Sometime the food is miraculously restored to the table after being eaten by a Nephite (possibly as a reward for hospitality), or it may appear in an empty bin or pantry.

Food is a recurrent motif. In a tale of missionary work, a Nephite asks a mother for a loaf of fresh-baked bread and then delivers it to her famished son.

Three Nephite stories involving food have abounded both in times of scarcity and in modern times, when foodstuffs have increased in price and emergency preparedness has been emphasized.?

One tale describes a woman who housed two college students and expected them home for lunch.? She heard a knock at her door and was confronted by a man who asked for food.? Inviting him in, she chatted with him as she offered a meal.?When he finished eating, he thanked her, said she would be blessed for her generosity, and left.? The woman closed the door, turned to clear the dishes, and discovered that the man’s entire meal was untouched, although she had watched him eat it.?When her two boarders came home, she noticed there was snow on their shoes, although there had been none on her visitor’s.?Rushing to the door where he had entered, she noticed that the snow was smooth and untouched, with no footprints visible.

A story that combines the common Nephite motifs of war and food occurred during the Korean War, when a strange man visited the home of Mrs. John Harris, whose husband was stationed with the U.S. Army in Korea.? The bearded man asked Mrs. Harris for a sandwich and, a few days later, presented her husband in Korea with a sandwich identical to the one she had given him.

In a variation of the “Korean War Sandwich Story,? two young missionaries were traveling without money for food, going from home to home in the eastern United States asking for assistance without much success.? They felt they would starve as they walked between two towns, so they decided to pray for help in finding something to eat.?Afterward, they walked for a mile or two and then met a kindly, bearded man who offered them a loaf of warm bread.? They were thrilled with the bread, and one missionary wrote to his mother about it.?She wrote back that the very night he was in need, she had baked bread.? A man had come to her home and asked for some, and she had given him a warm loaf.?The missionary felt strongly that he had eaten his mother’s own bread.