Happy Wednesday and welcome to a brand new monthly feature in partnership with Fran Wilde and Aliette de Bodard’s Cooking the Books Podcast! Today’s guest is Ruthanna Emrys with whom Aliette talks about her novel Winter Tide over at the main kitchen. Meanwhile… Here at the extension kitchen, we have bonus Q&A content and an audio snippet! The Book Smugglers: What’s your favorite food scene from (an SFF) movie, tv show, or book? (e.g. Imaginary Food becomes Real Food morphs into Food Fight in ’90s classic, HOOK) Ruthanna Emrys: Becky Chambers’s The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet undermines all the tropes about future space food. The Wayfarer has an extremely enthusiastic, extremely skilled ship’s cook with an excellent kitchen garden. When we first meet Dr. Chef, he’s grilling red coast bugs, which are kind of like lobster but apparently extremely common–except that the newcomer to the ship has never had them. Her family is Martian upper crust, and they’re so rich and decadent that they actually imported cows from earth. So right away you get food as caretaking, and food as class marker, and all the little ways that a cross-cultural family handles making sure everyone is fed […]