Food in Literature Research Papers

The Tale of Gareth combines Malory's interest in the ethics of the chivalric body with an emphasis on Gareth's conduct around food. Beginning his time in Arthur's court as a kitchen hand, he is deprived of courtly alimentation,... more

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- by Melissa Raine
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- 5
  Medieval English Literature, The Body, Thomas Malory, Food in Literature

Keywords: British Asian Literature, diasporic literature, women's literature, Preethi Nair Diasporic writings has emerged into a distinct literary genre today. The word 'diaspora', derived from the Greek word diaspeiro, means scattering... more

Keywords: British Asian Literature, diasporic literature, women's literature, Preethi Nair Diasporic writings has emerged into a distinct literary genre today. The word 'diaspora', derived from the Greek word diaspeiro, means scattering of people from their land of origin. One of the central features of diasporic writing is a mapping out a journey. This is a journey from the centre of the immigrant's home culture to the periphery of the alien culture and again from the periphery of the alien culture to a different centre representing multi-culture, that is, a consciousness of at least two cultures or more. The paper proposes to study Preethi Nair's One Hundred Shades of White as representative of such a journey spanning three generations of women through the metaphor of cooking. Food is one of the most popular tools in the hands of diasporic women writers to express their longing, rejection and finally acceptance of their home culture. Against the backdrop of contemporary British Asian literature Nair's One hundred Shades of White stands out for her deep insight into the lives of the immigrants and her empathy with the characters. The novel is an unforgettable rendering of a mother and daughter's search for identity and 'wholeness' in an alien land and coming to terms with the 'duality' of their existence. Diasporic writing has emerged into a distinct literary genre today. The word 'diaspora', derived from the Greek word diaspeiro, means scattering of people. Though initially limited to the dispersal of Jews from their homeland, in this increasing era of globalization, it is applied to the numerous ethnic and racial groups living in an alien land. The immigrants who left their home countries for various reasons, voluntary and non-voluntary, had to construct afresh a sense of community, culture and nationality in a country where they were a minority. Thus, their writings deal with their own experiences of geographical dislocation, displacement, cultural ambivalence, social and political alienation and absence of centrality. On the one hand they express a longing

Food studies is not the study of food per se. It is an emerging interdisciplinary field of study that observes the intricate relationships among food, culture, and society from a number of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences,... more

Food Studies is not the literal study of Food. Food studies looks at peoples connect with food. It straddles several tropes all together. It addresses issues of Culture and Identity. Food plays a consistent role in how issues of race,... more

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- by Dr.THAHIYA AFZAL
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- 2
  Food Studies, Food in Literature

Con la descripción de lo que comía Alonso Quijano cada sábado, duelos y quebrantos, Cervantes ofrece la referencia culinaria más discutida en toda la temprana edad moderna. Curiosamente no aparece en ningún otro libro de cocina pero a... more

Zoom registration link for this event: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZItc-6tqT4vH9C1Iih8MQzKpt_fYSdbpO9N. After registering, participants will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. The... more

The Mistress of Spices examines several tropes all together. It addresses issues of Culture, Identity, the immigrant and diasporic experience and is an evocative account of the protagonist Tilo's journey from awareness to self-discovery.... more

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- by Dr.THAHIYA AFZAL and +1
  Dr. Kalyani Mathivanan
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- 14
  Postcolonial Studies, Food, Gender, Culture, Indian English Literature, Diaspora Studies

Machon’s plays, staged in Ptolemaic Alexandria, seem to have employed the stock plots and characters of New Comedy. A few of their elements, however, are hardly typical of that genre. The mageiros in fr. 2 introduces himself as a lover of... more

The file available here for download is a pre-publication version of this paper.

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- by Melissa Raine
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- 4
  Medieval English Literature, The Body, Margery Kempe, Food in Literature

Nostalgia is part of a migrant's everyday life: although lived, imagined, invented and re-invented in dramatically different ways. In this article, I use an interdisciplinary approach and base my analysis upon two components of research:... more

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- by Maria Amelia Viteri
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- 10
  Cosmopolitanism, Postcolonial Literature, Nostalgia, Cities

Food Studies is not the literal study of Food. Food studies looks at peoples connect with food. It straddles several tropes all together. It addresses issues of Culture and Identity. Food plays a consistent role in how issues of race,... more

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- by Dr.THAHIYA AFZAL
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- 3
  Psychology, Food Studies, Food in Literature

**CONFERENCE CANCELLED DUE TO COVID19** “There is nothing more political than food.” – Anthony Bourdain (2017) Food is both a basic necessity and a complex cultural object. It shapes and is shaped by social structures, cultural... more

**CONFERENCE CANCELLED DUE TO COVID19**

“There is nothing more political than food.” – Anthony Bourdain (2017)

Food is both a basic necessity and a complex cultural object. It shapes and is shaped by social structures, cultural contexts, and political policies and actions. It can be used metaphorically to express a variety of meanings, including political positions (cries of “eat the rich” now abound on social media) and relationships between people and social classes. It is also inextricably intertwined in both the causes and consequences of climate change, making it a worthy subject for speculative fiction, which, per Jameson, articulates the anxieties of the present.
This presentation will examine the sociopolitical implications of food and foodways in two contemporary speculative fiction works: Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007) and Waubeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018). Both novels occur after an apocalyptic event, and in both, a return to more traditional foodways is valorized. In the former, that valorization is part and parcel of an anti-authoritarian rebellion; fresh produce is synonymous with new life, and rehabilitating the land becomes a metaphor for rehabilitating society. In the latter, which centers on an Anishinaabe reservation, those who have continued to follow traditional Indigenous foodways are the ones best positioned to survive an unknown apocalyptic situation. The non-Indigenous consumption habits in the novel also metaphorically invoke the historical oppression of Indigenous peoples.
In each novel, the oppressive ruling party relies on tinned foods procured through industrial agriculture and global trade, while the protagonists engage in alternative and local foodways. This presentation will therefore argue that the return to agrarian ideals in each novel – to the homestead farm in The Carhullan Army and to traditional Indigenous methods of hunting and gathering in Moon of the Crusted Snow – enacts a critique of globalized capitalist (food) systems. It will also question some aspects of these alternative foodways and their potential for implementation in the real world, such as the importance of meat-eating in both novels and the ethics of extrapolating Indigenous foodways as potential solutions for non-Indigenous contexts.

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- by Nora Castle
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- 7
  Feminist SF, Science Fiction, Indigenous Literature, Speculative Fiction

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- by Daniela Fargione
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- 7
  English Literature, Translation Studies, Julian Barnes, Cooking

This paper investigates how images of cooking and consumption derived from biblical texts and medieval vision literature are innovatively employed in Inferno 21-22. In the first section, I build upon Alison Morgan’s assertion that... more

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- by Carmen Denia
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- 6
  Dante Studies, Dante Alighieri, Humour, The Body Politic

Robin Hood did not stand alone in the fifteenth-century greenwood. The fifteenth-century King and Commoner tales depict the encounters between incognito kings and disgruntled commoners, who similarly resist agents of authority and hold... more

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- by Mark Truesdale
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- 16
  Mythology And Folklore, Folklore, Bakhtin, The Carnivalesque

No one is perhaps more gender-conscious, and more widely acclaimed as such, among leading contemporary manga artists than Yoshinaga Fumi (1971-). This chapter focuses on three of Yoshinaga’s popular series produced at different times in... more

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- by Tomoko Aoyama
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- 5
  Japanese Studies, Art, Food in Literature, Food In Japanese Literature

Food Futures: A Special Issue of SFS. This special issue examines food’s multiple registrations across historical and contemporary science fiction. As an element in the problems with as well as the solutions to the climate crisis, the... more

Food Futures: A Special Issue of SFS. This special issue examines food’s multiple registrations across historical and contemporary science fiction. As an element in the problems with as well as the solutions to the climate crisis, the global food system is the nexus of future-oriented concerns around issues such as security, diet, foodways, technologies, population, habitats, consumer cultures, production techniques, energy regimes, and more. The very concept of eating and food as baseline cultural material has been placed under the sign of the future. With a climate-changed world on the horizon, the present food system is threatened, not least because it is one of the most significant contributors to global emissions. It is no exaggeration to say that the future of humanity depends on the development of alternative food cultures, systems, and technologies. This has been acknowledged in research agendas from genetics to horticulture, from architecture to anthropology. Yet the future of food is also a necessary and developing imaginary. So how should science fiction engage with it?

Despite the recent boom in environmentally engaged sf, an exploration of the relationship of humans and non-humans to different food ecosystems (and the cultural lifeworlds those systems produce and sustain) has received insufficient attention in sf studies. The citation of illustrative examples from sf texts is consistently discernible across the published volume of both academic and popular media dealing with food futures outside literary and cultural studies. There is therefore much opportunity to read and re-read sf texts in and against the wider scholarship, particularly with pressurized ecological contexts in mind. How and where, then, does “future food” appear in sf? What is it and how is it made, grown, transported, reproduced, distributed, cultured? How might speculative work critique historical, contemporary (or indeed proposed futuristic) food cultures? Can such work offer potential solutions, counterfactuals, and innovations to unfolding or anticipated modes of crisis?

The special issue seeks to situate future food imaginaries as a significant topic in sf’s environmental turn. The guest editors invite submissions that explore a range of sf food imaginaries as well as foodways in the broadest sense of the term. We welcome engagement with a variety of media, including written texts (novels, short stories, poetry), multimedia or interdisciplinary texts (graphic novels, bio-art), visual and televisual texts (television, film, fine art), and interactive media (videogames, art installations). Send proposals (300 to 500 words) by 1 March 2021 to Graeme Macdonald <g.macdonald@ warwick.ac.uk> and Nora Castle <nora.castle@warwick.ac.uk>. Completed papers (6000-8000 words) are due by 1 July 2021.
—Graeme Macdonald and Nora Castle, University of Warwick

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- by Nora Castle and +1
  Graeme Macdonald
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- 17
  Dystopian Literature, Utopian Studies, Science Fiction, Ecocriticism

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- by Ilaria Parini
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- Food in Literature

A. S. Byatt’s short story “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary,” based on Diego Velàzquez’s painting Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, revolves around the relation of a young painter and a young cook. Food is... more

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- by Buket AKGUN
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- 19
  Religion, Reception Studies, Art, Art Theory

In “Four American Impressions” (1922), a fanciful account of Sherwood Anderson’s visit to 27 rue de Fleurus, Gertrude Stein is compared to a “wholesome cook” who works in a “kitchen of words” (Mellow 1974: 258). Binh, Stein’s Vietnamese... more

ABSTRACT. This text takes on common urban legends related to food forgery in order to find ground in legal texts. While literature is keen on food counterfeiting and perpetuates common topics, there seems to be more than a taste for... more

This article aims to investigate food metaphors and food imageries in the works of the female Petrarchan poet Gaspara Stampa, analyzing in-depth how she writes about food and how she uses eating as a medium to diversify the... more

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- by Bili Zhong
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- 3
  Renaissance Studies, Food in Literature, Female italian poets

Presented at The Diasporic Plate: Food in the Contemporary Diasporic World in Times of Crisis, hosted virtually by The Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study University of London, 11 December 2020 “So when we... more

Presented at The Diasporic Plate: Food in the Contemporary Diasporic World in Times of Crisis, hosted virtually by The Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study University of London, 11 December 2020

“So when we talk about insects being the ‘future’ of food, we’re also talking about other people’s past and present: it’s only the future for us because we chose to ignore or belittle what was right in front of us all along.”
- Soleil Ho, in Meal (p. 136)

Many food traditions worldwide make use of insects as a protein source, yet in most core countries in the world-system entomophagy is regarded with disgust. With the threat of climate crisis and food system collapse looming on the horizon, however, such an opinion may change. Insect-eating is increasingly being touted as a solution to both the ills of global warming and the cruelties of industrial agriculture, and a handful of startups in the US and elsewhere have begun churning out products like cricket chips and toffee-brittle mealworms in response. These startups occasionally engage with Indigenous food cultures, but most claim insect protein as a newly-discovered superfood, obscuring its historical and present-day value for many food cultures on the periphery.

In this presentation, I will explore the sociocultural implications of insect-eating and its appropriation by the agrifood industry through a literary case study. My focus will be on the graphic novel Meal (2018), in which an entomophagy obsessive, Yarrow, moves cross-country to attempt to join the kitchen of Cambodian-Mexican chef Chandra, who specializes in insect cuisine. Chandra and Yarrow clash on the why and how of bringing this cuisine to an American audience, thereby homing in on a tension central to diasporic food: the balance between adventure, innovation, and global appeal on the one hand, and memory, tradition, and cultural specificity on the other. This clash occurs in the shadow of larger questions about the use of others’ traditional foodways as a solution to global crisis. Through a reading of Meal, I will ask, if insects are the future of food, who should be cooking them?

As Kirsten Guest explains in the introduction to Eating Their Words, cannibalism has often been used as a limiting factor in colonial discourse, providing a method of delineating the civilized “us” from the savage “them,” as well as an... more

As Kirsten Guest explains in the introduction to Eating Their Words, cannibalism has often been used as a limiting factor in colonial discourse, providing a method of delineating the civilized “us” from the savage “them,” as well as an excuse for devastating native or marginalized populations. The practice of anthropophagy meant savagery, which in turn meant being closer to the animal than to the human. But what happens in a world where there are no non-human animals? How do we define the self? And, perhaps more pressingly, what do we eat?

Don LePan’s Animals and Joseph D’Lacey’s MEAT are both speculative fiction novels set after great extinctions, and each features a society that goes to great lengths to refashion cannibalism as an ‘ethical’ foodway. In each novel, colonial discourse is flipped; the un-human ‘Other’ is no longer the cannibal, but rather that which the cannibal eats. MEAT creates this ‘Other’ by elevating a class of people, know as the Chosen, to sacred status, requiring the consumption of their flesh for religious reasons. Animals adopts an ableist agenda, restricting the definition of ‘human’ to exclude the disabled, known as “mongrels”, who become pets or meat.

This chapter will examine the sociopolitical and economic framework mobilized in each novel to support a narrative of ‘ethical’ cannibalism. It will interrogate the methods of social control used in these novels, looking specifically at the influence of faith, pop science, and the capitalistic drive in the creation and maintenance of foodways that in contemporary society would likely be considered unethical.

This chapter will argue that there are two layers of critique coexisting in each novel. The first is a more surface critique of meat eating and the factory farm industry. By portraying humans who are created into ‘Others’ and then eaten, the novels each paradoxically highlight the vitality and potential personhood of food animals, and thereby the inhumanity of current farming practices. The second is a deeper critique of the dangers of the capitalist drive for profit and expansion. This chapter will argue that these novels make explicit that it is our own bodies on the line in the confrontation between the planet and capitalism that Naomi Klein defines as the crux of the climate crisis. By depicting societies that recreate the problems of overproduction, overconsumption and the like, these speculative novels demonstrate that the ultimate consumer is not the townsfolk who eat the Chosen or the neurotypical people who eat “mongrels”; the ultimate consumer is capitalism.

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- by Osman Umurhan
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- 24
  Sociology, Classics, Globalization, Literary Criticism

Also in the burgeoning field of environmental humanities, food has become an ideal site of critical debates, which are often intertwined with issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, age, and species. Because of the growing awareness of... more

By observing whether females eat in a story rich in food imaginary, one can find fresh insight into such questions of whether the story is or is not sympathetic with a genuine female perspective.

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- by Naomi S.S. Jacobs
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- 16
  Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Narrative, Literary Criticism

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- by Jay Daniel Thompson
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- 8
  Queer Theory, Cannibalism, Feminism, Gothic Fiction

This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines food as it mediates social relationships and self-presentation in a variety of international films and literature. Authors explore the ways that making, eating and thinking about food... more

Russia has an extraordinarily rich culinary history. More than merely a means of sustenance, for centuries food has served as a contentious expression of national identity, social status, religious devotion, and political power. Russia’s... more

This paper presents a comparative analysis of food patterns as the elements of political discourse in the novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) and Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). The stereotypes of food behavior and the gastronomic symbols,... more

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- by Kristin hallberg and +1
  Maria Nikolajeva
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- 9
  Picture Books, Literary Criticism, Fantasy Literature, Food and the Literary Imagination

У статті досліджено описи утопічної місцевості з виразною харчовою характеристикою в бурлескно-травестійній літературі українського бароко. Висловлено припущення про існування у творах мандрівних дяків та поезіях Петра... more

У статті досліджено описи утопічної місцевості з виразною харчовою характеристикою в бурлескно-травестійній літературі українського бароко. Висловлено припущення про існування у творах мандрівних дяків та поезіях Петра Поповича-Гученського уявлень про харчову утопію, подібну до країни Кокань, описаної в західноєвропейських середньовічних фабліо. Проаналізовано мотивну структуру харчової утопії, вивчено семантику наявних у ній образів їжі. Простежено динаміку розвитку уявлень про харчові утопії – від біблійних ремінісценцій до традицій народної святкової сміхової культури.

Ключові слова: їжа, утопія, бароко, Кокань, Рай, свято, бенкет.

This article considers foodscapes in Ukrainian Baroque vernacular utopias. These images have direct link to appearance of New Paradise conception, which embodies the cultural vision of biblical Paradise, replacing idea of a garden toward a banquet. In European Medieval literature we have a lot of fables, which depict land of Cockainge – a kind of earthly paradise with the food abundance and toil forbidden. The main purpose of this article is to reveal resemblances between Cockainge and images of perfect place in the poetry of Ukrainian traveling clerks with food images as a key-link.
It is assumed that despite of the absence of the particular fable depicting sated life in perfect land there are an original food utopia in Ukrainian literature, which exists as a collective image and appears in fragments of several texts. The structure and semantic of foodscapes in this utopia are examined from the anthropological perspective. Such motives as “edible architecture”, “food offering itself”, “rivers of vine” are analyzed. It is also shown that food utopia has much in common with the feast as a core element of the carnival culture. Vision of the banquet table full of dishes and drinks might be considered as a prototype for food utopia images.

Keywords: food, foodscape, utopia, Baroque, Cockainge, feast, paradise

The purpose of this work is to examine the relationship between the culture of the Rus’ people and depictions of food as they appear in the early twelfth-century record of Russia’s earliest history, known as the Primary Chronicle. This... more

Food in Literature

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