Magic and Food!

[Rkcapps]

Great discussion, great thread!

Whilst there is a subtle reason mentioned in HP, it wasn't mentioned in the first book (I'm currently re-reading The Philosopher's Stone). When the food appears out of no where at Hogwarts there is no mention of anything other than it appearing. I wonder that it's more for a reason directed to the target audience? After all, HP is aimed at kids and getting them to read and what better way to interest them but to wow them. Kids don't want to get dragged through rules. At least my three, who are all at the target age of HP don't!

But a YA or adult reader is more sophisticated and will go "Hey, out of thin air? I don't think so!"

I can be wrong, it's just an observation.

My audience is YA and food is served normally but I do have my MC, for a driving reason in the story, transform food but she can't click her fingers and make food appear. Why? She can affect things and control things but she can't create.

 

[Simpson17866]

When you eat food, many of the atoms of food are evacuated from your body as waste, but the rest of the atoms of food become part of your body. Your bones, your muscles, your blood... if you eat magical food to the exclusion of natural food for long enough, then you gradually approach 100% of your biomass having been created by magic.

What happens if the magic wears off?

 

[Queshire]

For my part, I did say why. The effort to reward ratio is too skewed. It's like using nuclear fusion to create gold from I don't know. Iron or something. Theoretically, you can smash small atoms together and make big atoms. Then knock of some extra neutrons until you get a wee bit of gold. Although mining and refining are difficult processes, they're easier and more profitable than atom smashing.

Same goes for creating food by dwimcraft in The World. Theoretically possible, but impractical to the point of useless. You'd starve before you ever got a plate of decent food on your table. Not much use that kind of magic!

As for point A, I'd ask in return: okey, so they don't worry about procuring food because a wizard can pouf it into existence without any problems. But that begs the question: why not just pouf up some super weapon that will kill the dragon so you can get the gold?

Or better yet, why not just pouf into existence pots of gold right in your front parlour so you never have to go on mucky adventures at all? At least for me, we're back to the deus ex machina of the replicator. If you have magic or technology to take of all your basic problems (food and so forth), why not just apply that magic or technology to eliminate all your bigger problems too (dragons, Klingons, etc)?

This is just my opinion, but I don't see this kind of magic as particularly mythic or epic in nature. Myth and faerie stories are replete with magic, sure. But it always comes at high cost and usually ends up back-firing on its abuser. I mean, we never hear the Tale of How Clever Johann Bred His Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs and Opened Up a Dealership in the Valley Selling Golden-Egg-Laying Geese to Princes and Potentates Worldwide.

The genie always runs out of wishes. The magic ring always disappears. The fool always insults the Fair Folk and the magic ... poufs.

Point A is about what the story's about, so if the story isn't about those things then yeah, sure, why not do it?

In my pet setting a lot depends on who the mage is and who the dragon is, but I very much have characters who can do that with the average dragon.

 

[Vaporo]

On the other hand, a magic system centered around food and cooking would be really cool! People could gain powers by eating certain things, but such things have to be prepared carefully in a special way or else they either won't work or will backfire. Different foods grant different powers.

I also like the idea of a candy shop of magical candy.

You're in luck! A middle-grades book, but a pretty good one from what I remember:
The Candy Shop War: Brandon Mull: 9781481411196: Amazon.com: Books


For the purposes of my story, magically created food is certainly possible, it's just not particularly practical. In my story, there is a kind of magic that revolves around summoning objects out of thin air. In order to do this, the wizard has to delete one of their own memories and uses it like physical "mass" to form the object. However, memories are not a particularly sturdy material, so these constructs tend to be less "real" than other objects.

Because constructs lack "realness," physically damaging and deforming them tends to cause them to stop existing. Breaking a construct down into its chemical components and using them as building blocks for your body will almost certainly cause it to collapse. In order to make their constructs "real," you either need to expend a lifetime of memories or obtain a piece of the raw material that the world was originally formed from. Neither option is particularly desirable, so going to all that effort to create the perfect steak dinner seems like a waste.

 

[Sheilawisz]

Hello everyone!

This has been a really interesting discussion. I love to talk about Magic, and how it affects and connects with the story in question and its world. Some styles of magic would be incompatible with certain stories, but they work well in others anyway.

In most of my stories, magically creating great food out of nowhere is allowed because it's part of how cool Mages are. In my worlds, if you are magical you are not simply a person with powers: You are Magic, and that means that you are very special and above the rules of nature and science.

They can do loads of things that make their existence far easier than that of ordinary people, and that's part of the story. My magical characters face difficulties and trouble adequate to them, so they do have challenges of their own even if they do not even need food to survive.

In my first Fantasy trilogy the Mages would be able to provide enough food for the entire non-magical population of their world, but that does not happen because they are two separate societies. The Mages live in very dangerous and isolated mountains ruled by their own Queens, and the ordinary people rarely get to see them.

Also the non-magical folks in that world would never accept food created by Magic, because they are afraid of such things.

In Wander's Land, Queen Amethyst and her friends are capable of magically feeding the entire army. This would solve a huge problem in times of war, but it would be a terrible idea since they would be unleashing a lethal poisoning of every soldier that ingests even a single magical cookie.

There's a bit of dialogue in Deathly Hallows that explains that rule a little, so it doesn't seem so arbitrary. Ron is being a jerk to Hermione, comparing her cooking unfavourably to Molly's, Hermione complains that she's getting stuck cooking because she's a girl. Ron retorts that she's stuck cooking because she's supposed to be the best at magic. Hermione replies with this:

You can do the cooking tomorrow Ron, you can find the ingredients and try and charm them into something worth eating

Seems like it's not just lol nope can't do it because you can't do it and more like, can't do it because it's already really flipping hard to just cook by magic, so turning something that's already inedible into something you can eat by magic is too difficult.

Yeah I remember Deathly Hallows very well.

The Wizards and Witches in Harry Potter indeed cook using magic. Molly is seen doing that sometimes, and Fleur is a great magical housekeeper too. The difference is that they need the ingredients anyway, and they have well equipped kitchens with all of the necessary instruments.

When Harry and company were outlaws, they did not have access to decent ingredients to cook with. They were forced to catch and collect whatever that was available in the wild, and Hermione did her best to cook with that.

What Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration says is that you cannot produce food with magic.

It means that Harry and friends could not simply collect some mud and transform it into pizza, for example. Also, the Room of Requirement can do anything except providing food for its inhabitants. I mean, they can teleport and travel back in time and turn people into ferrets, but they cannot turn rocks into bread?

This is one of the few things that I really dislike about the HP world, it feels like a very forced rule and we need to avoid such things in our stories.

I much prefer the explanation from The Worst Witch: You can magically create food and it tastes great, but it's simply not the real thing and there is little or no nutritional value contained in it. Then, it makes sense that they need ingredients and kitchens and it does not feel so strange.

 

[Michael K. Eidson]

In my WIP, wizards are the ruling class, and among the wealthiest people on the planet. The magical item business is booming, and it has put wizards on the top of the social status pyramid. Wizards imbue items with magic to a particular purpose, to help with all manner of mundane tasks. Item-based magic is nearly always tied in some fashion to one or more elemental planes. And the elemental planes are not without their limitations.

Magical mugs and plates can be created that will serve up whatever a person asks for in the way of food or drink. The food and drink so conjured are magically created by drawing on the elemental planes to produce what is served, combining the elements (stone, water, flame, and air) in just the right ways to create the requested consumable. What is produced in this way is edible, flavorful, and nutritional. Everything, whether alive or dead or inorganic (humans, plants, cows, goblins, rocks, buildings, streams, etc.), consists of elementals, so whether you put the requisite bits together through biological means or magical means, it doesn't matter when it comes to flavor or nutrition. And there's no "wearing off of magic" for conjurations. The elementals are in whatever state they're in, and they tend not to change their state unless provoked, by the laws of nature or magic.

Magical dishes and other items that draw on the elementals can't be used repeatedly in the same location without exhausting the availability of elemental matter in that area. In normal circumstances, you can easily feed one person three meals per day with a set of these dishes without having to relocate, because the elemental material in the area will replenish fast enough. But you wouldn't want to rely on these dishes to feed an army.

These dishes aren't all that reliable. Wizards can't look into the elemental planes to see how much material is available in any given location, or if any of the four elemental planes might be depleted in that location at the time. So they have no idea if the plates/mugs will work at any given time in any given place. Moreover, some areas might replenish slower than others. There are lots of variables, none of which can be determined individually.

It's often non-wizards who buy or are gifted these dishes, and all they can do is try to use them. They either work or they don't, when the attempt is made. If they don't work, then you're cooking. If they do work, then you get to take a break from cooking.

Overusing a magical dish in a location could prevent other magical items from working there, due to the dishes having depleted the elementals in the area. That's why most of the magical items don't actually conjure consumables. They summon elementals for services, and then let the elementals return to their dimension, to allow them to serve again much sooner than is possible when waiting for them to pass through one's digestive tract. Cleaning is one service for which elementals are often summoned.

One of my viewpoint characters, a non-wizard, owns a set of magical dishes (a gift from her benefactor), and makes use of them, but sometimes she chooses to prepare her meals from real ingredients without even trying to use the dishes, especially when she's feeling bored, or isn't wanting to think about certain other things.

In one scene of my WIP, a group of characters is trying to avoid the baddies. The group finds a place to hide out for a while, but they have no food or water, and they believe they'll have to stay in hiding for several days. So some of them make a quick yet still risky trip to fetch a set of magical dishes from one of their homes, so they will be able to survive while hiding out. They just have to hope the dishes will work when they get them to their hiding place, and will work often enough long enough to keep everyone alive.

I haven't gone into all this detail in the WIP, but I figured it all out so my story will be self-consistent.

 

[Insolent Lad]

In the overall magical scheme of most of my novels, 'magic' is largely based on being able to pull things out of other worlds. Now that would seem to work and the magically adept can pull food from another realm but — it is never completely untethered from that other world and will eventually pop back. Not such a good thing to happen to one after you've filled up or, worse, digested (I think it would automatically return before it became part of ones own body though I haven't specified this in any of the stories).

Of course, if one commands a demon or two, they can always be sent off to fetch food from somewhere in ones own world.