish.

I wouldn’t imagine that.

Hopefully if you couldn’t imagine any of the foods here, that gave you some ideas on how your cities and towns would be making do to not starve when their harvests were supposed to last them a long time.

Think about their wonderful food first and then figure out why it became that way, or go the other way around of the spoiling problem, and make them adapt their food even if it is banana with rice an it makes sense in context.

But if you want to get creative, make your food spoil.

PS: I really wanted to find the videos about grass mixing species, I could swear it was on PBS Eons, when writing this I was also really confident I could find again the pie one. I will update this post if I find it.

Edit: I found the pie one! Credits to Townsends and the book “A New System of Domestic Cookery”!

As a bonus I also found some videos I do remember but I didn’t reference.