food in fiction

when food is portrayed in books are you affected as you read them?

For instance, I found myself buying some Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream the other day while picking up some small sundries at the pharmacy. I blame this on one of the last books I read in 2011. The book in question was Ben and Jerry's: The Inside Scoop by Fred Lager. This book chronicled the birth of Ben and Jerry's Ice cream in 1978 as a one store ice cream shop in Vermont to it's becoming available nationwide in the early 1990's. The book was published in 1994, and left me wondering about the impacts of the company as it continued to grow in popularity and the sustainability of company sponsored charities/event/etc. I don't eat ice cream very often, due to not being able to digest milk very well. However, I do have a fond remembrance of this brand coming onto the market in the Chicago-land area when I was a teenager in the early 90's, and it it one of the few normal ice cream brands I still occasionally buy when buying store-bought ice cream.

It doesn't always happen. When I read the Latest Game of Thrones books, George R.R. Martin's descriptions of feasts didn't leave me hungry. The descriptions of the feasts in The Hunger Games when Katniss and Petta are in the capital did not leave me longing for a suitable snack similar to one I had just read about.

However, Every time I re-read The Lord of the Rings books I end up cooking myself a pan of mushrooms, and every Redwall book that I ever read had me trying to recreat deeper 'n ever pie, and hotroot soup (I was so happy to find the Redwall cookbook - the recipes are not always what I had imagined them to taste like but they are fun to make).

I would love to hear how others are affected by cravings while reading.