Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there.

This week, I cover Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat. On the surface a microhistory of kitchen implements—and full of fun facts about spoons—this book is also a deep examination of how technology shapes and is shaped by culture, through the lens of inventions that are rarely acknowledged as technology at all.

What It’s About

Cooking is central to what it means to be human. Our symbiosis with fire goes back hundreds of thousands of years, and the “predigestion” of cooking freed calories for growing our big brains. It took a while, though, for those brains to invent tools for techniques beyond sticking a hunk of meat into the coals. The first cookpots appear in the archaeological record about 10,000 years ago. Prior to that, only groups like the Māori, who lived near hot springs, knew the joys of boiling food. Another early innovation, found in Polynesia, involves cooking food in pits filled with fire-heated stones, a method particularly suited for starchy vegetables like taro and breadfruit. But pots allow for soft foods—which keep elders going after they lose their teeth—and stews and soups that stretch limited ingredients. They make it easier to use grains, and thus encourage the rise of agriculture. It doesn’t come up in Wilson’s book, but I imagine fascinating variations with the “partial agriculture” cultures from The Dawn of Everything.

Clay pots are one of Wilson’s many examples of how cooking tools interact with human culture—not to mention human anatomy. Whatever you can do over the fire doesn’t need to be done by the stomach or the teeth. It affects the types of foods available, who prepares them, the risks involved, and attitudes toward what foods are desirable. It’s affected in turn by available ingredients and materials, hierarchies, and social roles. For most of history and prehistory, cooking has been both necessary and perilous. Fire burns human flesh as well as food; knives are weapons as well as necessary for preparing meals. English-style cooking and eating develops from abundant fuel and outsourced labor: spit-roasts over long-lasting fires, turned by servants or slaves. Wilson quotes a recipe that involves beating an egg long enough to “weary” two people. Diners cut up servings at table, and detailed etiquette tries to minimize the threat of using knives on each other. Meanwhile, Chinese cookery develops from scarce fuel and uses labor differently: everything is cut small during the prep stages and cooked quickly at high heat—then served to diners who don’t need knives at all.

Industrial invention is often incentivized by managers and factory owners, and may move ahead of (or at right angles to) the comfort and safety of the actual users. Cookware, on the other hand, has tended toward a more conservative speed of invention—sometimes because those doing the preparation preferred familiarity to innovation, and sometimes because those outsourcing the labor to servants had no incentive to minimize that labor. It’s no coincidence that labor-saving cookware suddenly expands during the post-World War “servant crisis.” Once harried housewives no longer have two people to weary, everyone wants a better eggbeater. The food processor turns puree from a luxury food to something one person can make in ten minutes.

Mechanized cookery and closed ovens all come together to democratize cooking. It is only recently that one could imagine home-cooked foods (beyond a toasted cheese sandwich) as something the working poor ought to do more of. It is only recently that any culture would expect every home to have a dedicated kitchen, as opposed to a lung-destroying cookstove, a hearth that both boils water and dries laundry, or an outdoor firepit. For those living with these no-longer-luxuries, cooking is easier, safer, and (for many of us) more enjoyable than ever before. As cooks, eaters, and science fictional thinkers, it’s worth appreciating these changes, and the degree to which any given meal is specific to its time and place.

Buy the Book

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

Bee Wilson

I picked Consider the Fork off my shelf as a light contrast to the political intensity of The Dawn of Everything, and it has everything I want in a light microhistory: interesting trivia, clever connections, and the occasional thought-provoking meditation on the losses and gains leading to modern life. But since my first read, I’ve started working on a book about how to make technology prioritize human well-being, and I discovered unexpected resonances. I found myself constantly switching from pre-post skim to close reading, stopping to take notes about connections between Fork and Ursula Franklin’s masterful The Real World of Technology, and pondering the differences in design incentives for computers and wooden spoons. *Fork *is fun, but it’s also, quietly, all about the relationship between technological choices and what it means to be human.

I spend a good portion of my life on computers—thinking, writing, socializing, enjoying entertainment, failing to enjoy news, etc. The kitchen has always been my refuge, the place where I have to use all my senses, move around, change up what I ask of my fingers and hands. So it’s fascinating to consider the systems and histories that shape my ability to do that. Moving to another continent has already made me more aware of these contingencies: there are things that are easier, harder, or downright impossible to get in the Netherlands. In the U.S., my big group household had two large fridges and a regular Costco order. Here, we have a fridge slightly larger than what you’d find in the average dorm room, a grocery store a 2-minute walk away, and a 900-year-old farmer’s market down the block twice a week. I constantly have to translate my American cookbook cups and degrees Fahrenheit into grams and degrees Centigrade, my familiar varieties of sugar into the closest available granularity.

All this in the 21st century, marked by easy long-distance shipping, good food preservation, effective translation apps, and the ability to buy a wok in Europe. How much more alienating to imagine life before the oven, the blender, and pre-granulated sugar. Or life after… what changes over the next century or millennium? Science fiction authors need to calibrate how quickly, and how far, the things we take for granted can change. Forks only become common at Western tables in the 1700s, a switch marked in the anatomical record by a change in how upper and lower teeth meet, or fail to, in the mouth. Never having to prep your own food is a mark of high status, until having time and tools to cook becomes the thing to boast about. Roasting forks, mechanical spit-turners, and melon ballers rise and fall while that lovely wooden spoon and the faithful balloon whisk remain traditional comforts.

The chapter on measurement is also an eye-opener. There’s the familiar rant about weight versus volume measurements—only the U.S. consistently uses cups, and baking mavens will warn you how much two cups of flour can differ, and how that weight difference can affect your bread. But Wilson also talks about the rise of quantitative cooking measures in the first place, another effect of the shift to people cooking their own food. As apprenticeships and group cookery fade, people (mostly wives) become more likely to learn from books than masters. Level cups are reassuring. Oven thermostats, no matter how consistently off, are more comforting than the older method of checking what color paper turns when placed in the heat.

At the same time, skilled cooks still learn to adjust based on taste, visual cues, scent, texture. As someone who has worked on validating government project outcomes, I unexpectedly recognized the debate over metric design—what can be quantified, what should be quantified, and how to avoid losing the core values of the unquantifiable. And this debate has been handled completely differently in the kitchen than the lab. Blocked off by barriers of discipline, gender, and class, there are lessons here for science as well as worldbuilding.

The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories

Using the Right Fork. Etiquette is often dismissed as an unreasonable obsession with “which fork to use”—rules designed primarily to exclude. I have a whole rant about the value of scripts that reduce social friction, and behaviors whose primary purpose is to efficiently mark one’s willingness to act kindly—which I can shorten as “seriously, read Miss Manners.” However, there is a side branch of class-marking etiquette, and at times it has been overly silverware-focused. Late 19th and early 20th-century England was particularly bad on this (or good, if you’re writing a comedy of manners), with class consciousness and industrial capabilities coming together to provide way too many specialized implements for eating peaches, corn, tomatoes, etc.—though apparently not olives, a shibboleth that in one story allows Cardinal Richelieu to uncover a fake nobleman.

This specialization was far from universal. Wilson describes a British woman hosting a Chinese friend, amused by her place settings: “It is laughable, it is surprising! All these tools to eat a meal with!” Chinese manners focused more on equal sharing, on avoiding in-common eating implements, and on demonstrating enjoyment of the food. And in cultures where the primary eating implement is the hand, etiquette focuses primarily on hygiene.

The variation in eating styles and tools, and in the associated etiquette, is rich fodder for worldbuilding. When we carry food to our mouths on private tractor beams, what rules will govern touching anything on the table with your fingers? Or crossing those beams? How do you set places for a state dinner with elves and dwarves both present? What tools will aliens bring to our tables, like the 11th-century Byzantine princess who first brought a fork to Venice?

Cuisine for Time Travelers. Everyone knows that a trip to the past involves a whole slew of vaccinations, and other preparation for the iffy medical practices of the time. But food gets less attention. Tastes change along with the tools and labor to support those tastes. One dataset tracks the changing cookware inventory in a single English manor house: twenty-one spits in 1632, dedicated pots for stews and sauces in 1764, steam-heated hotplates in 1869. Victorians boiled food in inconveniently poisonous copper—and you thought you just had to worry about arsenic dye in your clothing. Until modern refrigeration, most of what you could eat in the winter was either butchered fresh or preserved via salt, vinegar, etc. Medieval and Roman cooks sought balance among strong tastes, often using combinations that sound dubious to moderns: Apicius boils fine-chopped lettuce with onion, lovage, and celery seed…not my first choice for dinner.

This goes in both directions: the past is another country with strange restaurants, and so is the future. Space opera ought to feature dishes as different from what we have now as Apicius’ lettuce is from a fresh caprese salad.

New Growth: What Else to Read

Despite the likely weirdness of future foods, science fictional recipes are one of my favorite sub-genres. I cannot, alas, recommend Miya’s Sushi in New Haven, because it closed two years ago—the menu was a feat of solarpunk worldbuilding, and the delicious rolls featured invasive species and the occasional insect. Restaurants that play with cutting-edge molecular gastronomy are more common, and sometimes suggest techniques that might be perfectly normal in the 24th century—I’m picky about flavored air and foams, but recommend any chance you get to try out a José Andrés restaurant. (Have the liquid olives at Jaleo, which I liked enough to stick in A Half-Built Garden.) There’s also the Afrofuturist Bronze. ForestEd in the DC area regularly creates feasts drawn entirely from their food forests: delicious, hyper-local, and thought-provoking—I assume that food forest groups elsewhere do similar things. I’m salivating just thinking about their spicebush cake.

On my cookbook shelf, I’ve been enjoying Nyanyika Banda’s Official Wakanda Cookbook, which looks like yet another dubious entry in the growing realm of insert-intellectual-property-here cookbooks, but is really an excuse for speculative Afrofuturist cuisine—though my favorite Wakandan recipe remains Nnedi Okorafor’s lamb stew.

Warren Belasco’s Meals to Come explores how cooking and eating may change in the coming centuries. Speculative fiction is also growing more interested in spoons as well as weapons. Recent additions include Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Interstellar MegaChef, Ferrett Steinmetz’s The Sol Majestic, and Tao Wong’s The Nameless Restaurant.

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Do you have a favorite—or least favorite—science fictional food? A wish list for lost kitchen tools? Share in the comments!