Diet and Discourse: Eating, Drinking and Literature

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

The alliterative title initially suggests a parody of thematic
criticism. Hinz apparently recognizes the potential danger here,
assuring us in her introduction that she hopes to “add a touch of
playfulness to this otherwise appropriately serious collection.” She
does so by offering an amusing if somewhat labored caricature of the
pretensions of contemporary scholarship. This parodic impulse returns at
the end in Norman Kiell’s “Food in Literature: A Selective
Bibliography,” a delicious spoof on the art of grotesque annotation.
But the intervening essays, in the main, are heavy reading indeed.

I tend to apply an acid-test to such projects: does the topic
illuminate the texts discussed, or are the texts merely (and
illegitimately) “used”—even abused—to illustrate the topic? Too
often, the latter is the case here. Eating and drinking are conspicuous;
literature comes in a poor third. Thus Mary Brugan seems more interested
in Victorian feeding bottles than in Dickens, who serves only as an
excuse for a discourse on raising infants. For Deborah Ann Thompson,
Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” is not a poem to be savored
but a hermeneutic problem to be solved. Robert James Merrett documents
Trollope as wine expert, but the emphasis is on port and claret rather
than fiction. On the credit side, however, Ashraf H. A. Rushdy is
decidedly helpful in providing a reading of Swift’s scatological
poetry, and Catherine MacGregor, while sociological in her emphasis,
offers a fresh and enlightening study of Lowry’s Under the Volcano.

The volume is not as revolutionary as one might think. It is best
thought of in the tradition of Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, or
Rabelais, or the writings of Joyce. “Eat or be eaten” becomes an
excuse to discuss almost everything, especially sex and defecation. Fair
enough—“interdisciplinary” is now an okay word. Yet, in a world
increasingly conscious of imperialist tendencies, I wonder how
literature teachers (who make up the majority of the contributors) can
so confidently colonize a variety of disciplines, from psychology to
social work, from political science to ecology. But we live in strange
times.