"Nature," said Plutarch, "disavows our eating of flesh." "Man," wrote Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "...is omnivorous." "Eating is an agricultural act," says Wendell Berry. "The first spoonful of panna cotta is so startling," Diana Abu-Jaber recalls, "I want to laugh or sing or confess my sins. It tastes of sweetness and cream and even of the tiny early flowers the cows have eaten to make the cream."
The rich literature of passionate emotions, experiences and opinions about food is well represented in the new Norton anthology, Eating Words, edited by English professors Sandra M. Gilbert (The Culinary Imagination) and Roger J. Porter (Bureau of Missing Persons). Most of the writings sampled are from the 19th and 20th centuries, though 11 earlier ones go back as far as Leviticus.
Eating Words collects short works and excerpts of longer works, each with an informative headnote by the editors. Common themes include the pleasure of eating, the labor and enjoyment of cooking, and the emotional power of food. Authors argue for and against all kinds of dietary theories and practices. Others consider revulsion, privilege, poison, taboos or cannibalism. Some pieces focus on a single food or an extraordinary meal, as in Seamus Heaney's poem on eating oysters: "Our shells clacked on the plates,/ My tongue was a filling estuary,/ My palate hung with starlight." The breadth and depth of this anthology and the quality of the writing should appeal to anyone interested in food and its culture through the centuries. --Sara Catterall