Smell The Coffee? What About That Turkey Stuffing?

First appeared on Nina Pierce’s blog as part of the Blood Knot book tour.

Hot plum pudding with brandy sauce.  Or for North Americans, pumpkin pie fresh out of the oven, and ice cream or custard.  Fresh home-made cookies, or a cake cooling in the kitchen…you can smell them all over the house.

Have you ever stepped into the home of someone cooking mulled wine?  Red wine steeped with spices and sugars…the smell is unforgettable.  So is the taste (and my mouth is flooding with saliva even as I write this!)

Croissants in Paris, with butter and real European coffee, hot and with that caramel smell that you only get from African beans.

Tart fruit stewed in its own juices, with cloves and cinnamon to bring out the flavours.

Chicken or turkey, ham or beef, slow cooking all day in the oven for a big family dinner, and all the dishes that go along with it and their aromas that start drifting from the kitchen from lunchtime onwards.

Waking up to the smell of toast, bacon, hash browns, eggs, waffles and coffee in the morning.

The sharp, thick smell of deep fried anything at fairs and sideshows.

Food is with us constantly.  You might think you only eat three times a day, but cues for eating and drinking waft past you endlessly, all day long.  Smells, sounds, images bombard you, making non-stop suggestions to eat or drink this, that or the other, and most of it isn’t commercial advertising.  You probably snack, bite, sip and nibble dozens of times a day without realizing it, and you think about eating and drinking hundreds of times a day. If you’ve ever struggled to lose weight you’ll understand this concept only too well.

Humans are designed to take in a certain level of calories per day in order to maintain body functions and provide energy to keep the body moving, so this obsession with food is built into our genes and psyches.  It’s a survival mechanism.

Consider, then, the poor vampire who, after twenty or thirty or more years of uninhibited eating and drinking, suddenly has his food supply abruptly cut off.  All he gets to imbibe is blood.  Now blood may well meet all his nutritional needs in his vampire form, but depending on which authors’ universe and which type of vampire you’re dealing with, he might still have all or most of his human instincts and psychology intact.

Which means that even if he doesn’t get hungry, per se, he’s going to still get bombarded by the same thousands of daily subliminal “eat!” and “drink!” messages we as humans get.  He’ll smell the same delicious aromas, watch humans eating with gusto, see the same commercial advertisements for food, food and more food, steaming gently and looking oh-so-good on the plate as it turns.  He’ll hear chips hitting the deep fry and smell them, too.  And what’s he going to do when he walks past a Starbuck’s?  If he’s a modern day vampire, does he wake with all his addictions intact?  Does he hunger for his daily espresso hit?

What if he’s one of the types of vampires whose senses (taste, touch, smell, hearing, etc) are all better than humans?  Are all those eat and drink messages going to be more powerful because he can receive them better?

I love my food — too much, frankly — and I’m constantly battling my expanding waistline.  While the idea of almost-immortality as a vampire has all sorts of appeal for me (watching history unfold is the biggie), giving up food and well, coffee, dammit, would make me sit down and really think hard if I ever got the offer.  I would have to have a written, sealed guarantee that all the cues and triggers that would deluge me every day as a vampire would be negated somehow before I would step over to the other side.  Even then, just the memory of eating and food would drive me crazy, I suspect.  I would miss it.

Humans have so many rituals and habits built around the consumption of food. From breakfast to work breaks, to simply cleaning your teeth (to get rid of food particles), to dinner out with friends, nearly every social occasion, everything is impacted by food.

Take away the food and you leave a very big vacuum.

That absence is something that Nial, my 1,500 year old vampire in Blood Knot, has struggled with in unique ways over his long life.  He misses food and eating as much as any human might, and it shows.  It also leads to a small crisis…but I can’t say more without spoiling the story!

 

_______________________