Foods

Various foods are unique to Roshar. Amongst others as yet unknown, these include:

• Avramelon - A fruit of which Danlan is quite fond.
• Bread - Thaylen and Shin breads are the only breads on Roshar that have white gluten flour and yeast. All other breads on Roshar are flatbreads.
• Canned fish - Azure refers to it as a convenience. To Kaladin, the meat tastes salty, but is good - far better than something Soulcast.
• Cheese - A dairy product made from sow's milk.
• Chouta - A rolled flatbread filled with meat covered in gravy. It has a certain flavor that is not bad, but is acquired.
• Chutney
• Clemabread - A large, baked roll, thick and granular, with spicy paste at the center. Lift thinks that it isn't particularly good, but that it is filling. Still, it breaks apart easily, almost more of a mush. Further, she thinks the rolls are only slightly better than gruel, which is only slightly better than cold socks.
• Cremling claws - Deep-fried, they make chouta crunchy. Rock enjoys his chouta this way. Eating cremlings isn't uncommon, but it isn't particularly fine dining.
• Curry - A stew made for either men or women.
• Finger Crabs - Cannot be cooked too long or they get rubbery.
• Flangria - A Soulcast meat mixed with ground lavis, then made into little balls, battered up and fried, stuffed into fried bread, then covered with gravy (i.e., chouta).
• Flatbread
• Garams - Served buttered with chutney.
• Grain - Often served with curry, according to Kaladin, the aftertaste of Soulcast grain has a lingering staleness.
• Haspers - Stranna haspers are steamed in the shell.
• Kuma - Served on flatbread, and crushed with lavis and spices.
• Lavis - A grain that is a labor-intensive crop to cultivate, but also a profitable one. From it are made beer, ale and liquor (or hard honu). Steamed lavis is added to boiled, spiced vegetable broth, tasting like home, also according to Kaladin.
• Lanka claws - Cooked in a savory broth, for men.
• Lazbo - A spicy powder that Huio adds to a batch of shiki. Rock is surprised and impressed by its suitability.
• Limm - A seasoning that is crushed before being added to a stew.
• Longroots - Allowed to cook before adding meat to them in a stew.
• Palafruit - Has a pit, and Gallant loves it.
• Pancakes - There are ten varieties of them.
• Peca - An Azish fruit used to infuse yellow wine.
• Pork - Served in slabs, in a peppery sauce, for men.
• Shiki - A brownish Horneater drink that Rock chills overnight in metal bins on the plateau outside Urithiru.
• Simberry - A fruit that grows on Roshar. It's flesh is clear and its rind is reddish in color.
• Skrip - A variety of cremling with a flat tail, two large claws, and long antennae, served steamed.
• Stagm - A brownish tuber that grows in deep puddles.
• Stew - Rock's stews are like haemultang, a traditional Korean spicy seafood stew. Koreans use gochu powder (i.e., gochutgaru: powdered Korean chili powder). Rock makes his stews super spicy.
• Tallew - A grain that puffs up when boiled in water.
• Treb - A grain that grows in bunches inside hard pods on vines. Grown in slits in stone, the vines bunch up and grow pods that get wedged so they don't tumble free in storms.
• Yamma root, called cussweed by some.

Women's vs. Men's

In the Vorin kingdoms of Alethkar and Jah Keved, the food consumed by women is different from that consumed by men. While Dalinar finds the food of women to be distastefully sweet, Shallan later finds the food of men to be distastefully spicy.

Within said kingdoms, to sit at the king's table at a king's feast remains a masculine dining reservation.

Notes

“	"Their milk products are much lesser used, but they do get cream and whatnot from sow's milk. The pigs on Roshar produce more milk from years of natural genetic modification - breeding and whatnot - in the same way that humans have bred cows over the centuries. So they do have milk products. Some of their curries will have different types of cream. Whether they're dipping the crustaceans depends on the culture. For instance, Horneaters have teeth that break claws. Their back molars are different from standard human molars. To a lesser extent, the Herdazians have the same thing going for them. For those two cultures, they’ll chew the shells and eat them. For the Alethi, they're probably dipping the meat in a curry, or just preparing the curry with the crustacean meat in it. There are other cultures where they'll saute it or have a sow's milk dipping sauce or things like that."	”
–Brandon Sanderson

The food that Brandon is using in The Stormlight Archive is based off early 20th-century American street food, and the change to mobile cuisine. It's one of those fascinating things one can read about. And that's where the food like chouta is coming from, the idea that as cultures intermix, and as Industrial Revolution starts to happen, food starts to be portable.

Diabetes is not prominent among Vorin women. One reason is that they're not eating candy. They do eat candy, but glycemically their average meal is not going to be as high as an average meal on Earth, even modern-day, because their grains are not refined. They do add sweeteners to things, but a lot of them are fruit sweeteners. And they're getting probably less of a load than a person eating a bowl of white rice in our culture.

When asked whether it could be possible that the euphemism that men eat spicy foods and women eat more sweeter foods could refer, respectively, to gay women or men (i.e., "Does he eat sweet food?", "Does she eat spicy food?"), Brandon said that he could see people saying that.

Q&A with Brandon

Q. How does a world that is wracked by Storms supply food for an entire population?

A. The thing to keep in mind is, it's not a barren planet. There are lots of plants on this planet. I mean, it's no more barren than a corral reef that deals with the tide rushing in and rushing out. Now, the life has to adapt to it, but it's a really lush planet. I mean, if you go and you look at the Shattered Plains, there's grass everywhere and plants growing all over the place. It's just, right before a Storm, it becomes barren and then becomes lush again.

Q. Potential historical basis for the Vorin separation of men's and women's food. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luau

A. I was aware of this during Stormlight worldbuilding, and so it certainly had an influence.