DUNGEON MESHI - I EAT THEREFORE I AM

"Today I ate: two slices of toast spread with peanut butter, a sandwich filled with swiss cheese, turkey slices and romaine lettuce, two cups of broccoli, 1½ cups of rice, and a sirloin steak."

You can tell a lot about a person from what they eat. You can also tell a lot from whether they cook for themselves, or from whether the food they eat comes from animals and plants that they themselves have killed. That last question may seem out of place. Almost no one kills the food that they eat anymore. Sure, I’ve uprooted some vegetables before, but I’ve never killed an animal, let alone killed one in order to eat it. Frankly, I think it’s a great shame that I never have. If I’m willing to eat something, I think I should be willing to kill whatever it came from, and such personal involvement with the food that keeps one alive dayto-day that is, interestingly enough, embodied by a manga that starts out as a comedy series about cooking the monsters of a high fantasy dungeon: Kui Ryoko’s first long-running manga, Dungeon Meshi (literally: Dungeon Meals), aka Delicious in Dungeon

Dungeon Meshi begins generically enough, with a party of adventurers getting wiped out by a dragon in the lower levels of a dungeon. The dragon ends up eating Falin, the healer of the party, just after she casts a spell to teleport her companions to the surface. The party then sets out to slay the dragon so they can revive Falin from her corpse. There’s just one small problem. Falin is being digested, so the adventurers have to hurry back to the depths of the dungeon if they don’t want to be stuck with the near-impossible task of reviving her from her bones alone. They’re also broke to the point of being unable to afford to feed themselves, which is where the party-leader Laios comes up with the genius idea of replacing regular rations with monsters.

A swath of other problems crop up. Laios sucks at cooking, and Marcille and Chilchuk, the party’s mage and lockpick, are repulsed by the mere thought of eating the monsters that prowl around the dungeon. Enter Senshi, a mysterious dwarf who randomly approaches the party and offers to help them cook monsters. Any given chapter early on usually sees the party run into, defeat, and cook a new monster. Laios and Senshi then rejoice at getting to try a new dungeon meal, and Marcille and others freak out until they try some and realize that it actually tastes pretty good. Rinse dishes and repeat. This simple monster meal of the week formula gets more complicated as the manga continues and we learn about the nature of the dungeon and the backstories of the various party members. Although it’s unlikely that all twists and turns of Dungeon Meshi were planned from the start, the early chapters hold up surprisingly well upon a reread and often subtly foreshadow later events. It’s also a delight to watch the main cast grow to care about each other on a more personal level as they learn to appreciate the surprising intricacy of the dungeon’s ecology.

From its very first chapter, Dungeon Meshi epitomizes the truism “eat or be eaten,” and despite all its comedy and slice of life elements, it doesn’t shy away from depicting the often gruesome realities of its fantasy food chain. Later on in the manga, the simple fact of killing and eating in order to live becomes inextricably tied to desires in general. Just as one has to kill and eat other living beings in order to live, one’s desires can often only be fulfilled at the expense of the desires of others. Thankfully, Dungeon Meshi does not shove this message down the reader’s throat but tastefully builds to it over a slow-burn of cooking and comedy. My compliments to the chef!