How Does the Wizarding World Food System Work?

Oct 01, 2020

"The song of the new mythos that yearns to be born through us requires our spirits to be loving and alive enough to hear and recognize the pain we are causing through our obsolete food orientation."
Dr. Will Tuttle,
The World Peace Diet

The Magic of Food

Wizarding food is iconic, from butterbeer and pumpkin juice to cockroach clusters and Cauldron Cakes, but how are these products made and what exactly is in them? Initially, it seems feasible that witches and wizards simply magic their food into existence, but we learn later on in the Harry Potter series that food is one of the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration; simply, food cannot be created from nothing.

Where Does It Come From?

So, if wizards do prepare their own food, where do they get it? Because we know for sure someone like Arthur Weasley couldn't possibly shop at a Muggle grocery store -- he doesn't understand Muggle currency, and I think the refrigerated aisles would be far too exciting for him -- and there's no evidence that wizards raise and kill animals or even farm crops. Harry has no peers that grew up on farms; there is no agricultural department at the Ministry of Magic, as far as I'm aware.

Are there wizarding grocery stores? Do wizards have some kind of deal with the Muggle Prime Minister to be allotted certain amounts of food? Even so, how would it be distributed? How would they keep it fresh? We learn from Hermione's Muggle Studies course that the magical community doesn't use electricity, so they would have to use spells to prevent animal products from decomposing.

The research I tried to do for these questions turned up basically nothing, with the few inquiries about the food system posed online mostly discussing Confunding Muggle farmers or wizards growing food in their backyards, though raising animals -- aside from the Weasleys'chickens -- was not even mentioned. (I think there's some kind of positive message in the fact that readers immediately think of growing plants instead of killing animals when they think of farming, though the foods in the Wizarding World are incredibly animal-centric.) However, I have a few theories as to how the magical food system works, assuming that there is indeed a Department of Agriculture at the Ministry that we simply haven't heard of yet, that doesn't require wizards integrating with Muggles at grocery stores.

Theories

1. Backyard Farms

The idea that wizards all grow their own food falls apart like a house of cards once you think about it for more than a few seconds. For one, Hogwarts basically has an endless supply of food, and Hagrid is the only member of the faculty, as Gamekeeper, that would hold the responsibility of feeding hundreds of people every day. Obviously, that isn't possible. For another, there are witches and wizards, just like Muggles, that live in London and other urban areas and don't have access to land to grow all their own food. (Plus, who has the time for that? Farming is a full-time job.)

Additionally, magical food is almost exactly the same as Muggle food -- you'd think in a world of Horcruxes and hinkypunks that the food would be a little more creative than sandwiches, shepherd's pie, and roast turkeys on Christmas -- and individual wizards are certainly not raising and killing animals every single day.

2. Hidden Wizarding World Farms

The Wizarding World is vast, and we learn more about it every year. Just because we haven't yet heard anything about agricultural practices doesn't mean that there are none. The Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures is divided into three Divisions -- Beast, Being, and Spirit -- and it is possible that animal agriculture could be incorporated in the Beast Division. However, this is highly unlikely because this Department is mostly concerned with wild creatures, and it's much more probable that there is simply another Department in the Ministry we haven't heard of yet.

One issue with this theory is the space it would take to farm for the wizarding community. Though wizards are capable of creating space seemingly out of nothing, most magical institutions are hidden in existing places: St. Mungo's is in a rundown department store; Grimmauld Place is situated between two Muggle homes; the Ministry of Magic is beneath London and can be accessed through a telephone booth or public toilets; and the Leaky Cauldron is nestled on a street full of Muggle shops, behind which is hidden Diagon Alley.

For the Quidditch World Cup, though it took place in a large, open area, there had to be countless protections in place to keep Muggles away, similar to when our leading trio is searching for Horcruxes and using multiple layers of Charms to make them invisible and undetectable. How could the magical community keep hundreds of farms hidden from Muggles, particularly when there would be near-constant transportation of plants and animals to and from farms? Additionally, there'd still likely be the need for slaughterhouses of some kind in addition to a nationwide distribution schedule to every single wizarding home, school, and business, and I don't think the Owl Post can cover it.

Ultimately, though it's certainly possible for there to be an agricultural system like this in the Wizarding World, and I hope there is because I'd love to learn about it, it seems unnecessarily difficult and impractical to be sustained throughout the entire world. But perhaps my understanding of it is simply limited as a Muggle.

3. Taking Food from Muggles

It seems possible that wizards could infiltrate the Muggle food system without the need for buying from grocery stores or online. Wizards could have Muggles under their employ using the Confundus Charm, having those farmers do all the work and then taking what they need. As mentioned before, it also seems plausible that there is a partnership between the Muggle government and the magical one for a certain allotment of foods to be allocated to the wizarding community. Though the Imperius Curse would also be effective, it seems unlikely that an Unforgiveable Curse would be used when there are more ethical options. Lastly, it would be possible to use Summoning Charms to attract food, though that could be quite risky.

My primary concern with this theory is the issue of money. Wizards are notoriously poor at anything to do with Muggleness; they often can't even dress properly. Though magical money can be converted, how would these sales be documented? Do wizards pay full price for animal products, or do they get the subsidized rates? (Surely, wizards, aside from perhaps Muggle-borns, don't pay taxes, so why would they be afforded the lower prices created with taxpayer money?) The government would have to get involved in order to keep quiet all these strange sales or unusual discrepancies in the food distribution system, though then there becomes an issue of how many Muggles are involved in the cover-up and how they are kept quiet. If wizards did use Summoning Charms to secretly take what they needed, the Muggle economy could quickly be in tatters.

4. Transfiguration

It'd be easy to take some inanimate object, transfigure it into an animal, then slaughter the animal. Since most inanimate objects can be conjured out of nothing, there wouldn't even be a need to have a cache of objects to transform into animals; wizards skilled at Transfiguration could feasibly create and kill animals within seconds. This would work around the need to use land, time, and resources to raise animals and kill them specifically for the magical community.

However, since spells designed to kill or harm -- Avada Kedavra, Sectumsempra -- are Dark Magic, it's highly unlikely that they would be permissible, though in a world where you're killing others to live, does it really matter if the slaughter is done by magic or not? (Also, in this world of speciesist magic, is it even considered Dark to use spells to kill animals for food and other "useful" purposes?) Additionally, there are still issues with postmortem processing of the bodies, distribution, and storage.

Though this seems like the most plausible option so far, there are still holes in the theory, especially considering how difficult it is to transfigure objects into large, complex vertebrates. Since foods can be multiplied once they're available, it's possible that there are far fewer deaths for a Hogwarts feast than a traditional Muggle feast, though my next question would then be about what all the house-elves are doing down in the kitchens if the food is magically being multiplied.

5. Conjuring

However, the Principal Exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration don't seem to account for the conjuring of live animals, which we see when Draco conjures a serpent in the Dueling Club and when Hermione conjures small flocks of canaries in her sixth year. This completely upends my previous theory that "food" animals would fall under the food Principal Exception, as I was thinking too much like a vegan and forgetting that meat and other animal products are, to the average person, completely separate entities from the animals from which they come.

That being said, this theory is still very similar to the previous one because the animals could just be conjured without the need for additional transfiguration. However, if the Principal Exceptions apply only to food in its edible state, what about all the plant foods wizards eat? Sure, they likely wouldn't need to feed any farmed animals, but the humans still eat some plants. Could a wizard conjure a head of lettuce or some edamame? Could they conjure seeds to create a garden? How is edibility defined in spellwork? If plant foods cannot be conjured from thin air, then where are wizards getting all their plants?

The Truth is Up to the Reader

Perhaps none of these theories are accurate, especially considering how complex the Wizarding World is, but I'd really enjoy learning about how exactly the food system operates, particularly in a world of advancing Muggle technology.

Other Areas of Concern

Most witches and wizards we meet are killed by magic, not by "natural" means. With diets so unhealthy and animal-based, where are all the wizards being diagnosed with heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other fatal, lifestyle-related illnesses? St. Mungo's has no division for non-magical maladies and injuries, so is there another, more mundane hospital for the magical community? Or can these kinds of illnesses be quickly cleared up with a spell or potion? If so, what can kill a person with magical abilities other than magic or poisons?

Creative Speciesism

Certainly, J.K. Rowling is an incredibly talented, creative individual, but she is also ignorant in many ways. Asking in-depth questions about a fictional world may never give me satisfying answers, but it does point to a larger problem: Even some of the most creative and successful people in the world don't consider the issues with using animals for food. Rowling developed one of the most complex, beloved fictional universes to ever exist, but even she, and most of her fans, don't consider what it really takes to farm animals. Because if she had taken the time to think about it, she probably wouldn't still be a carnist. We just take it is a given that animals will be used for food without thinking of the consequences because we are too afraid of looking behind the curtain to learn the truth.

be conscious, be kind, be vegan