Food as Literary Theme

Overview

The centrality of food to human experience and to personal and cultural identity is mirrored in the food preoccupations of literature. Without food, there is no life. Literature, the imaginative re-creation of life, often centers on food, eating, and cooking. Food practices and images help to define characters and values, enrich language, and illuminate cultures, regions, and particularly women’s identity and development.

The pleasure of eating is a perennial theme in literature. Joel Barlow’s mock pastoral “The Hasty-Pudding” (1796) for example, particularizes the joys of preparing and eating cornmeal. Food does more than provide sensual pleasure to the reader; it helps define character or meaning. For example, “The Hasty-Pudding,” in praising cornmeal, celebrates, with some irony, the new nation and its inhabitants. Europeans would not be pleased, or admit to being pleased, to eat corn. Ichabod Crane’s voracious appetite for the cooked dainties at the Van Tassel’s feast in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) underscores the humorous weaknesses of a personality torn by the opposite forces of reason, superstition, and appetite. Ernest Hemingway’s narratives often identify characters as manly in their overindulgence in food and drink.

Food as Metaphor

So central is food to life that writers often describe seemingly unrelated experiences and events with food-related language. In Betty MacDonald’s The Egg and I (1945), the narrator is so anxious for company that when relatives visit she “clung to them like the smell of frying”; a baby looks “as if he had been molded out of dough”; a logging victim “cracked” his “head like an egg”; and Maw’s “large white breasts bobbed to the surface like dumplings in a stew.” In the same book, image merges into symbol in the significance of the title. Eggs not only are food but also are the essence of productivity and fertility. MacDonald’s book explores the fertility of nature, garden, orchard, and families.

William Shakespeare used food terms as bawdy double entendres in his plays. Héloïse Sénéchal, chief associate editor of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Shakespeare edition says that the bard used food-related terms for genitalia. “There appear to be a greater number of food-related terms for the vagina (fruit dish, fig’s end, nut, medlar) than for the penis (beef, root, carrot)” in his plays. Sénéchal also notes that “the instant, easy carnality of carrots, parsnips has been used since time immemorial for innuendo and symbolism.”

Food and Cultural Identity

Food in literature often helps to define a cultural or geographical setting. MacDonald’s Onions in the Stew (1955) evokes the gastronomical glories of Northwestern seafood, while Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Cross Creek (1942) explores the delights of Northern Florida’s rural cooking. Willa Cather’s novels trace special foods identified with various cultural groups: dried mushrooms and “kolaches” with the Bohemians in My Ántonia (1918); the French devotion to salads, vegetables, and fine wine in Death Comes for the Archbishop(1927) and Shadows on the Rock (1931); and the pleasures of Southern meals in Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940).

Isak Dinesen’s 1950 short story, “Babette’s Feast” tells the story of a French woman who, having escaped political upheaval in France in 1883, serves two elderly sisters who lead an austere religious sect in a small village in Norway. When Babette wins ten thousand francs in a lottery, she spends it all to prepare a feast in honor of the sister’s late father’s one-hundredth birthday. The sisters reluctantly agree. It turns out that Babette had been a famous chef in Paris before she sought refuge with the sisters, and the feast is her last culinary masterpiece.

Women and Food

In most cultures women are traditionally the preparers of food, so women’s identities are often bound up in food and cooking. In affluent societies particularly, the result has been a struggle for women who seek to separate themselves from overidentification with food and eating. This tension is explored in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Edible Woman (1976), in which Marian works as a tester of consumer products, usually food, and finds herself threatened by a society that is intent on consuming her as if she, too, were food. One of the most complete fictional explorations of the relationship of women to food is found in Laura Esquivel’s novel Como agua para chocolate (1989; Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies, 1992). The novel centers on the experiences of a daughter raised on a ranch in the Rio Grande border area of Mexico, close to the United States. Tita’s life centers on her relationship to cooking and food. The novel is organized around recipes appropriate to the months of the year. Throughout much of the narrative, Tita’s passions are close to boiling—like water ready for chocolate beverage. In contrast to Atwood’s novel, however, Esquivel’s narrative depicts a mixture of positive and negative experiences inherent in the life of a woman defined by food.

Eating Disorders

Anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder in which one refuses to eat, has disproportionately affected women and girls, although the emphasis on thinness as an index of beauty began to affect increasing numbers of men in the last decades of the twentieth century. Anorexia goes against societal expectations, providing a mark of identity; she who refuses to eat demonstrates a degree, however self-destructive, of control over herself and her surroundings. Religious fasting and appetite control have traditionally been seen as transcendent, but when the religious symbolism is eliminated, self-starving becomes a rebellious attempt to establish identity in a society that is oblivious to women as people. One early American portrayal of intentional hunger centers on a male character searching for identity in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853). Bartleby’s rebellion against normal human expectations begins with refusals to work and ends in death from refusals to eat. Literary treatments of eating disorders typically center on women and, more often than not, on girls and young women. Young adult books that explore the dilemma of characters bent on denying themselves food and, thus, normal female development and growth, and bent on establishing an identity of thinness, include Deborah Hautzig’s Second Star to the Right (1981), Ivy Ruckman’s The Hunger Scream (1983), Susan Terris’ Nell’s Quilt (1987), and Margaret Willey’s The Bigger Book of Lydia (1983).

Bibliography

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