Delicious in Dungeon and the importance of food for survival and pleasure!

Watching Delicious In Dungeon, an anime based on the manga by Ryoko Kui, has changed my perspective on food and the personal or cultural relationship you can have with it. This show goes into depth about what food can represent to different people, will help you change how you think of it, and might even help you with your cooking! You can now watch it on Netflix.

Complex Characters 

Delicious in Dungeon characters always have interesting characteristics that make you want to know more about their intentions and why they do something, or why their personality is like that. For example, Laios Touden, one of the main characters, has a very strong fixation with animals and monsters. Even when he was little, his fixation was very prominent, with him always being with the family dogs and other farm animals. In episode one, where the group is in the dungeon and figuring out how to make food from monsters, you get to see Laios Touden’s cookbook, which is full of annotations and sketches of different monsters and their abilities, with methods on how to cook them properly. You can see that the cookbook has become a sort of diary for him, indicating that he’s had for years honing this weird knowledge of so many monsters. This lifelong hobby of his helps Laios Touden and his friends get through the Dungeon.

The main focus of Delicious in Dungeon is food and the show uses people’s relationship with food for many different things. A perfect example is the character Senshi in episodes 22 and 23, where we get to go deep into his backstory on how he is so knowledgeable in preparing monsters and making them into delicious foods to eat while also being very knowledgeable in the nutrition each monster as well as plants have. He talks about his traumatic history with the Dungeon, in which he was stuck inside for years, all his friends died trying to protect him, and he experienced extreme hunger for months… but then he was too scared and traumatized to leave, so he stayed inside the dungeon because he was trying to process. He thought that he would be safer staying inside then out. With these experiences, Senshi saw food as more complex than just eating whatever you craved. He saw it as something you needed for survival, energy, clear thinking, and the strength to keep going. His trauma made making food the most important task for him to keep on living.

Another perspective of this is Izutsumi in episode 19, where she is properly introduced to the audience and other characters. Her relationship to food is important because she is a picky eater. When she tries Senshi’s cooking she ultimately disrespects his hard work and throws away the vegetables that were added into the meal. From Senshi’s perspective, doing this is basically saying she doesn’t respect him, which makes their first encounter very rocky. Later into the story Senshi helps Izutsumi explore more meals and expand her palette, which in turn makes her more open minded about trying new things. Food highlights Izutsumi’s character development, so you could say that eating new things made her develop into a more complex character.

World Building 

The world-building used in Delicious in Dungeon mixes fantasy with realism for its races, animals, and ecosystem, which makes the environment of it very interesting. You can also see that the author, Ryoko Kui, was very inspired by D&D because each character is part of a class like mage, knight, rogue, ranger, etc…  There are also a lot of human races in Delicious in Dungeon that specialize in those classes. Elves and gnomes are known for being able to use magic very easily as well as gnomes, while half-foots are more specialized in picklocking or scouting due to their small stature. There are also tall-men (normal people) who aren’t really known for something specific and are more like jacks-of-all-trades.

Dungeons are located in different areas of this world, and parties explore dungeons for a living, making money from the stuff they discover. Magic is also a very important necessity when exploring since there are a lot of monsters in them, making mages and healers a huge asset when surviving in such a place.

Real Environments = Real Ingredients

Even though Dungeons are very common and important in this world, not much is known about them, so going inside them is unsafe and suspicious. It’s like gambling, you never know what type of creators, plants, and magic levels a Dungeon could have, so many characters are nervous about entering. Being an explorer is a very dangerous job. The creators of Delicious in Dungeon were also very inspired by D&D monsters. There are mermaids, dragons, minotaurs, golems, succubuses, and doppelgangers; but with those creatures also comes the environment they originate from. As the story continues, you learn the Dungeons themselves are their own world, with different races living on each layer, just like there are different animals on each continent. All of these complex ecosystems and placement of the monsters in their own biological niches make the world really seem alive. Everything these characters eat came from a very interesting environment where it served a real purpose.

You can find more information about Delicious in Dungeon on Wikipedia, or by reading the original manga and/or watching the anime. You can learn more about Ryoko Kui in interviews and blog posts on his website, but be sure to translate it to English using Google! You can also purchase the book Delicious in Dungeon World Guide: The Adventurer’s Bible to get answers to all your questions.