Thomas Pynchon is known to give his characters ridiculous food-inspired names, from Mrs. Eggslap to the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke. But the author’s love of food runs throughout his novels in larger ways, inspiring memorable food scenes that can leave you ravenous—or slightly ill.

With his latest novel, Bleeding Edge , out right now, we took a look at the major food themes throughout all Pynchon’s work, from V. to Inherent Vice:

Snacks

From Cheetos with grapefruit soda to “breakfast of Captain Crunch and Diet Pepsi,” Pynchon’s novels are full of snack foods in questionable combinations, particularly in Vineland and Inherent Vice, whose characters have a chronic case of the munchies.

For the ultimate snack lover’s dream, check out Doc’s shopping cart in *Inherent Vice: “*half a dozen obliga­tory boxes of cake mix, a gallon of guacamole and several giant sacks of tortilla chips, a case of store-brand boysenberry soda, most of what was in the Sara Lee frozen-dessert case, lightbulbs and laundry detergent for straight-world cred, and, after what seemed like hours in the Interna­tional Section, a variety of shrink-wrapped Japanese pickles that looked cool.”

Pizza

The definitive stoner food, pizza has a special place in Pynchon’s novels—particularly in Inherent Vice, where it inspires the kind of devotion usually reserved for loved ones. When a girl offers to “pick up a pizza on the way,” Doc’s first response is, “Marry me.”

In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon recounts the creation of “what is arguably the first British Pizza,” which seems doomed from the start:

"I don't suppose anyone has a Tomato?"

"A what?"

"Saw one at Darlington Fair, once," nods Mr. Brain.

"No good, in that case,— eaten by now."

"The one I saw, they might not have wanted to eat...?"

And woe to those who mess with pizza—especially those trying to make it healthy. In Vineland, Pynchon slams the fictional Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple, “a classic example of the California pizza concept at its most misguided. … Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover.”

Global Cuisine

It’s not all Cheetoes and pizza in Pynchonland. His books highlight cuisines from around the world— sometimes even in song. Mason & Dixon praises Malay cuisine in a few verses:

“Curried wild Peacock and Springbok Ragout,

Bilimbi Pickles, and Tamarinds, too,

Bobotie, Frikkadel, Fried Porcupine,

Glasses a-brim with Constantia Wine, singing,

Pass me that Plate,

Hand me that Bowl,

Let's have that Bottle,

Toss me a Roll,'

Scoffing and swilling, out under the Sky,

Leaving the Stars to go silently by.

With so many culinary options at our fingertips, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. That’s Doc’s dilemma in Inherent Vice, as he heads down Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica: “This street was a chowhound’s delight. … If he wanted to, he could also eat his way down Pico night after night for a long while before repeating an ethnic category. … Many was the night Doc ran out of gas, and his munchies-afflicted companions out of patience, long before settling on where to go to eat.”

Charles Mason in Mason & Dixon is more discerning, making his opinions known in a hilarious rant against Dutch food: “their emphasis upon roots, —the eternal boiling, the absence of even salt, we have already review’d. ‘Tis the Sheep,—Heaven forfend we should ever find a Moment without Sheep in it.”

Mexican Food

Pynchon lived in California and Mexico for decades, and came away with an abiding love of Mexican food that also made its way into his novels —from the greasy spoon in The Crying of Lot 49 to Lupita’s, in Against the Day, where customers come in to “fill their lunch pails or paper sacks with chicken tortas, venison tamales, Lupita’s widely-known brain tacos, [and] bottles of home-brewed beer.”

The extent of Pynchon’s obsession comes out in Inherent Vice, which ** takes readers to “the neon grandiosities of Tex-Mecca, unknown to guidebooks but for a network of hungry dopers … border on an object of pilgrimage.” Doc orders an impressive “combination of enchiladas, tacos, burritos, tostadas, and tamales for two called El Atómico, whose entry on the menu carried a footnote disclaiming legal responsibility.”

For something a little less gut-busting, try an Against the Day breakfast of “chilled papayas and limes, already cut up to avoid any chance of knife-related mischief, bolillos freshly baked, sliced, and spread with beans and Chihuahua cheese and put in some oven till the cheese melted, a kitchen salsa featuring the energetic local chili known as El Chinganariz, a pitcherful of mixed orange, mango, and strawberry juice, and Vera Cruz coffee.”

Restaurant Jobs

Pynchon’s characters frequently dabble in the culinary arts, albeit with humble (and often ill-dated) beginnings. In V, ex-Navy man Benny Profane gets a new job as an as “assistant salad man” at a restaurant in upstate New York. When a drunk marine stumbles in with a machine gun, Profane’s boss “finally triumphed, swapping for it three artichokes and an eggplant.”

Pig, Profane's sidekick, also worked in the galley on their ship: “The first day he fell asleep in the serving line, rendering inedible a gunboat full of mashed potatoes.” He’s later caught “trying to take over 5 pounds of hamburger swiped from the galley. Profane escaped legal action by splitting the loot with Knoop who was having marital difficulties and had somehow come up with the notion that 2-1/2 pounds of hamburger might serve as a peace-offering.”

In Mason & Dixon, Charles Mason’s father was a baker, prompting vivid flashbacks to his father’s pontifications on bread: "The Grinding, the Rising, the Baking, at each stage it grows lighter, it rises not only in the Pans but from the Earth itself, being ground to Flour, as Stones are ground to Dust, … finding its way at last to Heat, rising each time, d’ye see, until it be a perfect thing."

Frank in Against the Day also had memories of his family kitchen, where his mother was “known for cookin anything.” She runs an ice cream business, and puts Frank to work cranking the machine when he visits. “Cherry apricot, special of the day, sounds peculiar, but the truck shows up from Fruita every other day, and it’s pretty much what comes along”

Against the Day ’s official chef, though, ** is Miles, whose cooking was often inedible. “Not that Miles would deliberately set out to wreck the soup or burn the meat loaves—he seldom got that overt, tending more to forgetful omissions, or misreadings of quantity and timing.” His fellow airmen counsel him: “If anything's an irreversible process, cooking is! … You can’t de-roast a turkey or un-mix a failed sauce—time is intrinsic in every recipe, and one shrugs it off at one’s peril.” Solid advice for any cook.

The Inedible

“A lot of people who think they're cooks but are clinically deluded,” says a mess hall manager in Vineland. Pynchon includes a lot of their misguided creations in his books, relishing the gross and inedible—the places where "even [the] Jell-O salads have scum on them."

Maybe the most memorable example is the “English Candy Drill*,”* in which a parade of disgusting sweets are sampled, unwillingly, by Tyrone Slothrop, the protagonist (sorta) in Gravity’s Rainbow : rhubarb creams, cherry-quinine petit fours, eucalyptus-flavored fondant, and pepsin-flavored nougat, licorice drops with a “dribbling liquid center, which tastes like mayonnaise and orange peels” and “a hard sour gooseberry shell into a wet spurting unpleasantness of, he hopes it's tapioca, little glutinous chunks of something all saturated with powdered cloves.”

Gravity’s Rainbow includes another scene that’s hard to stomach: As a culinary prank, Bodine and Roger hold a dinner party with an intentionally revolting menu: “snot soup,” “sum soufflé,” “vomit vichyssoise” and “wart waffles.” Needless to say, “A general loss of appetite reigns, not to mention overt nausea.”

Food Fads

Pynchon is constantly poking fun at the latest food trends, but Against the Day features his funniest fake food fads. Consider Belgium’s “ culte de la mayonnaise ” where “oversize exhibits of the ovoöleaginous emulsion were to be encountered at every hand … mountains of Chantilly mayonnaise, swept upward in gravity-impervious peaks insubstantial as cloud, along with towering masses of green mayonnaise, basins of boiled mayonnaise, mayonnaise baked into soufflés, not to mention a number of not entirely successful mayonnaises, under some obscure attainder, or on occasion passing as something else, dominated every corner.”

The author also invents a fake diet modeled on the Greek mathematician Pythagoras, which is largely vegetarian. A “Full English Breakfast modified for the Pythagorean dietary” includes “imitation sausages, kippers & bloaters, omelettes, fried potatoes, fried tomatoes” and the awful-sounding “vegetarian haggis.” Another requirement of the diet is to “avoid beans”—supposedly a “direct quote from Pythagoras himself.”

And just to make sure you get the point, Pynchon’s most obvious parody is the so-called “Lightarians, living on nothing but light … concocting meals from light recipes, fried light, fricaseed light, light a la mode.”

Food as Art

We often think of food as art, but Pynchon makes it literal in V., which features a painting titled “Cheese Danish #35.” “The cheese Danish was a recent obsession of Slab's. He had taken, some time ago, to painting in a frenzy these morning-pastries in every conceivable style, light and setting. The room was already littered with Cubist Fauve and Surrealist cheese Danishes. ‘Monet spent his declining years at his Home in Giverny, painting the water lilies in the garden pool,’ reasoned Slab. ‘He painted all kinds of water lilies. He liked water lilies. These are my declining years. I like cheese danishes, they have kept me alive now for longer than I can remember.”

And what could Gravity’s Rainbow’s Banana Breakfast be, if not art? In a spectacle worthy of the Bocuse d’Or, the famous feast includes “banana omelets, banana sandwiches, banana casseroles, mashed bananas molded in the shape of a British lion rampant, blended with eggs into batter for French toast, squeezed out a pastry nozzle across the quivering creamy reaches of a banana blancmange to spell out the words C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre (attributed to a French observer during the Charge of the Light Brigade) which Pirate has appropriated as his motto . . . tall cruets of pale banana syrup to pour oozing over banana waffles, a giant glazed crock where diced bananas have been fermenting since the summer with wild honey and muscat raisins, up out of which, this winter morning, one now dips foam mugsfull of banana mead . . . banana croissants and banana kreplach, and banana oatmeal and banana jam and banana bread, and bananas flamed in ancient brandy Pirate brought back last year …”

Coffee

Coffee fuels many of Pynchon’s novels; it’s constantly being brewed in scene after scene. The only character who doesn’t appreciate its pleasures is Charles in Mason & Dixon , prompting the following heated exchange on the merits of coffee versus tea:

“Can’t understand how anyone abides that stuff.”

“How so?” Mason unable not to react.

“Well, it’s disgusting, isn’t it? Half-rotted Leaves, scalded with boiling Water and then left to lie and soak, and bloat?

Disgusting? This is Tea, Friend, Cha,—what all tasteful London drinks. That,” pollicating the Coffee-Pot, “is what’s disgusting.”

“Au contraire,” Dixon replies, “Coffee is an art, where precision is all,—Water-Temperature, mean particle diameter, ratio of Coffee to Water or as we say, CTW, and dozens more Variables I’d mention, were they not so clearly out of thy technical Grasp …"

This disdain toward non-coffee drinkers also seeps into Against the Day, which ** offers this critique of Columbus, Ohio: “It also quickly became evident—horribly evident—that no one in the city knew how to make coffee, as if there were some sort of stultified consensus, or even city ordinance, about never waking up.”

Alcohol

Whether it’s ale, Madeira, dandelion wine, or (most often) just a cold beer, you can always expect to find a Pynchon character with a glass in his hand. The author’s philosophy might be summed up by Benny Profane in V. : "Don't talk … Drink." Cheers to that.