Digesting Race, Class, and Gender

Abstract

Digestion is often used as a way of describing the experience of life, the consideration of ideas, or even the understanding of a god. One eats, or “takes it all in,” and may be forever changed by the experience. Some food for thought: David Gibbons, who studies alimentary metaphors—those that refer to nourishment—in the work of thirteenth-century Italian poet Dante, reveals countless instances of the characters in Paradiso referring to taste, hunger, and digestion to represent “the desire to understand” (2001, 697). Dante, who wrote this third piece of his Divine comedy after being exiled from Florence for political reasons, “finds himself wondering whether or not he should recount all he has seen to a world which will find his message difficult to swallow” (2001, 696; emphasis mine). An ancestor encourages him to do so indeed, reminding Dante that while the initial reception may be chilly, the nourishment his words contain “will be of use to them once they have been digested” (2001, 696). The Christian Bible or Hebrew Torah, Gibbons shows, is also packed with food-related metaphors: Moses famously reminds the Israelites that “man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Deut. 8:3). God’s word, too, is referred to as bread, milk, and even meat.