Absorbing Fare: Food, Bodies, and Social Attention in Modern Britain

Abstract

Absorbing Fare examines the imaginative functions of food and ingestion within the discourses of difference that emerged in modern Britain. Using four historical instances of cultural fixation, I argue that these seemingly anomalous moments illuminate a conceptualization of identity as constituted, for individuals as well as communities, by acts of exclusion as well as incorporation.

The first half of my dissertation focuses on two disparate types of foods whose distinctive properties activated questions about the ethics of eating and the ways in which the object of ingestion could act upon the consuming body.

Chapter 1 (“Man is but a Crab: Crustacean Kinship and Its Perils”) pries into the crustacean’s place in Victorian marine biology and evolutionary theory, situating it in the context of a long tradition of literature that uses ingestion to visualize the origins and ends of human life.

Chapter 2 (“Pills for Our Ills: Diagnosing Self and Society”) listens in on the clamorous conflict between purveyors and critics of patent medicines, showing how both sides claimed likeness between habits of alimentary, auditory, and cultural consumption in articulating competing visions for the future of the human race.

The second half of the dissertation turns from foods to foodways, and from philosophical questions about the malleability and vulnerability of the human body to socio-political questions about how these bodies could be ordered and placed to optimize the good of the British nation.

Chapter 3 (“Weariness and Watercress: Temporalities of Gender, Temporalities of Class”) follows the withered figure of the watercress girl to consider how the preservation of food, the salvation of souls, and the reification of national identity converged in the disproportionate visibility of labor across the watercress industry within sociological and philanthropic accounts.

Chapter 4 (“Between World’s Fairs and Warfare: Ordering Food at the British Empire Exhibition”) pays a visit to the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, arguing that food’s recalcitrance to coherent narrativization was causally linked to the exhibition’s failed aims to circumscribe the visitor’s movements simultaneously within the contained space of the exhibition and in the wider Empire, depicted as ripe for harvest.

Together, the case studies in these four chapters articulate the centrality of food in the period’s engagements with the limitations and possibilities of self, society, and species.