FOODFIC: Please Welcome Mary Kincaid, Creator of Hawk McCoy

My character Hawk McCoy is a seeking personality who has many adventures. Confronted with the eating habits of my grandchildren who will not try anything new I was prompted to write this story. I want to encourage children to try things and make up their own minds.

In Hawk McCoy: The Mutant Onion, Hawk explores the tastes of various superfoods, vegetables, that his mentor Nyssa Pentas  developed with his father, a plant genetist. He joins Nyssa as a Junior Botanist. The first requirement of being a junior botanist with his father’s lab are expressing his opinions about recipes after the daily taste test. His father and Nyssa work on increasing the nutrient value of four types of vegetables: artichokes, peanuts, sweet potatoes, and onions. While he tastes, Lima Bean Curry, Artichoke sauces, and peanut fritters, he develops a three-part scale to rate vegetables on the blog.

His ranking system designed to encourage everyone to try the vegetable recipes went like this: “One Hawk: take the one bite your mom insists on. Two Hawks: two spoonful’s because it is not that bad. Three Hawks: eat up: it will make you grow.”

Before his summer is over, he talks about vegetables on the radio, dances in an artichoke suit to attract tasters to Nyssa’s display, and learns to grow vegetables.

When Hawk, lured by the local ice cream vendor, Earl, with his two for one special, gives into his craving for hot fudge sundaes, he alarmed Nyssa. Nyssa coaxes Earl into being the only vendor for her special ice cream sauce. After tasting it Earl agrees to distribute the sauce and help Nyssa with an ice cream social that will encourage the community to name the sauce.

The sauce looks like it is created from some type of berry but is actually made from the Pen5, the mutant onion. This onion is bright pink with yellow striped leaves.  The bright pink onion makes amazing ice cream topping. The additional benefits are that it will eliminate many of the ailments that require over the counter drugs. It is a real threat to aspirin sales.

Hawk becomes a vegetable eating convert over the course of the story. He ends the summer no longer believing that mac and cheese is a vegetable. 

Thanks for stopping by to share your food for thought, Mary!

You can find Mary here:

Twitter @marykincaid2001

Facebook Fan Page

Books on Amazon

FOODFIC: Please Welcome Timothy S. Johnston, Author of Fatal Depth

The characters in my newest thriller, Fatal Depth, live in an underwater city.  They commute to work in scuba gear or in submersibles.  They work in submarines or serve in the submarine fleet, piloting massive warsubs through the world’s oceans.  They live, love, fight, and do everything else underwater.  All.  The.  Time.  

It’s their life, it’s their existence, and it’s their very reason for waking up each morning.

But what are they eating???

It’s an interesting question, and in fact, it’s at the core of the entire series of novels (which includes The War Beneath and The Savage Deeps). 

I knew I wanted to write a series of books that were cold war espionage/spy thrillers that take place underwater.  Think The Hunt for Red October on steroids.  But every writer needs a rationale behind the world they create.  I wanted it to be grounded in reality, in history, and in science.  It needed to be logical.  After many years at University in the 80s and 90s, and teaching environmental studies for decades, the justification for my undersea reality quickly became obvious:  global warming and rising ocean levels might soon destroy continental breadbasket regions and ravage shorelines.  Economies would disintegrate.  Nations would fall to rebellion.

People would starve.

But the underwater world could be our salvation!  Consider this:  The oceans occupy 70% of the planet’s surface.  Scientists believe we’ve only discovered 10% of the species which live there.  The ocean floors are, generally speaking, way beyond our reach.  However, the continental shelves at the rims of nations, extending a few kilometers into water before their rapid plunge into deep ocean abysses, are rich in organic material.  They are shallow enough to receive sunlight.  Fish love the shelves, especially if the currents are just right.  A collision of warm and cold currents is preferable. 

Kelp flourishes in these areas too. Some cultures already make heavy use of kelp and seaweed.  Imaging cultivating this crop in an organized and industrialized manner!  Kelp grows one meter a day in the right conditions.  It could solve our food problems, especially as famine and collapsing arable land hits us on the surface.  Throw in fish farms — schools of fish contained by bubble fences — and shellfish fields, and suddenly there’s a very real (and logical) reason for people to colonize the shallow ocean floors.

This is the basis for my current writing:  Surface nations are essentially a collection of collapsing economies which thirst for new resources.  There is an explosion of exploration and colonization on the ocean floors.  In Fatal Depth, the confluence of events have led to a Second Cold War, and a rapid flood of human beings into the oceans, to settle underwater cities and exploit the ocean deeps.  And, more often than not, war is the result.  This future possibility is a near certainty, if history is any indication of things to come.

I hope you might consider joining me in these adventures, and to explore just what people are eating in the underwater world!

- Timothy S. Johnston, from somewhere on the continental shelf

Thanks for stopping by to share your food for thought, Timothy!

You can find Timothy here:

TimothySJohnston.com

Twitter @TSJ_Author

Instagram @TSJ_Author

Facebook Fan Page

Books on Amazon

Fatal Depth Book Trailer: www.timothysjohnston.com/fataldepthtrailer