Diet Studies in the Romantic Period

Diet Studies in the Romantic Period

Samantha Webb*University of Montevallo

Abstract

The burgeoning interdisciplinary field of diet studies examines representations of food, eating anddrinking, and other aspects of consumption in literary and non-literary texts. It emerged in thefield of British Romanticism, at the intersection of materialist and formalist criticisms, and drawson food anthropology, food history and consumption studies. It also seeks to intervene into phi-losophy and aesthetics by revealing the corporeal and gustatory tropes that sometimes ground thesefields. The Romantic period has proven to be a fertile literary moment for questions about diet.Coinciding historically with the consumer revolution, the period between the 1780s and 1830ssaw many changes in diet, including the rise of haute cuisine, and the introduction of luxury foodslike tea, sugar, coffee and chocolate. Dietary reformers also sought to introduce potatoes into thediets of the poor in the wake of food shortages. In tandem with this historical context, the 18thcentury is also known as the ‘century of taste’, and diet studies examine the gustatory dimensionsof the aesthetic concept of taste. In diet studies, food is read as a sign that can demystify ‘Roman-tic ideology’ but that can also maintain its status as a figure. In this article, I review some of themost important works in the field, and suggest some of the reasons that diet studies has proved tobe such a productive intervention into Romantics studies.

If the popularity of diet books, food histories and the Food Network are any indication,people enjoy consuming representations of the consumption of food. Perhaps this isbecause thinking about food leads us to contemplate pleasure, luxury, the exotic, even,conversely, a bit of the disgusting. Or perhaps because it allows us to feel that we are incontrol of our bodies or to believe that our bodily needs and pleasures can be in syncwith the environment. The critical field that is coming to be known as ‘diet studies’engages questions about food in all its ideological and figurative dimensions. It might bestbe described as a set of interdisciplinary questions about the cultural, philosophical andaesthetic meanings of food and consumption. Crystallizing around literary studies’ interesthistory, material culture and close reading, diet studies seeks to trace the multifacetedrelationships between food and culture, and between body and mind. As aesthetic theoryis so grounded on terms like taste, appetite and consumption, diet studies is also interestedin the uninvestigated corporeal languages of aesthetics and philosophy. Scholars workingin the area look at texts, tropes, representations and terminology related to all aspects ofdiet – food, eating, appetite, ingestion, taste, for example – as they appear in a wide vari-ety of literary and non-literary texts. Less a unified approach to texts than a set of criticalfoci, diet studies can be engaged in drawing out the textual significance of food tropes,or the ideological work of representations of food, or the shifting cultural meanings offood and eating. Drawing on ecological, postcolonial and historicist criticism, as well asformal criticism, diet studies sits at the intersection of these approaches and, not surpris-ingly given the subject matter, resists totalization.

Diet studies is rooted in food anthropology as well as food history, but goes beyondthese in significant ways. For one thing, its aim is not the reconstruction of historicaldietary patterns, although it relies on that work. Where anthropology tends to view food

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as embedded in a cultural matrix, diet studies is also concerned with the ways discourseslike philosophy, aesthetics and literature frequently ground themselves in food- and con-sumption-related tropes. From these perspectives, the study of the peculiar languages ofconsumption illuminates notions of mind and self. Early work by Claude Levi-Strauss,Mary Douglas and Roland Barthes suggestively noted the convergences between languageand food. In ‘Deciphering a Meal’, Douglas proposed that the meanings of meals asmarkers of boundaries and ‘structured relations’ could be gleaned through their place inthe entire food structure, in the same way that the rules of versification ordered theinchoate movements of the mind in poetry (Counihan and Van Esterik 53). Food’smeanings are produced through a complex psychological, ideological and social dynamicwhose signification is generated as much by media representations as by traditional ritualsand individual preferences. As Barthes claimed,

To eat is a behavior that develops beyond its own ends, replacing, summing up, and signalizingother behaviors, and it is precisely for these reasons that it is a sign (Counihan and Van Esterik25).

The field of diet studies was first encapsulated as such by Timothy Morton (2004) in hisedited collection, Cultures of Taste ⁄Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism. Although Mor-ton’s contributions attempt a kind of synthesis, the question of diet studies’ parameters isleft deliberately open. Morton positions the field at the intersection of historical andphilosophical approaches to literature. That is, critical perspectives that see texts as histori-cally legible in some way, and those that approach them more generically and formally.Centrally, the volume reveals

the many ways in which food and eating was not simply an empirical reality in the Romanticperiod, but a mixture of ideas, practices, figures, debates, and philosophical speculations (xv).

Accordingly, the volume is organized into three sections illustrating the dominantapproaches: cultural studies, close reading and philosophy. This division serves less as a setof boundaries than as a guideline for the kinds of work that can be performed by scholarsinterested in these questions.

Indeed, other work in diet studies has tended to fall within these parameters. Morton’s(1994) own study of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s vegetarianism has been credited with settingthe groundwork for the field. In Shelley and the Revolution in Taste, Morton drew atten-tion to the radical political resonances of the poet’s vegetarian diet. Earlier studies ofShelley’s vegetarian diet failed to theorize it as a keystone of the poet’s vast andsophisticated cultural critique. What Morton showed was that 18th-century discourse onvegetarianism aligned the practice and its representation with radical politics and theRomantic critical project. But more than that, texts of vegetarianism and their critics –such as Shelley’s Vindication of Natural Diet (1813), Joseph Ritson’s An Essay on theAbstinence from Animal Food (1803), Samuel Pratt’s Humanity: or, the Rights of Nature (1788)and Thomas Taylor’s The Rights of Brutes (1792) – offer ways of thinking figuratively andaesthetically about the relationship between food, the individual and various cultural prac-tices like slavery, colonialism and class conflict. ‘The discourse of vegetarianism’, Mortonwrites, ‘creates waves of sympathy which overflow class, race and species limits or bound-aries’ (27). Never merely about a particular diet, food writing in the Romantic periodsets diet within a cultural framework that enables consideration of what it means to eat,what it means to be a subject and what it means to be human. To think about abstainingfrom meat, and to theorize why to do so, is to contemplate the place of humanity withinthe natural world, to mark out and sometimes to blur the boundaries between them. It is

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also to articulate a sustained political critique about conditions of production. That theseRomantic period writers were fully aware of the implications of this makes the era aparticularly fertile one for literary critics in any number of critical perspectives.

The Romantic period, conceived as both an aesthetic sensibility and the historical erabetween roughly the 1780s and the 1830s, has proven to be one of the richest sites forthese kinds of investigations. There are a number of reasons for this. First, Romanticauthors wrote about food a lot, figuratively and literally. Yet even materialist criticismshave tended to overlook these moments, likely because Romanticism has traditionallybeen conceived as a resistance to and transcendence of quotidian experience, particularlycorporeal experience. Charles Lamb’s ‘Dissertation Upon Roast Pig’ is one of the moredirect instances of Romantic writing about food. Hannah More’s ‘Cheap RepositoryTracts’ included recipes for the poor during times of scarcity. Coleridge’s notebooks arefull of observations on the pleasures of food and drink. Keats’ poems are virtually allabout the implications of tasting, ingesting and consuming. Consumption figures promi-nently as a trope in Romantic writing, with important implications for our understandingof Romantic poetics, especially in relation to the emerging literary marketplace in whichthe novel sat more comfortably as a consumable item than poetry. For example, whenWordsworth (603–4) laments that people express ‘a taste for poetry … as if it were athing as indifferent as a taste for Rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry’, he is communi-cating something about the various ways in which the consumption of food signified.Wordsworth is ultimately challenging food consumption as a model and trope for literarypleasure, suggesting that his poems are meant to be enjoyed in a manner beyond thebody, whose pleasures here are identified with sensational popular literature.

The second reason why the British Romantic period has responded to diet studies isthat the period itself witnessed multifaceted changes in dietary practice, from the rise ofhaute cuisine to the introduction of new foods: luxury items like coffee, chocolate, sugarand tea, to be sure, but also potatoes (including, in a separate development, the Frenchfry1). In the realm of cooking, highly refined styles of French cooking began to seep intoBritish cookery, particularly in the wake of the French Revolution.2 This turned cuisineinto a more self-consciously nationalistic enterprise. Not surprisingly, the period also sawthe invention of the gourmet and gastronomic writing, some of the most important ofwhich has recently been collected by Denise Gigante in Gusto: Essential Writings in Nine-teenth-Century Gastronomy. In the wake of the British reaction to the French Revolutionand the ensuing wars, food items became a kind of shorthand for representing the depre-dations of the French: they were shown as either effete (because of their refined diets) orcannibalistic (because of their barbarity). For radicals in England, food was used to repre-sent political and economic protest.3

In the 18th century, the British diet was changing through contact with foreign landsthrough trade, colonialism and, most controversially, slavery. Histories of these foodsabound for scholarly and popular audiences, and as these works show, a great deal ofcontroversy surrounded their use. Piero Camporesi’s Exotic Brew connects the consump-tion of these ‘exotic’ foods, which were lighter than traditional fares, to the rise of fashionand to new models of the ideal body. Sugar, of course, was the product of slave labour,and as such, was subject to boycotts and consumer actions, particularly in the latter partof the 18th century.4 Abolitionist writers, like Robert Southey, Hannah More, AnnYearsley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge used what Morton has called the ‘blood sugar’topos (Poetics of Spice 171–206) to link the eating of sugar to cannibalism. Sidney Mintz’sSweetness and Power traces the transformation of sugar from a foreign luxury to a dailynecessity, and correlates that transformation to the development of modernity. Mark

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Pendergrast’s Uncommon Grounds explores the impact of coffee, and Roy Moxham con-tributes to the history of that most British of foreign luxuries, tea. Originally the pausethat refreshes for aristocratic households, tea became a source of some concern when thehabit of drinking it was taken up by the working classes. The reasons for the oppositionto tea were as much ideological as they were health-related. As Charlotte Sussman (31)suggests, the attack on tea-drinking can be explained by fears that social emulation woulddisrupt the firm class boundaries, and were rooted in ‘the uncertain nature and power ofthe emerging industrial workforce’.

The British diet was also changing because of economic shifts associated with industri-alization. Studies of 18th-century dietary patterns show a steady improvement in the dietsof the poor from the early part of the century, thanks to fairly affordable food prices andsuccessive years of good harvests (Drummond and Wilbraham 205). However, shiftingeconomic conditions, poor harvests, inflation and (arguably) land enclosures changed thissituation so that, by the end of the century, the poorest citizens’ chief source of food wasbread. Always deeply symbolic – it is ‘the staff of life’ – bread became a hotly contestedsign of England’s happy past against its degraded present. Further, as E. P. Thompsonargued, the food riot, often sparked by wheat shortages, was a time-honored tradition foreconomically aggrieved people to uphold the ‘moral economy’ against the emergingmarket economy. These late 18th-century food shortages led to some colourful efforts tointroduce alternate foods into general consumption.5 Most notably, potatoes were toutedby their supporters as an efficient modern innovation and ‘the root of plenty’ against theirtraditional associations with Irish peasants.6 In short, the dietary situation in Englandduring the Romantic period was an evolving engagement not just with foods, but alsowith class, race, gender, nationalism, colonial practice and, underwriting all, capitalism.

Crucially for diet studies, the Romantic period coincided with what is known as the‘consumer revolution’. The period that witnessed the French, industrial and agriculturalRevolutions also gave birth to the consumer ‘as an economic subject, and as a style ofindividuality’ (Morton, Cultures of Taste 1). While the specific causes of this revolutionremain the subject of some scholarly debate,7 part of its effect was to expand the vocabu-lary of consumption to a wide range of cultural products in which food figures as themost literal but also the most problematic of objects. Thanks to the rise of industrialprocesses of production, people could now buy mass-produced household goods, printsand novels; they could perform the act of ‘going shopping’. These trends have beeninvestigated at length in the Culture and Consumption in the Seventeenth and Eigh-teenth Centuries series, edited by Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and others. Consumingthings became part of the fabric of society. This development had a profound impact notonly on economic levels but also on conceptions of subjectivity and self. Ann Berming-ham notes, in relation to the consumption of print paintings, that ‘what is ultimately atstake in consumption is the production of the subject through self-reflection and desire’(2). The self could now be conceived as a consuming self, and what it consumedmattered.

The sociologist Colin Campbell has argued that modern consumption, whose keyquality is its seeming insatiability, is akin to hedonism. The rise of the consumer society,he insists, cannot be explained as simply the result of the expansion of production, orthrough the emulative desires of the middle classes. Rather, this mass movement requiredan autonomous imaginative, even aesthetic dimension to sustain it as a social practice.The ethic of hedonism was given a mental dimension through Romanticism’s engage-ment with the imagination. Less important than actually having consumer goods was theability to day dream about possessing them. Campbell correlates this imaginative dimen-



sion to new forms of experience that emerged during the time: romantic love, fashionand the rise of the novel. As he (Romantic Ethic 88–9) explains:

The central insight required is the realization that individuals not so much seek satisfaction fromproducts, as pleasure from the self-illusory experiences which they construct from their associ-ated meanings. The essential activity of consumption is thus not the actual selection, purchaseor use of the products, but the imaginative pleasure-seeking to which the product image lendsitself, ‘real’ consumption being largely a resultant of this ‘mentalistic’ hedonism. Viewed in thisway, the emphasis upon novelty as well as that upon insatiability both become comprehensible.

Romanticism’s valorization of the imagination and the emotions, coupled with these newmodes for engaging lived experience imaginatively, offered a way of incorporatingconsumption into the very center of subjectivity and social life.

Campbell goes a good way to placing consumption at the centre of Romanticism (andvice versa), and indeed, Morton makes this case more fully in his recent monograph,Ecology without Nature.8 As should be clear, what Campbell and Bermingham say aboutthe consumption of consumer goods can also be said for the consumption of food: ithelps produce the subject. Yet historians of consumption have been oddly silent on thetopic of food, a point that Sidney Mintz attributes, with some disappointment, to food’s‘special status’ as an article of consumption: ‘Because the need for food is so fundamental,when it is satisfied widely such satisfaction can help to displace consuming desires toother spheres’ (‘The Changing Role of Food’ 263). This state of affairs is one that dietstudies challenges. Anya Taylor’s important study of alcohol in the Romantic periodshows the far-reaching literary and cultural significance of drunkenness (which quite anumber of Romantic writers indulged into their detriment). She uses the history of alco-hol consumption and representation as an occasion for drawing out the implications forsubjectivity. Coleridge’s alcoholism, for example, left him divided against himself, enjoy-ing the pleasures of drink as partaking of the pleasures of imagination, but understandingits ill effects for his own sense of agency. For Keats, intoxication becomes the ground fora full experience of sensation.

Timothy Morton’s The Poetics of Spice offers a reading of spice as a sign of the exoticupon which capitalism and consumerism were founded – indeed, as a kind of figure forhow capitalism works. He treats spice not just as a commodity with a significant history;he describes it as ‘ambient poetics’, a quality, ‘a discourse, not an object, naivelytransparent to itself’ (3). Spice signifies beyond itself to draw in notions of the exotic, theluxurious and the pleasurable – a kind of transumptive device that is simultaneouslymaterial and figurative. Morton contends that, by being at once a commodity, a speciesterm, and a form of currency, spice ‘can become a sign of signs, and in poetry it serves asa figure for poetic language itself’ (19). From a materialist perspective, spice operates likethe Marxian fetish, that which conceals its own conditions of production:

Spice, without doubt, is farmed, produced, subjected to all sorts of labour processes, whichdown the transnational chain are highly gendered and racialised, as well as falling under the signof class…However, as odiferous substances, spices appear to own their power or virtue to noth-ing but their own sweet or pungent selves (38).

What Morton’s examination of spice permits, then, is a reading of capitalism itself, andhis arresting conclusion, in line with Campbell’s to some degree, is that Romanticismwas not antagonistic to capitalism and the consumer society.

This is a significant departure from traditional understandings of Romanticism, whichtend to identify its anti-consumerist ideology with Wordsworth’s famous denigration of



the consumption of popular culture in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The era’s experienceof violent political eruptions and more gradual economic change, whose end points inmass urbanization and industrialization were only dimly guessed at, contributed to adynamic and passionate culture of critique. Our understanding of Romanticism hasundergone tremendous changes since the New Historicist interventions into the strictformalisms of New Criticism and deconstruction. Along with a fundamental questioningof ‘Romanticism’ as a category, critics now see the historical period as deeply and reflex-ively engaged in its own historical moment.9 Accordingly, much critical scholarship sincethe late 1970s has recovered the history in Romanticism, with the debate focusing on theextent to which the Romantics have evaded or engaged history, and the ultimate goal ademystification of Romanticism’s own self-presentation as a language of imagination,transcendence and idealism.10

While ‘history’, which in Romantics studies has often meant the French Revolutionand its aftermath, has performed this ideology critique to the field’s advantage, there is adanger that such aims will historicize food out of language. Thus, some of the morerecent interventions in the field of aesthetics keep materialism and figuration equally inthe foreground. The 18th century is known as the ‘century of taste’, hardly an arrestingterm because its gustatory dimensions have been erased from discourse – mystified, in thelanguage of ideology critique. Food anthropologists have noted the aesthetic dimensionsof concepts of gustatory taste, and have likened its terms to Neoclassical poetics (seeMennell). But literary scholars, too, have been late to pick up on these convergences.Such analyses have been begun by Denise Gigante, whose Taste: A Literary History revealsthe problematic of ‘taste’ as a physical sensation instantiated by the act of consuming, andas an attribute of the civilized self as it had been theorized by analytic philosophers oftaste. According to Gigante, in discussions of taste, the fact of appetite had to besuppressed. Milton’s Eve provided the template for the 18th century as an ‘aesthetic vir-tuoso, or connoisseur seeking pleasure through empirical experience of taste’ (17). If this‘connoisseur’ is marked by her gustatory enjoyment, how is it possible that Milton cameto be the standard of sublime language to philosophers of taste like Shaftesbury, Hume,Addison and Burke? As Gigante argues,

His epic representations of gustatory taste…describe a fictional world that anticipates and ren-ders visible the philosophical construction of taste as a symbolic economy of consumption (17).

Taste is something that marks one out as civilized; it is something that can be learned,refined. But as a component of corporeality, taste is haunted by brute (‘swinish’ inBurke’s terminology) consuming appetites. To taste, one has to consume, and thus thediscourse of taste is troubled by a corporeality which it must reject (and eject) but cannotlive without. Gigante reads these tensions in texts by Byron, Wordsworth, Charles Lamband Keats, and it seems likely that the insights of her work will continue to be productivesites of critical inquiry.

The possibilities of diet studies are about as endless as the number of food choices opento omnivorous humans. But although, for readers, it may be tempting to sit back andenjoy contemplating representations of food in books, the field has resisted lapsing into akind of non-rigorous pop food-writing mode, or a naı̈ve impulse to recover the quotid-ian past as represented in diet. As scholarly works within diet studies are showing, thereare large and important implications to be gleaned from the interdisciplinary study offood and diet, particularly in the Romantic period: implications for intellectual history,notions of the self, and the place of the human within capitalist processes. Diet studies,then, may be the field where pleasure and thinking meet.



Short Biography

Samantha Webb is Associate Professor of English at the University of Montevallo. Shehas published several articles dealing with the impact of the 1790 food shortages, specifi-cally Hannah More’s scarcity recipes in the Cheap Repository Tracts, and the politics ofbread in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s early work. She is currently working on a book-length project tracing the poetics of scarcity in Romantic literature and theory.

Notes

* Correspondence: University of Montevallo, Montevallo, AL 35115. Email: [email protected]

1 See Nick Groom’s contribution to Morton’s Cultures of Taste ⁄ Theories of Appetite.2 See Mennell for a comparison of British and French cookery. Rebecca Spang’s engaging history of the restaurantalso discusses the relationship between food consumption and culture.3 See Morton’s (2000a) edited collection, Radical Food.4 See especially Charlotte Sussman’s discussion of the role of women in the sugar boycotts. See also Morton, ThePoetics of Spice.5 See also Sherman and Wells.6 See Redcliffe Salaman’s magisterial social history of the potato. See also Catherine Gallagher, who draws herreading of the meaning of potatoes from his.7 Accounts of the origins of the consumer revolution have generally been responses to Thorstein Veblen, whoargued that the desire of lower classes to emulate the upper classes led to the increase in consumption. Campbellproposes instead a character-action approach in ‘Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption’.8 It should be noted that while this is the implication of Campbell’s argument, he explicitly stops short ofidentifying Romanticism with the consumer revolution. See ‘Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns ofConsumption’ (54).9 See especially: Chandler and Simpson.10 The critics whose work helped initiate the New Historicist mode in Romanticist criticism are Marjorie Levin-son, Jerome McGann and Alan Liu.

Works Cited

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Camporesi, Piero. Exotic Brew: The Art of Living in the Age of Enlightenment, translated by Christopher Woodall.Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.

Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. 3rd ed. Great Britain: Alcuin Publishers,1989.

——. ‘Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England: A Char-acter Action Approach.’ Consumption and the World of Goods. Eds. John Brewer and Roy Porter. New York:Routledge, 1993. 40–57.

Counihan, Carole and Penny Van Esterik, eds. Food and Culture: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1997.Chandler, James. England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 1998.Drummond, J. C. and Anne Wilbraham. The Englishman’s Food: A History of Five Centuries of English Diet. London:

Jonathan Cape, 1939.Gallagher, Catherine. ‘The Potato in the Materialist Imagination.’ Practicing New Historicism. Eds. Catherine Galla-

gher and Stephen Greenblatt. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000.Gigante, Denise, ed. Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy. New York: Routledge, 2005a.——. Taste: A Literary History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005b.Levinson, Marjorie. Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: An Investigation. New York: Cambridge University Press,

1986.Liu, Alan. Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988.McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. 2nd

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——. ‘The Changing Roles of Food in the Study of Consumption.’ Consumption and the World of Goods. Eds. JohnBrewer and Roy Porter. New York: Routledge, 1993. 261–73.

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——. Ecology with Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.——, ed. Radical Food: The Culture and Politics of Eating and Drinking, 1790–1820. 3 vols. New York: Routledge,

2000a.——. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World. New York: Cambridge University Press,

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Books, 1999.Salaman, Redcliffe. The History and Social Influence of the Potato. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.Simpson, David. Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement. New York: Methuen, 1987.Sherman, Sandra. Imagining Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism. Columbus, OH: Ohio University

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ford University Press, 2000.Taylor, Anya. Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink, 1780–1830. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.Thompson, E. P. ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd.’ Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular

Culture. New York: The New Press, 1993. 185–248.Wells, Roger. Wretched Face: Famine in Wartime England, 1793–1801. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads. William Wordsworth. Ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Oxford Univer-

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