Savory Bites

“Savory Bites: Books on Eating in Early America,” appeared in Early American Literature 50.2 (2015).  On the hot topic of food and literature, it considers three books on American literature and culture from colonial exploration through Reconstruction:  Ann Chandonnet’s Colonial Food (Shire 2013); Michael A. LaCombe’s Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World (U Pennsylvania P 2012); and Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York UP 2012). The essay places these books within the context of American food studies and the teaching of American literature.

As the first two volumes discuss, for Native Americans and European colonial explorers and settlers, food exchanges were not only crucial to survival but also highly symbolic. Hospitality among strangers is key among food practices that identify cultures.  Tompkins’s book takes a more grim approach to cultural differences. Consuming the other appears figuratively and frequently in American literature and culture, from the post-Revolutionary era through the 19th century.  In sum, what we share indicates who we are, just as what we eat determines who we are.