We all have had those moments. Moments when we sit down to eat something and then realize that the food on the plate, its taste, or that familiar aroma is our gateway to a memory that we cherish. “A Proustian Moment” if I may say so. But food IS evocative and often gives us the ability to time travel and narrate stories from the past. Literature is filled with such moments of nostalgia. However, food has also been used as a metaphor to describe not so “warm-fuzzy” emotions. The description of despair, love loss or struggle in food language is something I consider very difficult. Here are a few examples that I have come across in my limited readings. Some of these refuse to leave my mind unless I put them down on paper.
“Let them eat cake!”, said Marie Antoinette, wife of French King Louis XVI when she was told her subjects were starving and did not have any bread to eat. Historians believe that Marie Antoinette might have never actually said those words. Yet, “Let them eat cake!” has become a metaphor for aristocratic apathy and the politics of power.
While Marie Antoinette never made the popular dessert a symbol for political disregard in 1789 , seven years later Napoleon Bonaparte did write a letter to his wife Josephine expressing his despair for not being with her (and not being able to enjoy his tea!).“ I have not drunk a cup of tea without cursing the glory and ambition which keep me from the heart of my very being.” , wrote Bonaparte. A very foodie version of “I miss you!”. The marriage ended in divorce. Not sure how the tea tasted then.
In his essay “Eating and drinking in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, award-winning children’s author Philip Ardagh walks us through the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and the Victorian world of table etiquettes. Ardagh writes “…yet the Mad Hatter’s Tea party of Chapter 7 seems to break just about all the rules. Firstly, the Dormouse is asleep at the table. Bad form. The Mad Hatter and the March Hare are resting their elbows on him. Resting elbows anywhere was strictly forbidden. The guests are not sitting in an orderly fashion around the table, but are all crowded in one corner. One’s position at the table was vitally important.” Lewis Carroll’s disdain for these rules is also seen in his article “Hints for Etiquette; or, Dining Out Made Easy”, a satirical version of a popular book on societal rules.
The path to being acknowledged as a writer is often so lonely and filled with self-doubt that it takes an immense amount of motivation to seat yourself in front of the blank paper. Luckily we have the option of blogging about this very frustration and “filtering” a dull day image to make it look interesting. Don’t you ever wonder what people did before they could extol this phase of inactivity and make it look interesting? No one describes the struggles of a writer better than John Fante in his semi-autobiographical novel “Ask the Dust”. And if it needs to be summarized in one word, that word would be- Oranges!
“The lean days, blue skies with never a cloud, a sea of blue day after day, the sun floating through it. The days of plenty-plenty of worries, plenty of oranges. Eat them in bed, eat them for lunch, push them down for dinner. Oranges, five cents a dozen. Sunshine in the sky, sun juice in my stomach.”- writes Fante.
In popular culture, heartbreak and difficult situations in life are often paired with chocolate and large scoops of ice cream. The reality, however, is not that sweet. Food either becomes an object of neglect or a reminder of the void. The subject of marital discord portrayed through the world of food is probably one of the most difficult and most intriguing use of food metaphors. Meenakshi Thirukode’s essay Etiquette for Day Dreams is a food chronicle of a crumbling marriage. Thirukode’s metaphors are so poignant and beautiful at the same time, it almost seems unfair. While the writing calls for praise, the content calls for a hug. “His mother taught me to make this particular dish because it was “Raja’s” favorite. “Raja” liked it that way. Yellow, coarse, the friction against your tongue as you test it for taste, leaving a numbness so that you couldn’t taste anything else except for a lingering familiarity that was boring. Salty. Bland. Familiar. Oppressive. I just wanted to be a jar of Nutella. Parippusadam got me nothing.”
The effect in a more traditional set-up is seen in “The Upstairs Wife” by Rafia Zakaria. In the backdrop of political upheaval, The Upstairs Wife narrates the story of a divided marriage. Zakaria’s aunt has to deal with the blow of her husband bringing home a second wife. In this new marital arrangement food or the lack of it acts as a reminder of things gone awry. “Another time she spoke of preparing a curry, chopping the onions and heating the oil and realizing just as she was putting in the teaspoons of cumin and coriander and turmeric that there was no reason to make dinner that day, just like there was no reason to leave the bed in the morning, or to wash her face, or to change the clothes she has worn to sleep.”
Margaret Atwood’s book “The Edible Woman” , was first published in 1969. The protagonist in this novel experiences a loss of identity as she is about to get married. This internal crisis manifests itself as a gradual loss of appetite . Interestingly I found the book review by Millicent Bell, published in 1970. Bell writes “Not to eat or be eaten up like a confection of calculated flavors might be her heroine’s unconscious aim and Miss Atwood’s symbolic sense.”
“Please, sir, I want some more.” is a quote that needs no introduction and no context. Oddly enough a very apt description of food in Dicken’s work is seen in Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved. “Although his biographical experiences of destitution only came to light after his death, Dickens’ literature fully disclosed the venality and horror of the Industrial Revolution and the criminalization of the poor, which he himself had experienced. In Oliver Twist, Oliver’s diet in the poor house consists of ‘three meals of gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays.’ Although this might be something of an exaggeration it is certainly no stretch to say that the diet of the working class was generally poor.”
The versatility of food in the world of diction is definitely worth exploring. While there are many other examples, some more popular than the ones listed above, the attempt here is to explore this facet of food in the literary world.