[Think Tank] Best Fictional Food

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Sci-fi and fantasy elements of pop culture – movies, TV shows, books, etc – distinguish themselves from contemporary times through weirdness. People wear weird clothes, pilot weird vehicles, live in weird houses and interact with weird races. The weirder a common function of society is, the odder the landscape.

And what’s weirder than weird food?

“Fictional food” is up there with “alien sex” for producing the squirmiest reactions. We’re very self-conscious about how we look when we eat and what our choice of food says about us. And we defend our tastes very fiercely, to the point that treating the weird as normal freaks us out. The way we react to fictional food tells us about the fictional society being depicted, as well as … about ourselves.

Overthinkers – what is the Best Fictional Food?

(And stick around ’till the end for a verdict from our MYSTERY CELEBRITY JUDGE!)

Gagh – Star Trek (André Callot)

The Klingon race started out as metaphorical Cold War opponent for the Federation, and eventually turned into a catch-all metaphor for otherness in Star Trek. No alien culture on the show was ever as well-developed: Klingons love opera, violent sex and killing each other. And gagh. They love gagh.

Gagh is a disgusting pile of worms, served alive, enjoyed for the sensation of squirming inside your mouth. Being presented with gagh became an easy way to tell whether someone in Starfleet was badass. If you grab a fistful and grin as you smash the wriggling parasites into your mouth, congratulations, you’re command material. If you have any kind of normal human reaction, sorry, astrometrics for you.

For Klingon characters, though, gagh is just an ethnic comfort food that humans don’t understand. This is why it’s my favorite fictional food. My father is an immigrant, and when I was growing up, we bonded over cooking the food of our noble people – the French. Weird, gross food that made my friends wretch, like paté and mussels. Food that I loved, but isolated me from most other kids in suburban South Carolina.

Klingons don’t complain a lot, but when they do, it’s because something culturally important is being done wrong. “This gagh is dead!” “That restaurant sells gagh to tourists!” The injustice they lament is the slow death of their culture in a galaxy that privileges commerce and technology over a sense of historical identity. That, to me, is so very French, and so very admirable.

If you’d like to cook the (vegan!) gagh in the picture, check out this recipe from the Lazy Smurf. It uses beets instead of deadly parasitic worms. If you want something a little closer to the original, I suggest the shrimp lo mein at the take-out place down the street.

Just make sure you chew it to death before you swallow it. Bon appetit!

Pizza the Hutt (Spaceballs) – Lee

André, I’ll one-up you. Not only is my choice for favorite fictional food alive, it’s also a sentient being. I am of course referring to Pizza the Hutt:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33n-IS8a1S4

Oh, and lest we forget, Vinnie/Max Headroom wasn’t the only one snacking on Pizza the Hutt. He tastes so damn good that he ate himself to death.

Pizza the Hutt also beats out gagh in the metaphorical meaning department. Spaceballs hit theaters in 1987, at the height of the hedonistic, consumption-oriented 1980’s. Pizza the Hutt is both a symbol of that decade’s hedonism and a prophetic forewarning of the stock market crash that followed the movie’s debut that same year.

Sadly, the lesson of Pizza the Hutt–and the stock market crash–went unheeded. America keeps eating itself to death to this day.

Soylent Green (Soylent Green) – Shechner

[I’d like to alert our affiliates I’ll be running over time.]

It is the rare movie that invents  a foodstuff  so emotionally weighted that the film co-opts said foodstuff’s name for its own.  Fried Green Tomatoes, for one.  Old Yeller, maybe.   Soylent Green – the 1973 Hugo Award Nominated Film – definitely fits the bill.  It, like Citizen Kane and pretty much every Sandra Bullock movie, is the kind few of us have watched, but of which pretty much everyone knows the ending.   Admit it,  you’ve never seen this flick, but since you’re here reading OTI, odds are you know the principal ingredient of that  greeny goodness:

Now, I’ve actually seen this film, this doting love poem to Malthusian economics.  For the uninitiated, Soylent Green is a potpourri of the Future Dystopian and Government Paranoia films which were both so popular in the 70’s.  Think a mix of The Conversation and Logan’s Run, but replace all acting and laser battles with Chuck Heston.  Briefly, sometime in the distant future (say, ~13 years from now), the world’s become absurdly overpopulated,  choking to death on the smog which long ago replaced air.  This environment is utterly inhospitable for vegetation, and hence the traditional sources of food have become scarce.  Via a dummy corporation, the Gov’ment (composed of the standard shady and/or thuggish conspiracy types) have developed a series of foodstuffs called “Soylent,” and distribute it to the starving masses.  Soylents Red and Orange were allegedly made from sea-kelp, as the oceans are purportedly immune to the be-smogification of the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s assumed the latest-n-greatest offering–Soylent Green–is more of the same.  Of course by film’s end (probably the beginning) we know better:

What’s ironically great about Soylent Green, the foodstuff, is that actually negates both of the central themes of Soylent Green, the movie: (A) The Future Sucks, and (B) The Government Cannot Be Trusted.

Regarding (A) – let’s assume that the dystopian corporatized Gov’ment follows the traditional lowest-bidder policy, and would therefore attempt any cost-cutting measure plausible.  As it applies to Soylent production, materials, texture and color are easy to obtain and manipulate, but the taste would be difficult and expensive to disguise. But why should they even try?  Why not just leave Green with it’s natural flavor?

Bacon.

Yep, as established by cultural anthropologists a century ago, and confirmed by modern day technology, people taste just. like. pork. So let’s consider your life in this future dystopia: No job, so you don’t have to work.  No need for a home, because it’s pretty much 80 degrees and sunny outside every day anyway.  As an average every-day citizen, you basically just hang out, occasionally get laid, and try to scrap together enough cash for a helping of the only foodstuff available: delicious bacon.  This is what most of us call “vacation.”

Regarding (B) – let’s first recall the second law of thermodynamics.  In a closed system, as spontaneous processes move forward, the amount of usable energy in the system decreases.  Now, let’s consider the amount of energy (the “nutrient content”) present in, say, a newly-deceased 150 lb man.  By definition of the Second Law, the energy in this 150 lb man would be insufficient to fuel a living 150 lb man.  Over his lifetime the latter would have to consume more of his own weight in food.  For one, the scarcity of supplies would help make the living population on earth progressively thinner.

But more importantly, the collective energy stored in a generation of people would be insufficient to fuel a group equal in size. Hence over time, if Soylent is the only ready foodstuff present, the Earth’s population would have to decrease.  Overcrowding would subside to the point where the other remaining food stores would allow them to wait out the restoration of the environment.  Thus, the shady Soylent Corporation–far from ensuring the destruction of the human race for their own nefarious ends–actually provides humanity with its salvation!  I feel like this is an idea which has come up before…

Ouroboros (Egyptian Mythology) – Fenzel

What if I told you that you could carry your favorite food with you everywhere?

What if you could eat as much of it as you wanted?

What if it made you immortal?

What if eating faster made you lose weight?

What if eating slower gave you a longer snake? (I mean, who doesn’t want that, right?)

The best fictional food has got to be ouroboros, one of several ancient Egyptian symbols for eternal life — and easily the tastiest.

Passed down to OTI mostly through the Egyptian influence on the Greeks and Romans (but passed down to Mark through similar symbols appearing on the tombs of the emperors of ancient pre-Chinese dynasties), the ouroboros is affordable, compelling, classy without being overly baroque, hard-core without being really gross, and present in almost all world imaginary cuisines, while not feeling like a poseur.

The Norse have Jörmungandr (pasted directly to preserve the righteous umlaut), the Indians have Adisesha, the Africans have Aidophedo, Oshunmare and others. “Circular snake symbolizing eternity” is clearly the world’s only universal fictional food. Except maybe the McNugget.

See, this is how it works: the snake eats its tail, because its tail is delicious. This nourishes the snake, which causes it to grow its tail longer, which supplies it with more food. And thus the snake lives forever. It’s a traditional alchemical symbol for the purification or wholeness. And it also appears in In the Lake of the Woods, by Tim O’Brien which is neither thousands of years old nor a mystical tome of import, but is a really good book. And also that show Millenium I never watched. And of course, Fullmetal Alchemist.

It’s one of those symbols that people love spotting in pop culture media from the last five or ten years, cataloging each appearance, and forgetting of course that it’s been making cameos in pop culture for more than 5,000 years. That’s like Millenium times five.

But the ouroboros doesn’t look its age. Because, you know, it eats right.

Missionaries (Jokes About Tribal Cultures) – Perich

In one sense, missionaries are not at all a fictional food. Some Christian missionaries were eaten by the tribal cultures they tried to convert. In fact, in 2007 a cannibal tribe in Papua New Guinea apologized for eating some Methodist preachers over a century ago. So how can I claim that missionaries are a fictional food?

Because our primary understanding of missionaries as food comes through fiction – in the form of jokes.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

Two missionaries in Africa were apprehended by a tribe of very hostile cannibals who put them in a large pot of water, build a huge fire under it, and left them there. A few minutes later, one of the missionaries started to laugh uncontrollably.

The other missionary was incredulous, and said, “What’s wrong with you? We’re being boiled alive! They’re going to eat us! What could possibly be funny at a time like this?”

The laughing missionary said, “I just peed in their soup!”

Or:

These two cannibals kill a missionary. They argue for a while about how to divide him up, when finally, one of them says, “Okay. You start at the head and I’ll start at the feet.”

So they begin their tasty feast. After a while one of them says, “Hey, this is really great. I’m having a ball.”

“Slow down!” cries the other cannibal. “You’re eating too fast!”

Or:

Cannibal: Mom, mom, I’ve been eating a missionary and I feel sick!
Mom: Well, you know what they say – you can’t keep a good man down!

I could do this for hours without repeating.

The corpus of cannibals-eating-missionaries jokes vastly outweighs the documented instances of real cannibals eating real missionaries. It’s now a punch line for us. When someone talks about cannibals eating missionaries, we don’t think of the horror of a human getting boiled alive before they’re consumed like livestock, or the oppression of a well-armed culture imposing its religion on another. We think of zany comedy! Oh, those missionaries, getting eaten by those cannibals – all one big misunderstanding!

By turning a grisly and sporadic culture clash into an enduring body of jokes, cannibals and missionaries have transcended the limits of the real. They’ve become fictional constructs themselves: mythical archetypes, greater than the sum of their parts.

Hook Goo (Hook) – Belinkie

Peter Banning, née Pan, has only three days to recapture his lost youth and innocence. And at the end of his first day, after being subjected to a humiliating training montage and tossed out of a giant Wile E. Coyote-style slingshot, he’s still a grumpy old grownup. Now all he wants is a good meal. But it turns out that the Lost Boys survive entirely on imaginary food. They chow down from empty plates, while Peter watches miserably.

And then, a breakthrough! Peter’s rival Rufio starts tossing insults across the table. And reluctantly, the old man is goaded into responding. (Although I’m not sure how being a “near-sighted gynecologist” is an insult.) Peter gets more and more into the schoolyard name-calling, and eventually picks up an empty wooden spoon and gleefully flicks it in Rufio’s direction. To everyone’s surprise, Rufio is hit by something I will call Hook Goo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckawFvrGpPE&start=60

I think it’s important to note that at no point do we see anyone consume the Hook Goo. They eat everything else on the table, but the Goo is only thrown. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s what it’s there for. The Lost Boys are living embodiments of Fun, and Imagination, and above all, Play. I bet they never have a meal without a food fight, and so naturally their table is liberally stocked with the perfect ammunition. The Goo is sticky and thick, so it clings to your target. It is brightly-colored, so it stands out against their earth tone clothes. It is, literally, the best food fighting food one can imagine.

One could even argue that technically, it doesn’t belong on this list, since we have no proof it’s edible. But if the Goo is not, in fact, a food, than what happens in Hook is not, in fact, a food fight. And that scene is one of the main examples in Wikipedia’s “Food fight” entry. And Wikpedia is never wrong. So logically, the Goo must be a food, as well as an excellent way to melt away a disillusioning adulthood and jumpstart your inner child. Bangarang.

“Drink Me/Eat Me” (Alice In Wonderland) – McNeil

From The Matrix to Jefferson Airplane to the tattoos on that girl you liked in high school drama class, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland may be one of the most influential works of literature of the last 150 years.

How interesting, then, that the book’s first chapter ends with a simple message: Drinking makes you smaller, cake makes you bigger.   The first heroine that most girls in the English-speaking world discovered begins her magical adventure with questions of body image and alcohol consumption.

Having reached the bottom of the rabbit hole, Alice finds herself in a dismal hall full of locked doors, looking through a tiny portal into a magical garden she is too big to reach.  “How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains.”  But she can’t.  She’s too fat.  What to do?

Fortunately, there’s a bottle on hand, and instead of nutritional information, the label simply says “Drink me.”

“Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.

“‘What a curious feeling!’ said Alice,” having polished off this masterpiece of mixology.   Alice drinks, and immediately looses a ton of weight.  Had she not forgotten her keys (a common issue with those who drink anything put before them), she would have been the perfect size to waltz right into Paradise.  So Mr. Carroll offers us this moral: drinking = tiny = getting what you want.

Drinking may be the answer to life’s problems, but Mr. Carroll has another equation for his young readers.  Alice finds another helpfully labeled item, “a very small cake, on which the words ‘EAT ME’ were beautifully marked in currants.”  We’re talking about a tiny bite of dessert here, a dessert made with fruit, no less, and yet upon eating it, Alice immediately balloons to a gargantuan size, crying “‘Good-bye, feet!’ (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight).”

And at her new massive size, Alice begins to cry gallons of tears which form a pool in which she nearly drowns.  You can see this reenacted on any episode of The Biggest Loser.

Cake = becoming giant = drowning in your own tears.   Is there any wonder that anorexia affects hundreds of thousands of women in America?

So Mr. Carroll’s magic foodstuffs, perhaps the first fictional food encountered by many children (at least before Harry Potter), tell us that drinking will make us happy while eating food will kill us. Mr. Carroll is, in every way, responsible for this:

Before the voting begins, we’ll get a verdict from our MYSTERY CELEBRITY JUDGE. Please clear your plates and put your hands together for Chairman Takeshi Kaga!

Kaga-sama, your verdict?

Kagaは1950年10月12日石川県の金沢市のに生まれた、日本。 段階の彼の最初経験は7歳で彼が金沢のシティ・ボーイの合唱曲のグループに加わったときだった。

1972年に、彼は日本の演劇的な会社Gekidan Shikiに加わった。 会社と、彼はイエス・キリストSuperstar (1976年)の日本の段階の生産に於いてのイエス・キリストの役割、および西側Story (1977年)のトニーの役割を担う間。 1980年に彼は映画Yajuu ShisubeshiにSanadaの役割を担うためにSHIKIを残した。 彼は80年代中の複数の映画で主演した、彼の最も有名な役割は「Kaga議長」、Ryōriの風変りな、火炎式のホストのそれTetsujinの調理の競争ショー(1993-1999年)ではない。 それは日本でだけ、英語を話す世界中で非常に普及するように、なった。 以前は米国の食糧ネットワークとオーストラリアのSBSの放送は、鉄のシェフという名で「日本鉄シェフとして、ショー今続けていかれる米国の良い生きているネットワーク」。の 鉄のシェフのアメリカの印DacascosホストはICAでTakeshiの甥示された関係が2人がする架空の人物の間に実際にあるけれどもであるために、主張される。

ショーの彼の国際的な名声にもかかわらず、彼はミュージカルのための彼の愛をあきらめなかった。 1987年に彼はジーンValjeanおよびJavertとしてLes Misérablesの普及した日本の生産で主演した。 彼はロンドンの高貴なアルバートホールでLes Misérablesの第10記念日コンサートのアンコールの間に日本の代表として1995に於いてのValjeanとして彼の役割を再演した。 アンコールの間に、17の国からのValjeansは段階の鋳造物を結合した。 彼はまた2000年にマクベスと2001年にThreepennyオペラのと同様、Jekyllそしてハイドで主演した。

彼はまた日本の日本製アニメに彼の声を貸した。 特に、彼は表明したJirarudanの1999’s Pokémonの反対者を、映画-暴露Lugia、Pokémon第2映画、およびまた彼のテーマソングを歌われて、「製品Waコレクター」。の 彼はまた特に2005’s黒いジャックの先生を表明したKiriko: 暗闇の2人の医者。

終わった鉄のシェフが映画および戯曲の機能に彼戻った後。 彼はまた時間の衝撃21の日本の朝日テレビのクイズショーを催した。 2005年に、KagaはミハエルFrayn民主主義の日本の生産で鉛として行い、ビッグヒットのフィルムSengoku Jieitai 1549年で主演した。 Kagaはまた大成功の死のノートのフィルムシリーズの両方の分割払込金で現われた。

彼の最新の役割は、2007年12月現在の、テレビの連続番組Saiyūkiの映画化の皇帝Kinkaku (金角の王)のそれである。 彼はまた最終的な想像IVの任天堂DSのリメイクのGolbezに声を提供し、Dissidiaに於いての同じ役割を再演した: PSPのための最終的な想像。

彼はまた2004年現在にBionicle日本の媒体のTeridaxのための公式の日本の声俳優である

I … see.

In the meantime, we turn to you, the readers to cast your vote!