It’s August, and where I live, that means barbecue season. Every time I leave my house, I smell meat and/or vegetables sizzling on a grill somewhere. What better time to write about food? In spite of replicators, Star Trek includes plenty of stories about the importance of cooking and sharing meals together. So does our latest book club entry: The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai.
Published in 2013 and set in the author’s hometown of Kyoto, Japan, the story centers on the Kamogawa Diner and Detective Agency, run by a father-daughter team whose mission is to recreate the most important meal of every guest’s life. A widower and retired police detective, Nagare Kamogawa uses his training to piece together memories of lost loved ones and missed opportunities, while his daughter Koichi asks the forthright questions needed to draw clients out of their shells. Meanwhile, a cat named Drowsy tries to sneak into the kitchen with varying degrees of success, accidentally revealing as much about the clients as the Kamogawas’ own detective work could do.
Told in stand-alone chapters, without any major plot twists as Western readers might expect, this subtle slice-of-life story is just what Hoshi Sato, a Japanese linguist who loves to cook, might recommend to her friend T’Pol for our hypothetical Enterprise book club. As for T’Pol, she would surely appreciate the logic in the Kamogawas’ methods – and never, ever admit that certain scenes make her want to cry.
PRO s01e03 “Starstruck”
Choosing a favorite food can be an important step for children discovering their individuality. One of the Kamogawas’ clients is searching for a recipe for Neapolitan spaghetti, because it was the first meal she ever ordered in a restaurant when she was five years old. For the young crew of the Protostar, the power of choice is even more necessary; having been prisoners in a labor camp that always served the same “Nutri-Goop”, the first thing they do when they discover the replicators is order all their favorites, such as truffle biscuits for Jankom Pog. Rok-Tahk is too used to prison food to choose anything different, but later in the season, we see her eating vanilla ice cream with her shipmates (s01e17 “Ghost in the Machine), taking part in a new family tradition and asserting her right to choose.
VOY s04e03 “Day of Honor”
Food can be a marker of not just personal, but cultural identity, to mark the seasons and remind us of our heritage. An elderly lady named Tae visits the diner specifically for Kyoto cuisine, such as mochi wrapped in cherry leaves during cherry blossom time, and Chef Kamogawa respects her critiques when it comes to authenticity. Unlike them, B’Elanna Torres has conflicted feelings about her culture, but she also can’t resist digging into a Klingon blood pie on the Day of Honor, even – especially – when she’s sixty thousand lightyears away from home.
DS9 s07e20 “The Changing Face of Evil”
”It sounds like nostalgia might be the secret ingredient here,” Kamogawa says to his friend, a widower who feels his new fiancee’s udon noodles cannot measure up to his late wife’s. Honoring the memory of your loved ones is important (Kamogawa and his friend both keep pictures of their late wives on family altars), but not at the expense of the present. Benjamin Sisko understands this too; when his second wife Kasidy accidentally burns his homegrown bell peppers, he doesn’t try to measure her against his first wife Jennifer, but understands that she was only trying to cheer him up.
ENT s01e12 “Silent Enemy”
The Kamogawas’ least favorite client, a high-powered businessman, threatens to replace them with a famous TV chef if they can’t recreate his late mother’s nikujaga stew. The meal they serve, however, turns his whole world upside-down when he finds out how painstakingly his stepmother preserved his mother’s recipe collection. Food can be an expression of love, especially for people who are otherwise emotionally reserved. Malcolm Reed finds this out when his friends become food detectives, not unlike the Kamogawas, to find out what to make for his birthday dinner. Having learned from Dr. Phlox that Malcolm takes medication for his pineapple allergy, Hoshi Sato deduces that he must like pineapples – and his smile as he cuts his birthday cake is well worth the effort.
Discussion Questions:
- What meal from your past would you recreate if you could?
- Is there a traditional food from your hometown you are particularly proud of?
- If replicators were real, would you use them to synthesize your food? Why or why not?