I Read That As Stuff She Was Just Into Atm - Tumblr Posts

A weird little piece of early Bleach ephemera that I am obsessed with is the phrasing around Rukia's favorite foods on her character profile sketch:

"But the list could get longer."

I feel like this implies that at some point, Kubo envisioned that shinigami didn't eat or that there was no food in Soul Society. Which...makes sense? They're ghosts after all. And even in the way it turned out, non-powerful souls still have no need to eat.

It's just hard to picture Soul Society without food--all I can think of is the version of Soul Society from the Bleach live action movie, which was all shadowy rooms and purple glowing orbs.

The thing I really want to know about the idea of a food-less Soul Society, though is-- do souls who died have any kind of memory of what food tastes like? Like, would Renji's favorite food still by taiyaki, but only because he has ghost-memories of it from when he was alive? In that regard, is it perhaps a mark of class to not know what food tastes like? Someone like Byakuya, born and raised in Soul Society would have never eaten. That would put Rukia in a funny position, in the sense that she doesn't know what anything tastes like, not because she's noble, but simply because she was too young when she died to remember what anything tasted like.

Anyway, I think it's for the best that Kubo changed it, but I also enjoy thinking about Rukia eating whole cucumbers in Ichigo's closet in the middle of the night and exclaiming over their exquisite crunch and flavor while he smashes his pillow over his ears and wishes that someone would come and get her already.