Mapping Appetite: Essays on Food, Fiction and Culture

164 Pages·2007·0.54 MB·English

by  Jopi Nyman and Pere Gallardo-Torrano

Mapping Appetite

Mapping Appetite
Essays on Food, Fiction and Culture

Edited by

Jopi Nyman and Pere Gallardo

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING
Mapping Appetite: Essays on Food, Fiction and Culture, edited by Jopi Nyman and Pere Gallardo

This book first published 2007 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2007 by Jopi Nyman and Pere Gallardo and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN 1-84718-304-2; ISBN 13: 9781847183040
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments.....................................................................................vii

Chapter One.................................................................................................1
Introduction: Setting the Table
Jopi Nyman and Pere Gallardo

Part I: Food, Fantasy and Fiction

Chapter Two................................................................................................8
“An Aroma of Spices […] Magnified the Sense of What It Meant
to Live in England”: Travel, “Real” Food and “Misshapen” Identity
Inga Bryden

Chapter Three............................................................................................28
Sweet Taste of India: Food Metaphors in Contemporary Indian
Fiction in English
Daniela Rogobete

Chapter Four..............................................................................................52
Culinary Cartographies of Multicultural London:
Constructions of the Urban through Foods and “Foodways”
Lia Blaj-Ward

Part II: Food, Power and the Popular

Chapter Five..............................................................................................68
Writing the Recipe for Subversion: The Creation of Patriarchy-Defying
Communities by Means of Cookery
Miriam López-Rodríguez

Chapter Six................................................................................................85
Dr. Frankenstein’s Technophobic Diet: “The Iron Chancellor,”
by Robert Silverberg
Pere Gallardo
vi Table of Contents

Part III: Food, Identity and History

Chapter Seven............................................................................................98
“We Call It English ‘Prosciutto’”: Food, Travel and Nation
in Paul Richardson’s Cornucopia
Jopi Nyman

Chapter Eight...........................................................................................114
Representations of Time in Cookery Articles
Eleonora Chiavetta

Chapter Nine............................................................................................132
Writing Women, Writing Food: African-American Women’s
Cookbooks in Historical Perspective
Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry

Contributors.............................................................................................150

Index........................................................................................................153
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jopi Nyman’s research has been supported by the Academy of Finland
(project 205780). Pere Gallardo’s contribution to this volume is part of the
research carried out under the auspices of the T-CLAA Research Group at
the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain.

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE TABLE
JOPI NYMAN AND PERE GALLARDO

While the field of food studies was for a long time mainly occupied by
anthropologists and ethnologists interested in the study of everyday
practices, recent years have witnessed a strong interest in various cultural
representations of the culinary, ranging from analyses of food
representation in film and literature to cultural readings of recipes, menus,
national cuisines and celebrity chefs.1 Such explorations of the diverse
roles of the culinary testify to the increasingly important role that food is
gaining in today’s Western consumer culture, where global food trends
follow each other, transforming people’s diets and reconstructing their
identities. Thus food, while often considered to be too mundane to be
studied, is worth studying because of its crucial role in everyday life and
consumption in modes that range from televised cookery shows to mass-
produced hamburgers. As Warren Belasco writes in a recent collection of
essays on food,

If we are what we eat, we also are what we don’t eat. People moralize
constantly about what they will and will not eat. To eat is to distinguish
and discriminate, include and exclude. Food choices establish boundaries
and borders. In the modern era this process of culinary differentiation may
entail major modification of traditional foods; few people today eat exactly

1 See, e.g., Bob Ashley, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones and Ben Taylor, Food and
Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 2004); Eating Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Food, ed. Tobias Döring, Markus Heide and Susanne Mühlheisen
(Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2003); Kitchen Culture in America: Popular
Representations of Food, Gender, and Race, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film, ed.
Anne L. Bower (New York: Routledge, 2004).