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Deana Whitney

I'm working on a food article about Roshar, so a few questions. Lavis equals corn?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, ish. That would be a nice *indistinguishable*

Deana Whitney

Is one of the other grains like buckwheat, do they have bananas or similar-tasting fruit, and what is the Earth equivalent of the most popular vegetable in Alethi cuisine?

Brandon Sanderson

Probably a sweet potato, though I hate them, would be the closest thing to the tuber that they use. There is a somewhat buckwheat-ish grain, but most -- like the Thaylen bread that they talk about and stuff, you've got to be getting wheat in from Shinovar. But yes, they have a grain that's slightly more of the consistency, so if you saw it or if you ate something from it you would be like this is some weird form of wheat. They're forming the flatbreads out of it. I would have to go to my notes and find out which one it is. I know I've mentioned it in the books before. If I didn't end up mentioning it I got it in the wiki, so you can drop us an email and I can pull it out of the wiki for you.

Deana Whitney

I was also hoping they have garlic.

Brandon Sanderson

They have things similar enough to garlic that you could just use garlic.

sciencetor2

I was the one with the weird alcohol question. I'm a brewer so I was trying to complete the article I wrote--I wrote the article on the [Coppermind].

Brandon Sanderson

So really, you're going to have to give me advice. What would you think?

sciencetor2

Basically, if they have distillation apparatus? Because they've replaced a lot of technology with Stormlight technology

Brandon Sanderson

They do have distillation apparatus.

sciencetor2

Okay. Then anything above 20% alcohol has to be a distilled spirit. Anything below has to be a brewed spirit.

Brandon Sanderson

Okay, brewed. So a wine can be brewed? You call wine a brewed spirit?

sciencetor2

Technically, you call it fermented, but I'd say brewing process. Otherwise it's a distillation apparatus, and you have to actually distill it and boil off the alcohol.

Brandon Sanderson

That I know about. But the actual terminology...What we don't see a lot of in the Stormlight Archive is a beer. The hops, the fermented, the bubbles. You just don't see that. What you see is things we would call a wine, and things we would call a hard alcohol. A spirit, I guess. That spectrum is, to most people there, one spectrum. They do use grains for making things like a Horneater White. So that's probably going to be as close to a..

sciencetor2

Everclear?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, there you go. Yeah.

sciencetor2

Pink, by the way, doesn't have any alcohol according to the chart?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah it's just juice. Just a squeezed juice, I actually kind of imagine that one. And the next one is they squeeze the juice and ferment it. And then at some point during that line, I guess it would be at the 20% mark, they start distilling, and some of them are going to be grains that they made and stuff like that.

So you can take that all as canon now, and you can write it.

sciencetor2

So it's juice, not tea? Because it said tea in the little chart? It said, "I've had tea stronger than this."

Brandon Sanderson

Oh yeah. It's not a tea. "I've had tea stronger than this" is just a joke that it doesn't have any alcohol in it. It is a juice.

Oyeresu

The first thing in Stormlight that really blew me away was the blandness of the soul cast food. 

Was the blandness due to the relationship in our world between the food source and its microbiome? If you stripped all bacteria from chicken and beef you'd have a hard time telling them apart from taste alone, so it would make sense that a soulcaster turning stone to meat would just be making cells of the grain or meat and skipping the bacteria that give it flavor.

If that's why, Would a really microbiologist/food scientist soulcaster be able to mix in the bacteria to make tastier simulcast food?

Brandon Sanderson

This is indeed part of the reason! There are others, though. Soulcast flesh, for example, doesn't actually have much fat--it's pure muscle, as fat/oil is a different essence. Another factor, I figured, would be water content. I decided that simulcast grain would taste stale for this reason. 

These are both things you can compensate for as a skilled soulcaster, but the devices (rather than the radiants) aren't equipped to do this. 

Questioner

Does ice cream and popcorn exist on Roshar? 

Brandon Sanderson

Unfortunately, neither of them do. You can go to Scadrial and get some, right? But Roshar... so, they do get cheese and things on Roshar from sow's milk and things like this, but they are just not as milk-based as some cuisines on Earth. Ice cream is just not a thing. Also, like, ice is not a thing that they're really doing a lot with. And popcorn, y'know, requires maize, which... 

Questioner

But you said lavis is the corn? 

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, it is the corn, but if you pop it it's gonna pop a lot more like barley. It's not gonna be the same, right? That's what lavis is gonna be like. So it is the corn, but more in the idea that it's, uh... It's probably more similar to a barley.