Let Them Eat Romanticism: Materialism, Ideology, And Diet Studies

Abstract

The study of food has been necessarily interdisciplinary, as evidenced by journals devoted to it such as Food and Foodways, Gastronomica, and the publications of the Oxford Food Symposia. I call this work “diet studies.” In its etymology diet is close to culture. The Greek diaitia implied Raymond Williams’s idea of culture, “a whole way of life.” Diet studies constantly gesture toward ways in which life is lived. Consider David Clark’s work on figures of eating in Hegel and Schelling: they delineate a livable orientation—including sexual orientation. Interdisciplinary studies connect things in surprising ways. Paul Youngquist brings Lockean philosophy to bear upon the quotidian subject of using a toilet. Perceived gaps between different areas of human life are always theoretical, compelling us to reflect. Under-theorized or even antitheoretical studies of food and diet risk resembling Gillray’s cartoon of the theoretical carrot-eating Frenchman and John Bull, his plumpness the empirical “proof ” of English superiority, as Penelope Bradshaw points out. All the essays in Eating Romanticism, whether explicitly so or not, are theoretical, opening gaps between food and its cultural places. There’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.

Der Mensch ist, was er ist

—Ludwig Feuerbach1

Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es

—Jean-Antheleme Brillat-Savarin,

The Physiology of Taste, fourth aphorism2 Butchery,—a regiment of English militia, at the command of their officers, firing on their countrymen, the unarmed inhabitants of Bristol, when a number of men, women, and children were killed.

—Charles Pigott, A Political Dictionary, 83