Encyclopedia of Food & Culture | Literature

François Rabelais in his irreverent and influential sixteenth-century novel Gargantua and Pantagruel writes "[t]he satirist is correct when he says that Messer Gaster—Sir Belly—is the true master of all the arts. . . . To this chivalrous monarch we are all bound to show reverence, swear obedience, and give honour" (pp. 570–571). According to twentieth-century literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, Gaster is portrayed by Rabelais not as the creator of society, but more as the embodiment of the organized human collective. Because appetite is located in the viscera, "[t]he bowels study the world in order to conquer and subjugate it" (p. 301).

What better place to begin a discussion of food in literature than with Rabelais's novel in which references to food appear on nearly every page. This novel pokes fun at the sanctimoniousness of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the feudal elite by drawing on the humorous and vulgar language of the marketplace and the carnivalesque imagery of clowns, fools, giants, and dwarfs that were an integral part of medieval society. In carnival, the social hierarchy of everyday life is leveled, and individuals become united in a festival in which all participants are actors, and communal laughter mocks everyday society.

It is the belly and its appetites that give rise to the festival, and feasts of course inevitably accompany any festival. Such feasts celebrate the human encounter with and triumph over the world, in which food represents the entire process of cultivation, harvest, storage, trade, and preparation. Humanity devours the products of nature without being devoured by the world. This encounter takes place in "the open, biting, chewing, rending mouth" during carnival festivities (Bakhtin, p. 281).

Because of the excesses characteristic of celebratory feasting, Rabelais portrays his larger-than-life characters as capable of devouring much more than was humanly possible. Listen, for example, as the giant Pantagruel calls forth a feast for his men—with their grotesque bellies and wide-open throats—after a military victory in which only one opponent survived:

He had refreshment brought and a feast spread for them on the shore with great jollity; and he made them drink too, with their bellies to the ground, and their prisoner as well . . . except that the poor devil was not sure whether Pantagruel was not going to devour him whole; which he might have done, so wide was his throat . . . and the poor fellow, once in his mouth, would not have amounted to more than a grain of millet in an ass's throat. (p. 250)

Food imagery in Gargantua and Pantagruel is just one of the more extreme examples of the feast in literature. The jovial, celebratory feast, the culmination of the process of growing food, in which humankind in social solidarity encounters the world with an open mouth, naturally gives rise to excellence in conversation, to wise speech, and therefore to literature.

In Plato's Symposium, for example, a group of prominent Athenians gather to discuss the nature of love over an elaborate meal, during which Socrates is both lauded for his wisdom and mocked for his homeliness. The feast also is a celebration and validation of a community, and a celebration of victory, such as a successful marriage, military victory, or treaty. Feasts, therefore, bring to a close several of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, such as As You Like It and the Tempest.

In Fielding's eighteenth-century novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, for example, the hero's general lust for life is portrayed through his appetite for food and sex together. In the nineteenth century, when Victorian British society developed ambivalent feelings toward human appetites in general, Charles Dickens portrays one of his best-known characters, Oliver Twist, being thrown out of an orphanage for having more of an appetite than the authorities deem fitting.

Food in Culture and Memory

Feasts and food in literature, however, portray more than the mere physical appetite for food and a human triumph over nature in festivals. Each culture, with its own tradition of literature, also maintains its own distinct cuisine and distinct traditional rules that govern acts of eating. The food traditions of a community are composed not just of recipes, but of the methods and technologies by which foods are grown, gathered, stored, prepared, served, and thrown out. Such traditions include also culturally transmitted rules that govern ideas of health and cleanliness as related to food. Furthermore, each community that gives rise to a distinct literature necessarily also maintains culturally specific rules governing foods that are especially valued and foods that are especially shunned and controlling the contexts in which particular foods may or may not be eaten.

In events that involve the serving of food—from snacks to meals to festival feasts—networks of reciprocity among food preparers, as well as the relationships between those doing the cooking and those being served, become articulated. Food and events in which food is served, therefore, help define the social organization and cultural identity of the very communities that give rise to distinct literary traditions.

Because food customs call forth such a labyrinth of associations on the part of individual writers, and because the inherent sensuality of food involves not only the senses of smell and taste, but also the other senses, food is capable of evoking an avalanche of memories and feelings. Food imagery may appear, therefore, in literature as a source of deeply embedded associations that lead into the depths of individual and cultural memory. Perhaps showing the influence of Freudian thought, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (commonly known as Remembrance of Things Past) evolves from the narrator's memories brought out of the unconscious and into his conscious mind as he ate crumbs of "squat, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines'," that he had dipped in a cup of tea:

And soon, mechanically, disspirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. . . .

Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind. . . .

And suddenly the memory reveals itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. (pp. 60–63)

The Meal as Communion

Despite the availability of individual associations about food to a writer, it is the sharing of food within distinct food cultures that continues to be the major focus of literature about food. Furthermore, this sharing of food continues to be commonly portrayed in literature as a communion, even though the public festival of the late Middle Ages has, in modern society, become private. The famous Christmas feast that concludes Dickens's sentimental children's story, A Christmas Carol, with its flaming plum pudding and its transformation of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge into a more generous soul, is a prototype.

The family dinner as a private religious festival is perhaps more clearly seen in Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse, in which a private dinner of boeuf en daube gives a well-housed coherence to an otherwise dark and fragmented world outside of the home. The cook and main character, Mrs. Ramsay, leads in this communion. In preparation, Mrs. Ramsay lights the candles,

and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candlelight, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily. (p. 108)

Expanding on the idea of the meal as a private festive occasion, Woolf writes that Mrs. Ramsay serves the main course of beef:

And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats, and its bay leaves and its wine, and thought, This will celebrate the occasion—a curious sense rising in her, at once freakish and tender, of celebrating a festival. (p. 111)

A description of a fruit basket in the center of the table—the literary equivalent of a painting of a still life, writes Bettina Knapp, author of an essay about this dinner scene—concludes the description of the whole meal. The still shapes and the rich textures and colors in the basket of fruit represent, in peaceful form, the emotional complexities contained within the character of Mrs. Ramsay herself, and the serenity born of that particular meal.

Meals portrayed in literature as moments of light and warmth in the dark and cold are not uncommon. In Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Ishmael and Queequeg, the Fijian cannibal, share a meal of clam chowder in a jovial inn in cold and wintry Nantucket, Mass., just as they had shared a warm bed together earlier in New Bedford on a bitter New England night. Ishmael comments that to appreciate warmth it is best to feel as if you are "the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal" (p. 48).

In perfect contrast to the social solidarity of the shared meal, Captain Ahab compares the life of isolation that he has led with the life of community that could have been his had he not been obsessed with the white whale. He states this contrast in the language of food as metaphor, and shared food—in this case, the breaking of bread—as communion:

When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without—oh, weariness! heaviness! . . . and how for forty years, I have fed on dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts . . . aye, aye! What a forty-years' fool—fool—old fool has Ahab been! (pp. 477–78)

The Feast as a Focal Point of Plot

While plot in literature most often focuses on the vicissitudes of human relationships, on love, conquest, betrayal, and loss, rather than food, the feast—as both the culmination of one process and the beginning of another—naturally appears as a fulcrum on which plots can turn. Meals and feasts, then, often provide the framework for events. Meals that are not portrayed as placid communions, therefore, reveal the contradictions brewing in the plot. In Homer's Odyssey, it is just after a feast of the suitors, which the hero attends disguised as a beggar, that Odysseus announces his return and slaughters his rivals. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the juxtaposition of the wedding of the bereaved queen too soon after the funeral of her husband elicits from Hamlet himself the ominous quip that "the funeral bak'd meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables" (Act I, scene ii, lines 180–181). By juxtaposing two antithetical feasts, Shakespeare warns the reader that foul play, yet to be revealed in full, has taken place.

In Beloved, the 1987 novel by Toni Morrison, the central tragic episode of the story—an escaped slave's murder of her own young daughter to prevent her from being taken back into slavery—is immediately preceded by a feast that celebrates the young mother's freedom. This feast begins innocently enough when the man who ferried the woman across the Ohio River to freedom brings two buckets of blackberries to the family to be made into pies. To the pies, the family incrementally adds turkey, rabbit, fried perch, corn pudding, peas, various breads, and desserts, and invites the whole community to attend. "Ninety people . . . ate so well and laughed so much, it made them angry," Morrison writes (p. 136). They were angered that this family would celebrate so proudly while others still suffered. Yet the reader knows from the beginning that the celebration is premature and therefore doomed: the young woman's husband, the son of the older woman with whom she has come to live, remains in slavery and in danger. The plot turns from victory to tragedy on the fulcrum of the feast.

An excessive meal can betray other excesses latent in the personalities of the characters. In Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, the characters Levin and Oblonsky share a meal that seems vulgar in its quantity. During this meal of three dozen oysters, soupe printanière, turbot with sauce Beaumarchaise, roast beef, poulard à l'estragon, parmesan cheese, macédoine de fruits, vodka, champagne, and two bottles of Chablis—a gustatory metaphor for Tolstoy's opinion of the excesses of nineteenth-century Russian aristocrats—Levin speaks of his desire to propose to a woman half his age. Oblonsky, who himself has just been caught being unfaithful to his wife, encourages him. The food and conversation at the table encapsulate the magnitude of human desire that Tolstoy lays out in his novel as a whole, and cautions of the price that all pay for seeking the satiation of their desires.

Meals, Communion, and Counterculture in the American Novel

While in modern Western literature communion and meaning can be found around the dinner table, in the tradition of the American antihero, the bourgeois dinner table has sometimes been portrayed as stuffy and stultifying. Mark Twain perhaps began this tradition in Huckleberry Finn when he describes Huck complaining about having to abide by social manners at the Widow Douglas's house:

When you got to the table, you couldn't go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn't really anything the matter with them,—that is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better. (p. 4)

Countercultural characters similar to Huck appear recurrently in American literature. In this tradition, the wild out-of-doors, away from the social conventions of the dinner table, engender their own religious sensibility. In its suspicion of conventional modernity, this countercultural sensibility relates to the conventional the way that the carnivalesque related to feudal culture. Sometimes this suspicion of the conventional can also be symbolized by food, by a countercultural communion of sorts.

Ray Smith in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums speaks of himself as a religious wanderer, hops a train going north from Los Angeles, and shares a counter-communion in the freight car with an old hobo:

The little bum was sitting crosslegged at his end before a pitiful repast of one can of sardines. I took pity on him and went over and said, "How about a little wine to warm you up? Maybe you'd like some bread and cheese with your sardines?" (p. 4)

The communion on the freight train ends with the little bum "warming up to the wine and talking and finally whipping out a tiny slip of paper which contained a prayer by Saint Teresa announcing that after her death she will return to the earth by showering it with roses from heaven, forever, for all living creatures." (p. 5).

Whether in a public festival, a private bourgeois home, or in a distinctly nonbourgeois boxcar, the sharing of food in harmony is indeed a blessing, as the saintly shower of roses ending this one literary meal indicates.

Food and Social Healing

Finally, another strand of food literature in the United States is represented by Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler and Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham. In Tyler's work, Ezra, the youngest child of a broken home, opens a restaurant called Homesick Restaurant, where he fervently hopes the world's emotionally wounded will find healing in the nurturing environment of a restaurant that serves home-style cooking. In Home at the End of the World, a nontraditional family opens the Home Café in Woodstock, N.Y., hoping to offer the world honest, home-cooked food, when traditional fare has become so processed and standardized that it fails to meet the needs of a materialistic, spiritually bereft American nation.

See also Brillat-Savarin, Anthelme; Etymology of Food; Feasts, Festivals, and Fasts; Folklore, Food in; Herodotus; Language about Food; Luxury; Metaphor, Food as; Petronius; Rabelais, François; Sensation and the Senses; Shrove Tuesday; Symbol, Food as.

Jonathan C. David