Food and Your Characters

Don’t you love all the quizzes on-line to determine what your favorite color reveals about you, or what animal you are most like. How about this one? “What Food Matches Your Personality?”  Who makes up this stuff??? Anyway, when I took the quiz (because I’m a quiz sucker), here’s what it said:

You got: Sushi    You're sushi. Being raw fish never felt so good. You're smart, sophisticated, and fancy. But slap anyone who tries to dip you in soy sauce.

Huh? I mean, I like some kinds of sushi, but . . . seriously?

I took another quiz, the “Food Personality Quiz", and came out Gourmet. DH laughed. A lot! Sure, I like good food, but this farm girl is pretty simple when it comes to cooking. The description fit well, but I wouldn’t call it defining gourmet, would you?

Whether you are eating out or cooking at home, good food is important to you. As a gourmet personality you are likely to have a discriminating palate and be knowledgeable about food. You enjoy spending time cooking and preparing recipes that are high quality and are willing to make new recipes. You have enough experience cooking that you are comfortable changing a recipe to adapt it to your preferences. If you do not like parsley you can easily exchange it for cilantro. You understand that a recipe calling for a specific meat or vegetable can easily be substituted based on your preferences. You prefer recipes that are more elaborate than routine everyday recipes and could also include somewhat unusual ingredients.

Another one was fun, based on Myers-Briggs categories. After taking that quiz, "What’s Your Food Personality?”, I was rated ISFJ: The Apple Pie (Introverted, Sensing, Feeling, Judging)

Your personality is ISFJ! You are traditional, like the Apple Pie; you never go out of style with a timeless reliability that sets a warm and fuzzy mood for everyone you come across. You have an old enough soul in which you've accumulated past and present experiences, developing a world of wisdom and knowledge that you enjoy sharing with other people. You like to remain practical and are easily sensitive to the needs of others, making you the go-to delicious dish that that never steers us wrong!

So how much credence can you put into these things? Not much, I’d say. On the other hand, there are folks who study such enigmatic topics as what your food preferences reveal about you. I recently posted “What Coffee Drinking Reveals about Your Characters.”

For example, Dr. Alan Hirsch has tests to check out your food choices and match them up with factors such as partner compatibility, depression, and personality types. He believes there is a link between food choices and behaviors. For example, he found a link between a tendency toward perfectionism and tortilla chip eating. Also, there was a correlation between introverted personalities and cream crackers. You might want to use his data to help shape some of your novel’s characters.

A food behavioral expert, Juliet A. Boghossian, weighs in on our eating habits as revelatory of personality. For example, slow eaters live in the moment and fast eaters put others before themselves. People who organize their food on the plate need to loosen up and be more flexible. Those who cut up all their food before eating are preparers and one step ahead of others. Read the article to find out about the nine ways we eat food and what that says about us.

For those of us who write culinary mysteries, anything about food interests us. We mine these for ways to shape characters. These foodie articles are just some of the fruit to be picked off the personality analysis tree.

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Facebook: What do your food preferences and eating habits say about your personality? How can you use that for your characters? Sharon Arthur Moore shares some insights with you at http://bit.ly/2z1AAsx

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