If you are ever lucky enough to take a class from Emma Bull and Will Shetterly, who taught me much of what I know about writing and almost everything I know about writing novels, you will be familiar with the term "food values." A book which describes food in an entertaining way, whether it's the hilariously revolting "worms in custard" scene from Diana Wynne Jones' Witch Week, Vlad Taltos' explanation of why life is like an onion in Steven Brust’s Taltos, Tolkien's short cut to mushrooms, or the extraordinary fruit of Venus in C. S. Lewis' Perelandra, has good food values.

If you're familiar with all or any of the scenes I mentioned, you know how the food values are not only fun to read about, but also illuminate character and advance the plot. In Perelandra, they also provide fodder for thoughts on greed, everyday pleasures vs. extraordinary ones, the value of serendipity, and the idea that some things, like soap bubbles, cherry blossoms, or the passing moments of time, are beautiful and precious precisely because they are ephemeral.

Good food values do not have to concern tasty food, nor do they have to be lengthy. But if you're going to bother to mention that your characters ate something, you may as well say what it was and whether it was any good. Perhaps also what it smelled like, any illuminating rituals that were performed during the course of the meal, and whether there were any amusing food-related moments such as someone accidentally pouring the beer down the front of her shirt. If you're not even going to say what was eaten, you probably should have set up earlier that your point of view character is so unconcerned with food that he eats without even noticing what it is-- it's just fuel to him.

On the flip side, if your characters always eat the same things, you only need to describe the food the first time it's mentioned. Do not do what L. E. Modesitt did in the Spellsinger books, which was to always have everyone eat the same fruit, bread, and wine, and then describe in long and boring detail the peeling of each apple, the passage through the throat of each sip of wine, the tearing and chewing of each slice of bread, every single time the characters ate... and have the food and the manner of its consumption give no information about character, plot, or the customs and geography of the country. That way madness lies. Probably for the reader.
The night before I wrote this essay, I had dinner with some friends at a Japanese restaurant. Our toast was "Kampai!" which is Japanese for "Cheers!" One of my friends was surprised that I'd never before drunk sake as they served it, from little wooden boxes that held about a shot, but had only ever drunk it from ceramic cups or glasses. He said that he preferred it from natural wood boxes, so it absorbed some flavor from its container, but the ones we drank from were lacquered red and black.

We had lamb chops with crispy skin along the bones, seared Japanese peppers which are eaten whole and fill your mouth with seeds, sausages dipped in mustard, fatty chicken wings, juicy chunks of beef, pearl-like ginkgo nuts, and tiny quail eggs which were hard-boiled, then marinated in soy and roasted just long enough to heat them but not long enough to make them lose their tenderness.

The evening was only marred by the moment when I accidentally poured sake down the front of my shirt, then banged the bottle into the metal cooling bucket as I replaced it.

BOOOOM! Everyone in the restaurant turned around.

If I was very self-conscious, or had been trying to impress a date, that moment might have so overshadowed the entire evening that I wouldn’t have even noticed what I was eating. But since I was with old friends, and I am used to looking foolish in mixed company, I blushed. And kept eating.

If I was a sake connoisseur, like my friend who likes natural wood, I might have described the flavor of the sake.

If I wasn’t very familiar with Japanese food, I might have paid more attention to the details of eating with chopsticks, to the funny writing on the wall, and to my surprise that raw fish wasn’t even on the menu.

Food values are a function of point of view. Different people like different things. Different people notice different things. But everybody notices something, and what they notice will tell you what they think is important. The act of eating and drinking can say an enormous amount about a person, a culture, and the relationship of people to each other—whether they feed each other bites, ask permission to sip each other’s drinks, make formal toasts, or throw food at each other and get thrown out of the restaurant.

Food is character. Food is culture. Don’t forget to eat.