Mapping Appetite

Book excerpt: As recent years have witnessed a strong interest in the cultural representation of the culinary, ranging from analyses of food representation in film and literature to cultural readings of recipes, menus, national cuisines and celebrity chefs, the study of food narratives amidst contemporary consumer culture has become increasingly more important. This book seeks to respond to the challenge by presenting a series of case studies dealing with the representation of food and the culinary in a variety of cultural texts including post-colonial and popular fiction, women’s magazines and food writing. The contributors to the first part of the volume explore the various functions of food in post-colonial writing ranging from Salman Rushdie and Anita Desai to Zadie Smith and Maggie Gee in the context of globalization and multiculturalism. In the second part of the volume the focus is on two genres of popular fiction, the romantic novel and science fiction. While the romantic novels of Joanne Harris, for instance, link food and cooking with female empowerment, in science fiction food is connected with power and technology. The essays in the third part of the book explore the role of food in travel writing, women’s magazines and African American cookery books, showing how issues of gender, nation and race are present in food narratives.