This chapter explores the ways in which the practice of cookery and the act of eating were understood as analogous to the making and experiencing of literature in early modern writing – a set of similarities that was both exciting and disquieting. It begins with the word “conceit,” which could refer either to a wittily rhetorical piece of language or to something dainty and edible. This leads to a discussion of the ways in which eating causes distinctions between people and practices both to be made and to break down in this period (especially in the work of Shakespeare and Jonson). It ends with a discussion of the place of food in the writings of Margaret Cavendish – who distinguishes her own labours from the typical culinary work of women even as she sees Nature as a productive cook – and John Milton, who places a striking emphasis on prelapsarian eating as common to human and angel, while recognizing food as the most devilish of temptations.

This chapter examines twentieth and twenty-first century US farmworker literature. It argues that US farmworker literature distinguishes itself from the Jeffersonian agrarianism dominant in literary and cultural representations of US farmers by not only exposing the systems of power and privilege through which farmworkers are exploited, but also positioning farmworkers as key conveyors of environmental knowledge. And it shows how farmworker epistemologies in US literature and culture offer a critical vantage point on both the industrial food system and the larger systems of colonialism, capitalism, and racism upon which the industrial food system relies. The chapter considers Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown (1939), Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946), and Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) as examples of farmworker literature that both address the conditions of exploitation facing farm laborers in the industrial food system, including economic and environmental violence, and foreground farmworkers’ environmental knowledge.

This chapter explores Julia Child’s role in the “hot kitchen” of Cold War culture, and her unlikely repurposing of the trans-national domestic front. Recent commentators have suggested that the OSS researcher, food writer, TV celebrity, and domestic goddess single-handedly “re-outfitted the American kitchen and re-educated the American palate.” In the heyday of Jello molds and frozen foods, she made French cooking hot. But when Julia arrived in France in 1948, the country was scarred by war and reeling from deprivation – was, in other words, far from a foodie paradise. Child’s memoirs reveal her keen awareness of postwar scarcity, and the postwar politics of being an American in Paris in the age of both McCarthy and the Marshall Plan. Reading My Life in France alongside Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Child's collected letters, I uncover how her work to translate French cuisine for an American audience pivotally upended Cold War domestic ideology, countering narratives of American modernity and postwar abundance with visions of French leisure, luxury, and culinary extravagance.

When it comes to food and race, the connection is often one of identity: how the one comes to stand in for the other and vice versa. This chapter invites readers to theorize food and consumption in Asian American literature by attending to food, not as an expression of identity, but as that which profoundly destabilizes (and perhaps even dissolves) identity and by questioning the association between food as matter and race as matter. It focuses on the tropes of ingestion, farming, and environmental and human health in On Such a Full Sea, Chang-rae Lee’s most and least Asian American novel, as a way to meditate on the nature of racial/ethnic (im)materiality. By turning to the crises of food and ecology as sites that trouble the division between the human and the animal, the consumer and the consumed, Lee forces us to reconsider our easy assumptions about racial-ethnic identity and the corporeal integrity that presumably substantiates that identity.

This chapter examines contemporary African fiction through the lens of food and foodways, highlighting the ways that recent writers have deployed agriculture, cooking, and eating to highlight the traumas of history, the emptiness of displacement, and the power of community. In We Need New Names (2013) NoViolet Bulawayo uses a piece of half-eaten discarded pizza to indicate the cultural and economic distance between those Zimbabweans with access to America and Europe and those without. Rosa’s District 6 (2004) by Rozena Maart shows the way food acts to bring people of different faiths and races together in a community facing erasure under apartheid. In Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones (2006), the revival of a coffee plantation serves as a metaphor for the rebuilding of Sierra Leone after decades of military coups and a civil war. In all three novels, food is used to chart political and social history unique to each region. Foodways and food security can serve as important markers in ascertaining how liberation is proceeding because access to food is a basic human necessity and foodways serve as cultural and social markers that speak to a community’s comfort with its access to food.

This chapter introduces the reader to literary representations of food as well as the literary facets of culinary texts ranging from early modern receipt books and nineteenth-century cookbooks to contemporary culinary memoirs and food blogs. It highlights the complexities of food culture and foregrounds the role that food has played in the formation of racial identities, gendered bodies, national tastes, cultural memory, and social capital. Tracing the rich range of historical and theoretical approaches to literary food studies that have emerged over the past two decades, it offers an overview of how food and its literature came to be taken seriously by literary scholars. Finally, this section establishes the parameters of the Companion, and provides a chapter-by-chapter introduction to its contents.

In the late nineteenth century, cookbooks began to describe in detail a heteronormative economy in which a wife was cooking for her husband and family in return for the love, financial security, respect, and protection her husband provided. This ideological frame, brought about by social change in household structure and the distribution of labor, helped to establish cooking and eating as modes to narrate changing sexual economies in the twentieth century. This chapter tracks the historical development of heteronormativity in cooking advice as well as how literary texts have exploited the idea of cooking as central to the performance of hegemonic femininity, and also occasionally contested that idea. It also discusses how the heternormativity of cookbooks was sometimes questioned by authors of cooking advice. Not only did cookbook authors start to challenge the gender binary traditionally promoted in cookbooks as well as the normative assumption that women prepare food for the men they love, but they also innovatively reformulated the rules of the genre, thereby making its normative claims visible while creating a space to narrate alternative tales of love and sexuality.

From the turn of the twentieth century forward, movie makers, fiction writers, and journalists have increasingly pushed into view bodies mangled by agricultural machinery, workers drowning in silos filled with grain, and lands laden with synthetic toxins. Farms have frequently appeared not only as ideal homesteads near picturesque villages but also as cogs in the brutality of corporate agribusiness, or as isolated and alien outposts struggling for economic survival in depopulated landscapes. The farm has even grown into a privileged setting for stories of supernatural horror bound to the rise of agriculture’s industrialization. Tangled with images of terror and mutilated bodies, Thomas Jefferson’s once idyllic “labor in the earth” now often takes place on a threatening, quasi-industrial, vast and lonely landscape of corn. Texts examined include Frank Norris' The Octopus, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Picture in the House,” Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Stephen King’s “The Children of the Corn.”

The Romantic Revolution in Taste entailed a radical revision of the category of art and a toppling of the traditional hierarchy of the senses. In the wake of the French Revolution, Parisian gastronomers emerged as necessary adjuncts to the phenomenon of the restaurant, guiding the public in the formerly exclusive practice of food connoisseurship and applying the aesthetic art of judgment to products of culinary artistry. This chapter examines the response of British literary writers and critics to the cultural upheaval the age of gastronomy represented. It surveys the different “schools” of thought that emerged at this time – in the language of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Leg of Mutton School, the Cookery School, the Soda-Water School – in addition to the more well-known Cockney and Lake Schools – and considers the role of William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, William Kitchiner, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron in the Romantic Revolution in taste.

In the winter of 1791–92, James Madison compiled a set of reading notes that scholars long assumed were meant to support the “party press” essays he soon published in the National Gazette, the new Republican newspaper edited by his college friend, the poet Philip Freneau. But as Colleen Sheehan has argued, Madison also conceived these “Notes on Government” for a more ambitious project: to draft a treatise on republican government that would apply the lessons of the American experience to problems that had long fascinated political theorists. The table of contents that opens the notebook indicates the outlines of the argument. The treatise, alas, remained unwritten – a reminder of the fact that Madison preferred to do his best political writing for himself, rather than the reading public. Alexander Hamilton, his co-author as Publius, felt fewer inhibitions and proved a more spirited polemicist. Had Madison gone back to Virginia in the fall of 1787, to aid in the ratification struggle in his native state, rather than returning to the Continental Congress, his twenty-nine contributions to The Federalist would never have appeared. Without Federalist 10 and 51 and a few other essays to guide our thinking, the modern concept of a “Madisonian constitution” might never have formed. Who knows: had Hamilton written nearly all of The Federalist, with a little assistance from John Jay, we might have been stuck with a “Hamiltonian constitution” all along.

Judging from the title that Publius gave his collection of essays, the label that defenders of the proposed Constitution took for themselves, and the label that became attached to their opponents, federalism seems to have been the central issue in the debate over the proposed Constitution. Yet the labels themselves are often the source of confusion when speaking of the debate over its ratification. One form the confusion takes is the puzzlement that derives from the fact that the Constitution’s opponents, the Anti-Federalists, are usually characterized as a group who sought a more federal constitution than the nationalist-leaning document the so-called Federalists were sponsoring. It might seem that the parties were strangely mislabeled, a feeling shared not only by many modern readers, but by some of the participants in the debate themselves. So Melancton Smith, a leading Anti-Federalist, was reported to have said in the New York Ratifying Convention, in reply to a speech by a leading Federalist: “He hoped the gentleman would be complaisant enough to exchange names with those who disliked the Constitution, as it appeared … that they were Federalists, and those who advocated it Anti-Federalists.” The confusion over names was certainly a natural one, but the names that have stuck were not so inappropriate or so much a usurpation as critics like Smith averred. All the parties to the debate, even Anti-Federalists like the Federal Farmer, thought by many to be Smith, agreed that a federal system had two major components: member states and a “federal head” or general government for the whole. Since a federal system was normally contrasted with a unitary or consolidated system like France, the federal system was thought to be the one with decentralized authority, that is, with more authority in the member states relative to the greater authority in the general or central government of a unitary system. Thus, one could plausibly be labeled a federalist if one were in favor of greater authority in the member units relative to the federal head (as the Anti-Federalists were). But one could just as well be a federalist for favoring the strengthening of the federal head or central government (as the Federalists did). Given the circumstances of the debate over the Constitution, its advocates even had a somewhat stronger claim to the label, despite the understandable ambiguities. The pro-Constitution forces came before the country with a proposal to strengthen the federal head and thus were in this sense Federalists.

Conventional accounts of The Federalist tend to overlook a critical and uncontroversial fact about the Constitution: the principal function it assigned the proposed new government was the conduct of the Union’s foreign affairs. By neglecting this simple point, readers too often miss the forest for the trees. The central task of The Federalist was not to offer a general blueprint for republican government but rather to demonstrate the depth of the Confederation’s failures in foreign affairs and to explain why the new federal government would govern more effectively in that realm without imperiling the republican commitments of the Revolution. This insight in turn reveals another: Even when The Federalist focuses on other, very different themes – whether in analyzing the general principles of federalism or the separation of powers, the importance of energy in the executive or independence in the judiciary, or the deficiencies of popular assemblies – foreign affairs remains its ultimate subject. These explorations were so many arguments to demonstrate that the federal government would neither repeat the Confederation’s foreign affairs blunders, nor pose a threat to the states and the republican principles upon which they were founded.

A common perception of the arguments in The Federalist may be stated as follows. In designing the Constitution, the framers were motivated by reason. Their task was to limit the influence of interest and passion, and perhaps enhance the role of reason, in the future political agents whose choices the Constitution would guide and constrain. In a more compact version, to paraphrase Friedrich Hayek, the American Constitution – like constitutions quite generally – was a tie imposed by Peter when sober on Peter when drunk.