The Edible Predator: Wells and Food

Abstract

Eating is a creature’s basic need: avoiding being eaten, an accompanying necessity. ‘Hunger or the hunter is the common alternative of life’, Wells states in The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind. His other books recurrently and zestfully serve up this fact with lavish helpings of documentation and dramatisation. Food obsesses him—the forms it takes, the ways it is obtained, how it is consumed, and what it does to those who are absorbing it. Larded with gastronomic metaphor, stuffed with piquant culinary tit-bits, his writing caters for all appetites, from the qualmishly vegetarian to the most raveningly cannibal. There is even, in Bealby, a recipe for the way he himself would prefer to be cooked, should the eventuality arise: ‘If it should ever fall to my lot to be cooked, may I be fried in potatoes and butter. May I be fried with potatoes and good butter made from the milk of the cow. God send I am spared boiling; the prison of the pot, the rattling lid, the evil darkness, the greasy water.’