Food

Very good article, honestly (are you the OP?)

I think that, different to what a lot of the worldbuilding community likes to imagine they're building (a totally cohesive, granular universe), all world projects, like all stories, have a focus.

What you choose to emphasize says a lot about you--what you find interesting and important. Tolkien loved languages and european folklore, so he built a world focused on that. Brandon Sanderson liked puzzling out rules based magic and exploring sociopolitical themes, and that's reflected in how Mistborn works.

So, for context, I'm part of a roleplay comminity about different nations in the post apocalypse (keeping this purposefully a bit vague.)

And it attracts a lot of different types of people. A lot of them are military history geeks who write about daring midnight raids using salvaged cars with metal plates strapped to them as APCs. Some of them are politics geeks who write about the constitutional structure of their city state, and the dramatic struggles for domiannce within the governing party.

I play a bunch of anarcho-socalists living in the mountains of Spain, helping integrate escaped slaves and planning for the day they can come down and burn all the local plantations to the ground.

I talk about war when there's war, and political structure when it comes up. But, with a country amounting to less than 40,000 people spread across less than a dozen major settlements, their story is extremely personal. They're less "a country" than a bunch of people running around and doing stuff.

My posts have been about things like finding the right typeset alloy to make a working printing press so they don't have to use the typewriter for every single copy of a page. The collective farms firing someone for selling their crops to outsiders at unfairly cheap prices in exchange for a fancy pistol.

And, more than anyone else in the community, I talk about food.

I can't help it: the area I'm looking at is famously agricultural, and there's not a lot else the anarchists are able to get hold of. They don't have fancy medical tech, or tanks, or cathedrals. But they do have a shitload of oranges.

The story of their slow expansion and development in is the story of their food. It used to be that oranges and pigs were the only thing you could eat in the mountains (the absurd surplus of oranges being a sort of joke about a line in Homage to Catalonia, where Orwell says his militia was short on everything except those.) Their diet revolved around the stuff. No grapewine, you drink orangewine, munching on orange fruit jerky and a cold gazpacho made from pulped oranges and tomatoes. They ate "presser's toast," where the olives have already been crushed once for oil, because they desperately need the stuff for cooking and lighting.

As they've slowly come into their own, the types of available food has blossomed. They can drink beer made by their neighbors, and grow basil in their gardens, and they have taverns who can make a huge variety of foods from the same dozen ingredients.

What's important to their story is that it feels like a community, with practical concerns and friendships and nasty gossip. They care about the military insofar as it's useful. What I choose to emphasize in the worldbuilding helps inform what kind of society they are.

And, by and large, they're a society concerned with feeding their people. Not just with basic sustenance, but with food you can actually enjoy and share.

I think telling more stories about food and community is solarpunk as fuck.