Regular dad food?

What sort of food would regular people eat in dnd?
Of course I'm talking about most demi-humans in terms of this question.


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abe ray said:

What sort of food would regular people eat in dnd?
Of course I'm talking about most demi-humans in terms of this question.

Click to expand...

I don't think there is any sort of 'right' answer for this, but the basic answer is "peasant food", where peasant food can be defined as what a peasant ate in a pre-industrial culture somewhere (or indeed anywhere) in the world back when the world had a subsistence agrarian economy.

I'll make a caveat to that by saying that I personally find it interesting to have my fantasy world be cosmopolitan, so that all the cultures have 100's or 1000's of years hence traded whatever cultivars that they had and most crops (like coffee, tea, potatoes, etc.) are now global in scope. It's worth noting that this is very Tolkien, as his pre-historical Western Europe still has tea and potatoes in it.

The fundamental answer to your question then is, "What effective latitude do your regular people live at?" The closer they are to the 'poles' the more they will have to rely on animal protein because the growing season won't be long enough to grow or harvest crops. Eventually you get to the point that you can't raise food animals either, because the growing season is too short to support herbivores. At that point you are sucking on chunks of frozen sushi and chewing whale blubber as a snack. You have no tooth decay and a lot of heart disease. The reverse happens as you get closer to the equator and can have two full growing seasons in a single year. Now you can live almost entirely on vegetables supplemented with butter, milk and maybe the occasional egg to provide the essential nutrients that are otherwise hard to get from vegetables alone.

In between you have a variety of mixed diets, mostly based around which starch you can grow because it's only starchy vegetables you can store. So you have rice, wheat, and maize based diets and in areas where you have cold ground also potato based diets. Rice and potatoes are historically best in terms of crop yields but rice requires a lot of water and a lot of technical ability (irrigation) and potatoes require cold storage because they have too much water in them to store 'dry' like a grain. Wheat is the most widespread because it stores exceptionally well, doesn't require a ton of sophistication to get going, and does well in a fairly dry climate. Less productively, you can have yam, taro, oats, quinoa, barley and oca based diets.

For non-humans in my world, their diets are strongly shaped by preferences and dietary restrictions that the omnivorous and adaptable humans don't have.

Goblin-kind: Goblins poorly process most vegetables. They starve on a vegetarian diet, and even small amounts of vegetables can make them flatulent and irritable. When possible, wealthy and healthy goblins subsist entirely on animal proteins - preferably animal flesh. Fish, cheese, and yogurt are considered second rate, and eaten in smaller amounts unless the goblins has lower social status. Most goblin communities survive on a combination of hunting, and animal husbandry - usually of goats and sheep. Shephards and goatherds, that most stay awake and go out during the day have very low social status, but owing to their importance to the community have comparatively high freedom, wealth, and food security compared to other low status goblins. As such, free shepherds and goatherds that own their own herds, form one of the most important goblin 'middle classes'. It's also one of the few ways that a goblin female can become independently powerful. Goblins with access to the underworld also farm some of the magical fungi that can be found and survive in the depths and which are capable of creating energy from contact with the stone alone. These are not particularly productive crops, but fungus are much more digestible to a goblin than say grains or cabbage, and are a welcome source of food that does not require going out into the hated sunlight. Goblins enjoy alcohol, but prefer those produced from simple sugars such as rum, sasma, tequila, or brandy. Diluted with water, and sometimes mixed together, these are all collectively known as 'grog'. Goblins prefer the taste of 'grog' that has been cured by placing a hunk of raw meat in it during the aging process, giving it a musky taste. Food is eaten communally, with higher status goblins taking the first share. A typical high status goblin table or 'board' will therefore have things like roasted lamb (in the spring) or mutton (in the fall), stewed salted goat, baked venison haunches, ewe's milk cheese, mushrooms and venison sweetbreads fried in butter, and jugs of grog. Poorer goblins will eat dried meat and various cheeses, and possibly even nut butters, fried potatoes, and other high fat vegetable food stuffs. On special occasions, slaves or captives will be slaughtered and served in a series of specially presented dishes. Goblin cooks are prized for their ability to showcase the flavor of meat or game of any sort, and to make long lasting hard cheeses and other preserved foods.

Elves: Elves on the other hand prefer a nearly strict vegan diet, supplemented only by small amounts of butter and cheese. They live mostly on nuts and dried fruit, and are capable of dealing with and enjoying high tannin forest nuts like acorns that humans find unpalatable. Elves garden with the intent of creating environments that look as natural as possible, so an elven garden looks a lot like stands of wild foodstuffs - blackberries, blueberries, apple trees, cherry trees, or whatever fruits are indigenous to the region. The proper way to farm is considered to be to find an area where something grows naturally, and then encourage its growth by subtly altering the environment and tending it to make it ideal for the foodstuff in question - whether it be oak trees or blueberries. Only an expert will typically recognize when they are in the middle of elvish 'farmland'. Elves enjoy alcohol and generally produce wines, meads, and ciders. Elves are more arboreal than humans and much more comfortable harvesting food well off the ground. Elves enjoy breads and grains, but typically clear only small amounts of land for what humans would recognize as farming, and so treat breads as a bit of a special treat rather than daily fare. Seeded or nut breads are especially highly prized, and - along with wine and cakes - are typical celebration fare. In areas where good relations exist, they often trade with human farmers to obtain grain and grain alcohols and also grape wines. Elven fare tends to be very herbal, with a great deal of flavors imparted by added the leaves of various herbs. Wild leeks, garlic, onions, ramp, and chives are highly desirable. Meat is rarely eaten, and many elves - especially high status ones - refrain from it their entire lives. Consuming meat is associated with low social status professions like soldiering or travelling merchants, and is done normally only as hardship fare when the need for quick energy outweighs all other considerations.

Dwarves: Dwarves are a highly cosmopolitan people and there food stuffs in many ways resemble those of humans. Dwarvish fare itself though borrows heavily and unabashedly from just about every culture it comes in contact with, so it would not be unusual to find a goblin salted goat and mushroom stew, stir fried peppers, herbed and seeded elvish bread, and beer. Dwarves like especially strong flavored foods of all sorts, and after adopting foreign recipes typically adapt them to their purposes by adding copious amounts of sugar, garlic, hot pepper, or strongly flavored spices like saffron or cinnamon. The result is a lot of thick spicy and often sweet sauces, as well as rich spiced deserts. As a consequence dwarven cookery is often highly prized in human lands, especially among mercantile classes. As a result, inns catering to merchants and travelers often serve dwarf style fare, both to attract dwarven customers and high class merchants. In dwarven culture, eating bland or unspiced food is a sign of poverty and hardship. Although cooking, brewing, and distilling are a highly prized and esteemed crafts, dwarves are not notable farmers or herders, and such work is considered unrewarding and even distasteful. As such, whenever possible dwarves prefer to trade for their food - most notably with human tenants. It's not at all unusual for a dwarven kingdom to have most of its surface dwellers be human tenant farmers or even freeholders with title to the surface land but not the land underneath the surface.

Gnomes if I remember like a LOT of salt in/on their food.


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abe ray said:

Gnomes if I remember like a LOT of salt in/on their food.

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This would be an example of why I think there is no 'wrong' answer to the question. Invent whatever cuisine that you like and can justify.

For my part, I didn't list gnomes or halflings because I don't have either one in my world. If I had gnomes, they'd eat a cuisine somewhere between elven and dwarvish. If I had halflings, they'd prefer the well documented food stuffs of Tolkien's works, which is basically English farm fare heavily influenced by Tolkien's own preferences for very fresh plainly prepared fare showcasing the flavor of the foodstuff.

Very salty cuisines are associated with relatively hot climates where you sweat a lot and must replenish the salt. For example, just about the saltiest European cuisine is Portuguese, and the Portuguese in turn heavily influenced and were heavily influenced by various Southeast Asian cuisines (notably modern Thai). Spanish is also a fairly salty cuisine, and you can see that influence in hot climate former Spanish colonies where you find very salty 'saltado' and 'adobo' dishes that are probably adaptations of native dishes influenced by Spanish cooking. About the saltiest cuisine I know of is Indonesian, which is just crazy salty. The only other places you see 'salty' show up a lot are cuisines that do a lot of pickling foods, but then typically you have very bland food that you add pickles to as a garnish. None of that suggests a reason why gnomes would love really salty food unless gnomes are largely desert or jungle dwelling people in your world, so personally I wouldn't have gnomish cuisine be particularly salty.

Social class and (possibly) species would play a role in what you're eating. Some species might have less of a social class system.

Geography plays a role. In the real world, some food sources (such as the potato) were found only in some regions until humanity developed reliable long-distance navigation and sea travel. If your world has the potato growing far from your core setting, it's entirely possible characters there don't eat it, or it's too expensive for most characters. Or maybe it simply grows everywhere and is cheap. Or maybe it was introduced already. Or maybe the PCs bring the food to the core area and made a lot of gold off of that. Or maybe the core area is where the potato grows.

A D&D setting could potentially transport food much more efficiently than in the real world. However, in some editions, transport is expensive. 4e is one of them. While you can casually teleport in 3e, you can't really do that while carrying lots of food. So in either case I don't think it would be cheap to transport spice from the Five Kingdoms of Southeast Faerun to Waterdeep, at least not magically. (Eberron's magitek would make shipping relatively cheap, I think. You still wouldn't be teleporting stuff, but you have houses devoted to enhancing ships.)

So I think most food would be local, and anything being transported a great distance must be preserved cheaply or it gets too expensive for most of the population. If you live on an island, even if you're not near the shore, you can probably buy fish that has been preserved in salt. However, you'll be eating relatively local fish, so your choice is limited.

If you live in an area that's not really suitable for cattle, you won't be eating much beef. You can eat some local animal though, perhaps oxen, or some fantasy creature.

I believe most European peasants worked on farms large enough to (barely) support their families after taxes and tithes. Whether your setting includes mandatory tithes is your business, of course Certainly many peasants had farms that were too small and had to labor on the fields of wealthier farmers to make enough to live on. Farmers in the first group could literally be self-sufficient, but would probably barter or sell food for the sake of variety. Farmers in the second group make some sort of wage, which might be food products rather than coinage, but again these could be used to acquire a more varied source of food. Many commoners would have jobs that take them away from the farm too often, and would have to use their wages to acquire food. And finally, the really poor would have to beg, rely on alms, or both.

Generally I try to make humans of the setting much like real-life medieval humans. I believe they would be able to access trading networks at local markets on weekends to buy foods they weren't growing or weren't available within a day's walking distance, but because magical preservation is so expensive, they wouldn't be eating food from very far away.

They would be omnivores and would be able to keep themselves fed, avoid malnutrition (most of the time) and get a little variety in their diet. Vegetables and grain would probably be more varied than meat because you can transport them further before preservation becomes an issue. Meat is less varied: you might only be able to eat mutton, beef, pork, fowl and fish, as more exotic animals live on your lord's land, and to acquire those food sources you either had to buy them from the lord's agent (somewhat expensive), or become a poacher. Fruit would fall into the same category as meat; it doesn't rot as fast, but you don't want to be eating month old grapes either, instead you buy wine and water it down to make it last longer. If you live in a "frontier zone" you could become really popular if you wander off your lord's territory and come back with venison or tasty displacer beast flesh.

Due to the lack of preservation, peasants would probably have to shop weekly, and many foods aren't in season much of the year, especially winter. Foods suitable for preservation would be common. You won't be eating strawberries most of the year, you'll be eating strawberry jam, which will last longer. The butcher will sell you salt pork all winter (until he or she runs out), and you might find yourself slaughtering your animals more often in the summer, as the heat will make meat spoil faster. You'd be eating lots of hard bread that probably wouldn't rot as quickly as tastier, softer bread made with today's recipes. You'd also have to get used to cheese and yogurt, which will last a lot longer than milk.

City dwelling humans are a somewhat different story. If the city is big enough there won't be nearly enough farms within easy walking distance. Farmers would sell their wares to merchants who then take food to the cities daily. City dwellers probably shop for food daily; you don't want to wait until late in the day when the shops have run out of fresh food. There never seems to be enough food, so there's always concern about food supplies being cut off (by war, bad weather, etc). Cities have a middle class who can afford more expensive food and usually have access to ports where exotic food can be brought in daily, so expect a wider variety of food in their diet.

I generally picture half-elves as commonly living in human cities. Half-elf civilizations don't really exist outside of a few areas of the Forgotten Realms (and a couple of enclaves in Eberron). I figure they would eat the same as humans. Same thing goes for small populations of tieflings, aasimar and the like. Because their tastes differ, they might tend toward a variant diet. For instance, maybe there's a lot of vegan aasimar.

In 4e major cities have teleportation circles (see the Linked Portal description) so nobles can, at high cost, keep themselves fed no matter what. The cost of transportation expensive food is only marginally higher than transporting cheap food, so in a siege the nobles might literally be eating more expensive food than normal. Also they can use these circles to run away if things get really bad.

I think an elven diet would not be that different from a human's. I think wild elves (elves in 4e) would live in small, possibly roving communities, and could live a hunter gatherer lifestyle. They would eat lots of fresh meat and gather as wide a variety of edible plant material as possible. Civilization (including that of high elves/eladrin) encroaching on their territory could prompt a crisis.

High elves/eladrin might live in artificial forests (were once forests, but magically shaped into buildings, with a managed ecosystem) that wouldn't provide enough food for the relatively high densities of eladrin compared to wild elves. There would probably be a fairly large number of eladrin vegans, which means less land used for less efficient meat. These lands, while more sustainable in the long run than human farms, would produce less food per acre, since the eladrin use different farming techniques. Fortunately eladrin have a high civilization level, and would be able to trade widely more easily than a lot of human civilizations. Furthermore I suspect eladrin communities tend to have fewer social classes than human communities (not no social classes, just fewer) so there's almost no desperately poor eladrin and fewer amazingly wealthy eladrin by percentage. This would enable most eladrin to afford to buy food that has been transported a long distance. With their slightly higher magic skills, I figure eladrin merchants would use large, mobile (floating?) "cold boxes" to transport food a great distance with minimal decay.

Dwarves have it rough. You can't grow plants underground, at least not without a lot of magical support such as Daylight-producing items, and those are expensive. You can grow fungi, and in many fantasy settings these fungi make powerful alcoholic brews, which dwarves sell at a high price (and use the proceeds to buy food). These fungi are living off of material trickling down from aboveground, or fertilizer bought by dwarves. The fungi probably has a low nutritional value, so dwarves need to carve out very large caverns to grow enough to keep themselves fed. That might not be enough. Dwarves might have to mine precious metals and minerals and sell them for food. Selling non-renewable metals for consumable foods sparks controversy, of course.

There's other foods underground as well, but there's much less variety, so dwarves would get heartily sick of any dwarven foods and will mob any merchant who brings them anything they're not used to. The stereotype of the "greedy dwarf" might exist because dwarves hoard money... to buy nutritious aboveground food. Dwarves might have to pay a lot for these foods, because dwarves might live far away from other civilizations, and also because foreign merchants don't like climbing mountains. They're steep and give you headaches. I suspect every dwarven mountain has a well-maintained merchant "fort" at the foot of the mountain that non-dwarven merchants bring food to, letting the dwarves carry the food up the mountain or through large tunnels directly to their communities. These tunnels would have to be well-guarded, obviously.

Halflings are pretty friendly with humans, and in most settings live near or even right beside humans rather than having their own independent countries. Many halflings are willing to live in burrows a short distance underground. These aren't as deep as dwarven communities, but could be deep enough that halflings could literally live under their own farms (or human farms that they work).

In most settings, gnomes don't seem to have their own countries, at least not in the material world. In Eberron the gnomes are the majority of the intimidating kingdom of Zilargo. In that setting gnomes are "weak-blooded wererats", a pretty good explanation for why they can talk to rats. Rats can eat anything, but civilized gnomes probably prefer better-tasting, nutritious food. In Eberron gnomes are often obsessed with hiding stuff. A gnome who owns a carriage probably hides secret compartments in it, even if they're not a smuggler, but just because they feel like it. Any gnome can find a way to secretly transport food, but in small quantities.

I suspect human and eladrin merchants don't travel far into Zilargo (and only to well-guarded facilities, where you'll be followed all day by secret police) with the gnomes transporting food to more local centers away from the eyes of outsiders. The gnomes probably don't buy finished foods, instead buying raw ingredients and making food themselves. Merchants who reach Zilargo and want to try a restaurant before they leave might be disappointed to find the food looks just like human food; the gnomes don't want to cook their own food for anyone else.

It wouldn't surprise me if most gnome-grown food is grown in "agricultural colonies" at specific points of Zilargo and then distributed. That's not very efficient, but it does let the government control food supplies, since privately-operated farms might not be tolerated by the Trust. Of course that's less efficient... or maybe that's just what the Trust wants you to think.

IIRC there was a gnome-controlled island in the Forgotten Realms, and the place is something of a magocracy. Their diet would resemble that of the eladrin (since they're also fey).

I ran a short-lived campaign where goblin food became important. The PCs were mainly elves, with a human or two, but lived in a setting where there was little distinction between the two. The core culture was a farming culture.

Nearby lived several large goblin villages, and the goblins lived off of food raided as well as hunting and gathering. The PCs found "too many" goblins, because the goblins were using an artifact to multiply food. The PCs didn't know what the artifact was at first, but when they found out they were very happy. When the goblins came to take their artifact back (they would face literal mass starvation without it), the PCs proposed a deal: multiply their farm products instead. They would even teach the chieftains' young heirs how to farm (and take the opportunity to convert goblins to their own religion, gaining control of the goblins a generation in the future). The unstable situation had the occasional spot of tension, as it made more sense for the PCs to keep the artifact near their productive farms (the goblins would have felt safer keeping the artifact to themselves), with the goblins showing off their superior numbers whenever they came to pick up food, while the PCs went on a mass-recruiting drive to maintain some sort of advantage.

To fill in some of the other races on the lines of Celebrim:

Drow: Drow culture is extremely hierarchical, and Wealthy Drow have some of the food sources most different from the surface world. Whole sections of underground caverns are dedicated to growing the stocks of mushrooms and fungi that make up the majority of the Drow animal feedstock. Other staple Drow foods include the meat and internal organs of their domesticated Roche and Carrion Crawler stock. For a picture of what these things look like, imagine if Klingon food was served on spotlessly clean bone-white plates.

On the other hand, Poorer Drow (males especially) subsist on mushrooms and fungi - and supplement this with hunting for bats, lizards, fish and other small game. In some ways, poor Drow males have a way of eating that is the most 'surface-like', and this is a cause of some disgust among other, better-off Drow. This has caused some clan houses to make hunting and trapping illegal in their caverns.

Drow society does not have a large number of 'middle-class' individuals - very few Drow are content to be anything but first or last place. However, Drow merchants, slavers and tradespeople enjoy some tangible benefits of serving their overlord. They are likely permitted to eat meat from the same domesticated underground animals as their betters (though less) and are more likely than the family-less and poor to have the opportunity to try foods from outside of their home cavern.


Duergar: Duergar are a stone-hearted people, favouring nothing in terms of flavour or texture, and having a "food is fuel" mentality to the things they eat. They do not broker trade with their neighbours for food. They grow primarily a particular variety of mushroom that is considered flavourless and unpalatable to the other underground races, but is especially nutrient-dense and filling. Duergar slavers and slaves alike eat this food.

Svirfneblin: Svirfneblin truly wish to be left alone to their own devices - and this mindset extends to the foods they eat. They've adapted some Drow farming techniques, and subsist mostly on underground fungi and trapping for small game. Unlike the Drow, Svirfneblin society is effectively classless. Wealthier Svirfneblin prefer to spend their money on things besides food. When they do trade for food, they are most likely to buy wine, liquor and beer from Drow and Dwarf traders.

Daniel Myers has two cookbooks available for fantasy races. One for dwarven cuisine and the other for halfling. Heavily informed by medieval cooking, they’re interesting reads, and have some delicious recipes.

One thing he pointed out at a seminar at Origins, was how important available cooking fuel is to the types of food prepared. Dwarves probably don’t use a lot of wood in their ovens, but probably grill using coals, for example. Elves probably aren’t too keen on chopping trees down (depending on your campaign) so they probably eat a lot of raw food.

Dwarves might also like a sort of Asian type of cuisine. This is considering that they don’t have much wood to burn for cooking.


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ENWorld is awesome for specifically this level of analysis. I particularly like Celebrim's consideration of social class in elven meat consumption. You might add a bit more meat consumption back in in the form of ritual or feast food though. As dedicated celebrants of nature they would probably participate in ritual hunts and consumption at certain times of the year (probably midwinter/fall).

I totally didn’t look in this thread because it said “dad food”. I honestly thought it was a thread about food at the gaming table or something.