FOODFIC: Please Welcome Henry Walton, Author of The Journals of Thaddeaus Shockpocket

 

The Journals of Thaddeaus Shockpocket children’s short story series, including Albion 77, incorporates food throughout the stories to create moods and settings, and to give hints to the quirky personalities of the eccentric Shockpocket family of English turn-of-the-century inventors/explorers. A meal may reveal a clue to their next adventure, evoke a feeling of comfort, or simply be a product of another crazy invention.

For example, when Thaddeaus discovers that camel vomit makes a great mosquito repellent, he invents a way to make his new bug repellent smell less obnoxious and more like rose water, and then uses his scent modification technique to create all manner of odor altering products, including those that alter the smell of food.

When reformulating my Shockpocket All Organic Bug Repellent to smell less like camel vomit and more like rose water with slight camel breath undertones, I developed all manner of techniques to transform odors. The ensuing formulas have had no end to their potential.

For instance, I can:

Make spinach smell like steak.

It works, but the cooked spinach still has the limp texture of soggy leaves and a taste Tweak can’t stomach.

Make roast beef smell like spinach.

We use this whenever we have roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for supper. The formula is extremely successful at fooling our dog, Shandy, and keeping the furry mutt from stealing freshly cooked roasts straight off the kitchen counter before we even have our first bite.

Unfortunately, one of the joys of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is the lovely smell that fills the room when it comes out of the oven. Now our Sunday meal smells like overcooked greens. Oh well, at least it still tastes sumptuous. And Tweak and I don’t have to eat leftovers from Shandy.

Make skunks smell like fish.

Okay, smelling like a fish is probably not a whole lot better than smelling like a skunk, but it is the only formula that has any effect at all on the family of little black and white critters that runs loose on the Shockpocket estate.

At any rate, you can see that we became quite adept at scent conversion.

The very next day I set about on my next invention, the Shockpocket Buffler, a personal muffler and odor converter.

One of the surprises of creating what I believe to be unique meals, has been finding that they weren’t that odd after all. For instance, Tweak’s absolute favorite lunch is a sardine and peanut butter sandwich. After coming up with the idea, I made one to see if it was edible and found that my wife actually liked it. And recently, I met an older gentleman who told me that he has made sardine and peanut butter sandwiches for his work lunches for decades. Who knew.

 

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

 

You can find Henry here:

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FOODFIC: Please Welcome Susan Hasler, Author of INTELLIGENCE

How long has this been here? Will it give me food poisoning? Do I care? 

I stared at the desiccated lump of cheese and meat lodged in the corner of a Pyrex dish. The hour was 3 a.m.; the place was the CIA Counterterrorism Center; and the date was mid-September, 2001, a few days after the 9/11 attacks. I’d been called in to the night shift on short notice and no sleep. I had three hours to go and a stack of situation reports to review. I was hungry and flagging. The vending machines were empty. The agency cafeteria was closed. The feast donated by spouses and laid out by the coffee mess was gone except for this Salmonella casserole. I emptied crumbs from several potato chip bags into my palm and attacked my situation reports.

When I wrote Intelligence, I used food as a symbol of an unhealthy, unhappy time. My protagonist, Maddie James, worked long hours in a cube farm full of Type A personalities. It was a few years after 9/11, but lives remained on the line, and management still viewed self-care as unpatriotic. Maddie often made a meal out of a mug of strong coffee and whatever salty or sugary junk she could scrounge. She went for the short-term boost in mood and energy. She would think about the long-term consequences later. 

Maddie belonged to the first generation of women to enter the intelligence field in large numbers. When they arrived in the early 1980s, they found the work compelling and the atmosphere often toxic. Making their voices heard in a world built by and for men was the hardest task of all. Sometimes Maddie slapped her palm down on the conference table when men talked over her. That’s how she got her reputation for being difficult to deal with. That’s why she kept a stock of gummy bears in her desk drawer. She bit their little heads off to keep from biting larger heads off.

Maddie is an amalgam of the women I met when I transferred to a job in the CIA Counterterrorism Center in 2000. Most of them had already been there for years. They had done painstaking and pioneering work on the al-Qaida organization. They persisted when their warnings were ignored, and then they took an outsize share of the blame after 9/11. They are some of the best people I have known in my life. I raise a mug of strong, hot coffee in their honor.

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

You can find Susan here:

SusanHasler.com

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