What do elves eat?

[Fenris]

The recent spate of "what do XXXX eat?" threads got me thinking about a passage in Bored of the Rings:

"As with most mythical creatures who live in enchanted forests with no visible means of support, the elves ate rather frugally, and Frito was a little disappointed to find heaped on his plate a small mound of ground nuts, bark, and dirt."

So, what do your elves eat? Are they horticulturalists? Agriculturalists? Gatherers? Hunters?

Or do they stick with the high fiber diet described above (that would explain their thinness and lack of stature -all the fiber and no protein!)

 

[Kunimatyu]

Nothing - the orcs and humans killed them all.

 

[painandgreed]

They eat and farm much as humans do. However, more of their diet still comes from hunting and gathering but from a carefully tended to wilderness. Much of their livestock is free range with elaborate gardens planted inorder to provide food for them in needed.

 

[Felix]

Bored of the Rings

Would this be the one with the pictures, or the large-print type to facilitate reading?

 

[Fenris]

Would this be the one with the pictures, or the large-print type to facilitate reading?

Damn, there's an edition with pictures!?

 

[Celebrim]

My elves are mostly vegetarian. As excellent gardners, they raise diverse vegetables, tend orchards, eat tree nuts (walnuts, pecans, hickory nuts, chesnuts, etc.), and plant and harvest grain much like thier human counterparts. They've had plenty of time to turn thier entire forests into gardens should they want to. They keep bees, and eat alot of honey. They also keep sheep and goats, which they tend for milk, cheese, butter and wool.

It's not so much that they think eating meat is wrong, and they will hunt or eat meat when at war or when impoverished or in the aftermath of natural disasters; it's that they think eating meat shows poor class. They are so in touch with nature, so naturally gifted at communicating with the environment, that eating meat just doesn't give them the pleasure it gives other races. There is little fun in hunting when you can walk up to game and knock it over the back of the head before it realizes you are a threat to it. There is about as much fun killing and eating an animal for an elf, as there is for a human to kill and eat a horse or pet dog. An elf which made a habit of eating meat regularly would be remarked on, in much the same way that someone that abused thier pets would be. Except in the very poor, it would be seen as a sign of pending psychosis and dangerous instablity.

You can imagine how such attitudes goes over with less settled elves (barbarous, wild, and feral in the eyes of the self-titled 'high elves') who do regularly hunt.

 

[Aaron L]

Nuts, berries, vegetables, venison and other forest animals they hunt, and the same farm animals humans eat, though on a smaller scale.

 

[WayneLigon]

In the current campaign, they are mostly vegetarians; the normal meat for them is fish, which they raise in ponds or pull from the lakes they like to live by. They will eat the occassional deer, elk, or other herd animal if they must thin a herd but they prefer to make jerky/trail rations out of it, or sell it. On the whole, though, they get more meat in their diet than the average farming human does.

In the desert campaign I have, they are purely hunter/gatherers and eat meat most of the time. They are skilled hunters and an elven boy is not a man until he is marked with the blood of his first kill. They are very much in tune with nature: they are the predators that thin the herds, or take out the weak.

 

[3d6]

My elves are hunter-gatherers.

 

[wolfpunk]

My eleves eat seafood, but then again, my elves live under water.