Spotlight on Original Plant Species – Olowa
Olowa serves a lot of purposes. Aliens have to eat, and they don’t just eat meat. At least, not my aliens.
The Calafans needed something to chow down on. But what?
History and Use in Plots
I first put it – and it didn’t have a name yet – into a dining table scene of Calafans, in Reversal. The idea was not to showcase the food. I just called it a large purple vegetable. Rather, I wanted to show the Calafans were familiar with knives and forks. This is to counter an earlier scene, where Treve and Chawev are dinner guests on the NX-01. In that scene, Treve expresses an unfamiliarity with forks. So Lili shows him how to use one. Yet in the later scene, his younger sister, Yimar, uses a knife and fork to cut some up for her younger brother, Chelben. This alerts the reader to the aliens’ deception.
It isn’t until Together that humans actually taste it and refer to it by name. Olowa (pronounced: OH-luh-wah or OH-luh-wuh) grows in the Lafa System. Lili describes it as follows –
This slightly underripe eggplant is how I envision a spicy-tasting olowa would look
“That is an olowa. Or, rather, it’s bits of a bunch of them. It’s a vegetable that grows on Lafa IV. Now, the interesting thing about olowa is, as it matures, it petrifies and turns to stone. It also lightens from deep purple to, eventually, kind of an ash grey. You can’t eat it then; you’ll break a tooth. So what you’ve got here is a salad made from olowa at different stages of maturity. If anything feels too hard, all I can say is, don’t eat it. I won’t be offended.”
Details
The fruit goes through various flavors as it changes in color, from a sweet pear-like flavor, to a spicy flavor, then eventually to a fatty texture and flavor somewhat like peanuts.
In Temper, perrazin will eat it and, while hunting, Melissa climbs such a tree in order to escape a herd of charging perrazin. To distract them from going after Doug, she plucks a fruit and throws it as far away from him as possible, and a few of the animals run that way.
It is even served in the Mirror Universe, to the Empress Hoshi Sato and her family.
In another scene, a very young child, beginning to get an introduction to solid foods, gets a little sweet immature olowa in a mix with other soft foods.
In Fortune, it appears in a lot of off-handed ways. The paste is sent aboard Malcolm‘s ship as a treat, to be used by the Chef in pies. Declan also paints and draws it. It’s a part of still life studies for his art classes. At Lili and Doug’s home, there is a spreading olowa tree. It’s comfortable to sit under there and nap during a warm afternoon.
It even crossed over to my first story taking place in the JJ Abrams universe. In Release, Eriecho and Saddik are tempted by the Commandant with pieces of it. But Saddik notices its artificial ripening. Still, it’s better than what they’ve been eating for years. So he practically swallows his portion whole. Their olowa is going spicy in flavor.
Upshot
Someday, when we have made friends with other species, we’ll find ourselves eating their local foods. Plants will probably be a lot easier for us to take than meats. A vegetable like it would be particularly pleasant. So long as it wasn’t petrified.
