4 Books To Read If You Love Food
By: John-Paul Kunrunmi
Reading food in fiction can be mouth-watering when it’s written well. As readers, we can often appreciate both the overt and the sublime in an author's thematic choices and motifs. Sometimes food is written about simply because it tastes good, and sometimes it points to something buried deep in the psyche of the characters. Here are four books that will have you both thinking and salivating in your seat.
Before We Hit The Ground by Selali Fiamanya
If you’re someone who likes to leave a book feeling a tiny bit heartbroken on the inside, then Before We Hit The Ground is a great place to start. It follows a Ghanaian family with roots in Scotland as they live life before they lose their son and brother, Elom. Throughout the novel, Selali shows how food can ground us, especially if you’re in the shoes of Abena, Elom’s Mother, who is missing her home and life in Ghana. When reading the kitchen scenes, you’ll appreciate how much detail Selali has put in the text, introducing us to ingredients from Ghana and sharing how they are prepared. Selali himself has said that food is an integral part of cultural stories, not just to mark where the characters are from but to show what is familiar to them and part of their daily lives. If you’re a reader who loves food, it may already be clear to you that food is more than just to keep us from starving, it’s a quest to find something that tastes good and also makes us happy. Selali sees you! In the second half of the book when Abena and her daughter Djiffa begin to reconnect, it’s because Djiffa asks her Mum how to cook dishes from Ghana.
She feels a pull towards her childhood but also to her heritage. This book is a stunning debut for many reasons, but the intentionality behind why he has decided to make food such an integral part of this book is why I would recommend it if you’re a bookworm who also likes food.
Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi
As well as being Sapphic, Francesca has gone a step further to give her readers good Nigerian food in her book, Butter Honey Pig Bread. Taiwo is our messy main character who loves love and also loves food. She cooks for her girlfriends and situationships, but never her one-night stands (she has her limits, of course), and cooks with her Mother and twin sister. When I first read this book I was completely taken away by the amount of cooking and eating that we are exposed to throughout the story. One moment that will stay with me forever is when I read Taiwo making puff-puff, a sweet fried dough ball, and in my mout,h I could taste my auntie’s puff puff – perfectly fluffy and sweet on the inside and not oily at all which is exactly how I like it. That’s how I knew that Francesca had done a good job.
In this book, cooking is Taiwo’s refuge. She’s going through a lot. With an apparition of The Virgin Mary haunting her, her situationship going left, a judgy twin sister and her secretive mother, Taiwo cooks whenever she can to keep herself from losing it.
Family Meal by Bryan Washington
If, when you read this title, you immediately picture a happy family around a table, you’ve fallen right into the trap that Bryan has set. Even in the midst of a book about physical intimacy, friendship and familial history, Bryan does not shy away from his love for food. Full to the brim with Korean cuisine, sweets, and African American soul food, Bryan’s characters are culinary wizards and use food to try and reach out to each other. Bryan makes them fall in love with the works of their hand and this is why he is one of my favourite writers. But warning, Family Meal will make you cry. It’s heartbreaking at its centre, but it tastes so sweet on the way there that I didn’t realise what was happening until it did. The perfect blend for someone who wants to feel a little something when they read about characters who constantly fall short and try to make it up by whipping up something that tastes really good.
For Such A Time As This by Shani Akilah
A love letter to multiculturalism in London and especially the food. Shani Akilah speaks to the Black British diaspora through her short story collection and infuses flavours from Grenada, Antigua, Ghana and many more. Shani reminds us that food is community.
Set during and just after the COVID-19 pandemic, For Such A Time As This is a potluck of experiences that she’s taken from her friends and other people around her, hence why it’s so rich in different cuisines. She captures how we use food to rebuild ourselves but also how to show that we love and care. In the story “The Third Death”, Sharna is being taught how to make roti by her Grandmother, another display of how cooking can connect generations.
The book ends with a little party to celebrate a character's birthday and her description of the layout was mouthwatering. In a nutshell, this book is tender and will definitely tickle your tongue. It’s probably best read after you’ve done your food shop for a week to avoid going out and splurging on whatever Shani might make you crave.
If you’ve gotten to the end of this list I can assume that you enjoy both food and literature and food in literature. It’s an important part of a story and there’s so much to explore with a character's relationship to food. It’s not often that I see a good literary read that features food so vividly – and does it over and over again – but that could just mean I have a lot more reading to do. Hopefully these recommendations satiate you and in the best case scenario, leave you feeling full.
