Food and Literature

Scholarship on food and literature is interdisciplinary in nature, linking poetics and politics and drawing from multiple disciplines: literary studies, cultural studies, history, philosophy, sociology, linguistics, gender studies, anthropology, and other disciplines. The changes in the scholarship on food in literature mirror broader trends in literary and cultural studies as well as shifts in societal concerns. The study of food literature has been influenced especially by cultural studies; semiotics; feminist, gender, and queer theory; postcolonial theory; critical race theory; ecocriticism; food ethics; and object-oriented ontology. These critical lenses have helped literary scholars study food as symbol and metaphor, as a marker of cultural and national identity, and as an indicator of gendered roles and expectations. In studies of food and identity—as influenced by gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexuality, age, and more—scholars show how individuals and communities are both shaped by and can resist powerful social structures and forces. Many analyses highlight power relations, whether of class structures and hierarchies, economic inequality, racism, or the power dynamics between colonizers and colonized people. A growing area of interest is food and the environment—including the relationship between food and environmental sustainability, the climate crisis, and the ethics of eating animals as well as food inequality and food sovereignty. Another area of interest for scholars of food and literature is literary form, including the expansion of what kinds of texts are worthy of literary study. While scholarship on food literature once focused mainly on plays, novels, poetry, and some nonfiction, it has expanded to consideration of cookbooks, memoirs, genre fiction, film, television, culinary travel narratives, hybrid genres, performance pieces, and more. Connected to an expanded notion of what kinds of texts count as literature, scholars have also broadened their perspectives of whose work is worthy of serious study, going far beyond canonical authors and/or critically examining those authors. In studies of food in literature, scholars recognize that food can function as an important symbol, central theme, or plot device worthy of serious analysis. Analyses of food also invite contextual analysis, illuminating the historical, cultural, social, and political contexts in which the literature was produced and is read.