by Dish Staff
In a review of Sandra Gilbert’s The Culinary Imagination, Bee Wilson traces the history of fictional food:
In a chapter on food in children’s fiction, Gilbert suggests that food fantasies originate in children’s dreams of never-ending bounty. “Lollipop trees and gingerbread houses. Bottles of cherry-tarts mingled with custard, roast turkey, toffee and other goodies. Spoonfuls of sugar.” For most of history, while communities lived in constant fear of the next famine, the culinary imagination was dominated by Rabelaisian excess. In children’s books, we are all still ravenous. We share the hunger of Laura Ingalls Wilder for maple sugar and candy canes. In real life, sugar is now almost as freely available as the gingerbread on the cottage in “Hansel and Gretel,” yet in our bedtime stories it remains a precious commodity. The sweets in the Harry Potter series, whose release coincided with an inexorable rise in childhood obesity, are no less lavish and no less lusted over than those in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”
Wilson continues, “The nonfiction food writing now aimed at adults contains somewhat different fantasies”:
Gilbert writes of the “postmodern pastorals,” which, rather than inviting us to indulge in rivers of chocolate, create a fantasy of simple self-sufficiency wherein one never eats anything one hasn’t grown or at least cooked oneself, in an imagined recreation of the lifestyle of great-grandmothers. Now the dream is not of plenty but of scarcity: the make-believe idea that we are still governed by the constraints of the seasons. These utopias allow us to pretend that peaches in summer or squash in the fall still have the same force they once did. What is forgotten, Gilbert suggests, is the uncomfortable fact that many peasant great-grandmothers ate “a monotonous and often dangerous diet.”
The Dish 