In Cat-Tales we can and do talk about sex, so the food isn't a substitute, but it does contribute a layer of sensuality to the proceedings. I love evoking the senses, and too often in fiercely visual media like comics and movies (and the fan fiction based on them) there is a tendency to forget we've got four other avenues in.
There isn't anything intrinsically easier in describing a visual image, we just do it more. But when you cross the street and start working on sounds, a
little exercise will get you there in no time. Touch doesn't have as wide a vocabulary, IMO, but it can certainly be done. It's those other two.
I'm not sure a smell can be described in prose. I think the best attempt to date was Judith Krantz in Scruples, where her young heroine is in Paris, goes out on her balcony, smells that Paris-in-Spring ambrosia for the first time, and thinks to herself that this is why so many writers attempt what can't be done: describing a smell. We might not know what that sensory experience is, but we know it is an inspiration.
Taste is pretty much the same as smell. Once you've pulled out salty, sweet, sour, or bitter, you're pretty much tapdancing on the edge of a precipice. But like that balcony in Paris, can evoke what you cannot describe.
She pointed out that she'd spent two hours that afternoon listening to the Metropolis Ladies Who Lunch debating Banana Nut Glace - that's (Listen up, Dark Knight, cause this might be important later on) walnut ice cream, banana sorbet and walnut dacquoise with candied walnuts - versus the Lavender Plum torte - which would be lavender ice cream with plum sorbet, almond dacquoise, and caramelized vanilla bean. Bruce tried to interject, but she cut him off with the news that the committee ladies THEN discovered there were chocolate apricot and spiced pear options to be considered, and that meant another hour and a half of discussion until they ran out of time. They would be picking up there tomorrow before the cassis mango meringue versus mint chocolate macaroon throwdown. So at this point, Batman my love, kicking Ted Trigger in the nuts wasn't the worst idea she could think of, even if it was crimefighting.Any questions?
When we draw on imagination, when we make the reader/audience fill in the blank or connect even those final two dots in their own minds, the result has more
substance. It is more real to them because they participate in creating it. (and P.S. comic writers, that's one reason why readers are so proprietary
about comic book characters. It isn't some mental tick in the fan boy, it is the nature of the medium you work in, and maybe if you bothered to understand
that, you wouldn't embarrass yourselves and disappoint your audience quite so relentlessly)
Anyway, that's food on the page. I also like cooking analogies in talking about the craft of writing, but that's an entry for another day.
