Literally Blogging

Have you ever noticed how obsessed literature is with food? Quality literature, I mean. One of the exercises I have my students do when they experience writer’s block is to write about a favorite meal with the most detail possible. Food is one of the few things that forces us to use all five of our senses, and the more sensory detail writing has, the better it is. It never fails to break the block.

I suppose that’s why food is not as present in lesser literature; the writing isn’t as good. Or is there another reason? I mean, literature is obsessed with food.

Food is constantly used to show economic stability or hardship: those who describe it the most either have too much or not enough of it. Is it possible to read anything by Dickens without your stomach growling? Pages and pages full of ‘stocked larders’ of warm crusty bread, creamy cheeses, and salted pork. Roasted geese with crisp skin and bubbling fat, thick puddings bejeweled with brightly colored fruit, hot buttered toddies in front of the fire.

So goes the Victorian fare. Southern literature has its own charm, with its cornbread dripping with golden butter, puffy clouds of mashed potatoes, and bacon sizzling in a puff of hickory-flavored smoke.

And anything about pioneers and farmhands…watch out! Every other page is about food. You can even buy cookbooks now featuring recipes of the foods often mentioned in the Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie series. Look at this excerpt from Farmer Boy of the Little House series:

Three fat hens were in the pie, under the bubbling gravy. Mother spread the crust and crimped the edges, and the gravy showed through the two pine-trees she had put in the dough…

Mother sliced the hot rye’n'injun bread on the bread-board by her plate. Father’s spoon cut deep into the chicken-pie; he scooped out big pieces of thick crust and turned up their fluffy yellow under-sides on the plate. He poured gravy over them; he dipped up big pieces of tender chicken, dark meat and white meat sliding from the bones. He added a mound of baked beans and topped it with a quivering slice of fat pork. At the edge of the plate he piled dark-red beet pickles. And he handed the plate to Almanzo. Silently, Almanzo ate it all. Then he ate a piece of pumpkin pie, and he felt very full inside. But he ate a piece of apple pie with cheese.

So what is it? Is it simply exercising sensory detail? Does food connect these writers to family traditions that can’t be ignored? Is food a symbol of what people have and what they can’t? I’m not sure, but one thing I do know after reading this entry: I’m hungry.

2 Comments