The Importance of Food and Mealtime in Stories

     This was an essay for American Lit, I was going to base it on the use of weaving faith and superstition throughout the plotline of several novels, but realized at the last minute that there was no way I could do that effectively. So at the last minute I changed the topic to the use of food and mealtimes throughout novels, which Dr. Mackie said was a really good topic, but the essay needed a lot of work. I knew that, but a poorly-written essay is better than one turned in past deadline. It got a 79, which is higher than I would have given it, but that just barely kept me from getting an A in that class(I had an average of 88.9). Oh, well.

     In literature, often overlooked are minor details of daily living, if they are not relevant to the plot in some way. One of these aspects is mealtime; though the presence of food in general often serves as the setting for an important scene and/or emotional turnaround, or where important background exposition is revealed. I will try to showcase how food and mealtimes are important in novels.

     Through her novels, mostly situated within the small Appalachian village of Mitford, North Carolina, Jan Karon writes in a very down-to-earth, everyday manner. Characters do laundry and go grocery shopping and work through chores on Saturday; they work crossword puzzles and pray and read the local newspaper. Most of all, they eat. And many cook. In her anthology collection/scrapbook The Mitford Bedside Companion, Karon responds to numerous reader fan mail commenting on all the food in the books(which includes everything from apples, buttermilk biscuits, and Sara Lee pies to bouillabaisse, gizzards and lethal orange marmalade cake). She says on page 49,

“Why is there so much food in the Mitford books? First, food is a great way of communicating. When I write about Dooley loving fried baloney sandwiches, you can connect with that. When I write about Puny baking cornbread and Louella frying chicken, most of you can relate to that. Food is something we can all understand; it’s a common language.”

     A little farther down the same page Karon explains that besides that, she had left a successful advertising job to launch her writing career, and the reason the first book was filled with food references was “largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.”

      When hungry, it can be difficult to think properly, which can lead to poor decision making. The most obvious example of this is the biblical story where Esau traded his birthright to his younger brother Jacob as payment for a bowl of lentil stew (Genesis 25:29-34). Drinking alcoholic beverages throughout history has been seen as a social pastime, depicted in many literature and films. The impending decision about Jig getting an abortion in Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” is discussed over beers, while she proclaims that everything in life tastes like licorice. “Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.” Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises is filled with characters who exist in an alcohol-induced fog of addiction, living out Jig’s thought that “That’s all we do, isn’t it – look at things and try new drinks?” The characters of Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey Into Night would probably agree; as Mary says of addictions in Act Three, “It kills the pain. You go back until at last you’re beyond its reach.”

     Though not using drink as a means of escape, Nick Carroway of The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is perhaps running away from the memories of that New York summer by locking the experience into printed form. Jay Gatsby built up his ridiculous façade to disguise his anguish over Daisy’s marriage to Tom, but the hullabaloo camouflaged well the fact that “he was just the proprietor of an elaborate road-house next door” (64). Gatsby uses mealtime and alcohol memorably; most of the first chapter introduces us to the main characters through an extremely uncomfortable dinner party (6-17). The second chapter is primarily concerned with the bizarre evening at Tom and Myrtle’s trysting place, which Nick cannot remember too well due to being drunk most of the night (24-37). It is over a meal at a fancy New York restaurant where the shadowy side of Gatsby’s business dealings is briefly revealed to the reader (69-73). Everyone is partially drunk that day in August when Myrtle Wilson is run over (114-141), and then in the aftermath that night Tom and Daisy “conspire together”, in Nick’s words, over cold fried chicken and ale (145).    

     But more often the sensory experience of consuming certain foods lends itself well to forming associations with experiences involving that food; which is what John Tobias’ poem with the extremely long title “Reflections on the Gift of a Watermelon Pickle Received From a Friend Called Felicity” is about. As Tobias says:

“…The summer which maybe never was

Has been captured and preserved.

And when we unscrew the lid

And slice off a piece

And let it linger on our tongue

Unicorns become possible again.”

     Watermelons ruled that summer when “the purpose of knees was to be skinned”; according to the poem, and E.B. White picks up on this theme quite a bit in Charlotte’s Web, from the opening chapter describing the momentous breakfast one spring morning in the Arable kitchen (7-13) to the listing of all the edible things summer brings (50-51) to the old sheep’s recitation of the paradise of food Templeton will find at the county fair (130-131). Listing all the places food drives the story forward would be citing almost the entire book.

In another novel written for juvenile readers, S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, it’s while Ponyboy and Cherry are getting popcorn and Cokes at the movie theater where they discuss the differences and similarities between the Greasers and the Socs, exposing each to the view that those “on the wrong side of the tracks” might not be so terrible after all (38-43). Coca-Cola realized that trendy music could help marketers target the young demographic which Ponyboy, Cherry and Hinton all fell into, using widespread TV and radio advertisements starring the likes of Ray Charles, Libby H. O’Connell writes in her history of The American Plate (238). And while popcorn had a long tradition of being an American snack food, O’Connell states that its’ big break came from the invention of the electric corn popper in 1925, which was soon picked up widely by movie theaters, providing an affordable draw during the Great Depression and then providing servicemen a taste of home on military bases during World War II (261).

     Besides providing sustaining energy, meals can also be, in the formal definition of UCLA scholars Elinor Ochs and Merov Shohet in their journal article “The Cultural Structuring of Mealtime Socialization”, “cultural sites where members of different generations and genders come to learn, reinforce, undermine, or transform each other’s ways of acting, thinking and feeling in the world.”

     That transformation of acting and thinking which can occur over shared meals is part of what makes Celie’s and Squeak’s revolt during a family meal even more shocking in Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (198-204). Harmony is just somewhat expected during mealtimes, and so it’s doubly astonishing when that social civility is snapped. At the book’s close, a barbecue is one of the staples of the family reunion, thus reestablishing the sometime-frayed communication channels between former partners, extended family and parents and children (287-288).

     In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, the girls’ Christmas is made immeasurably brighter by Mr. Edwards’ visit bearing gifts from Santa Claus for Mary and Laura. These presents include a tin cup, a peppermint stick, a cake made of white sugar and a penny for each of them. And for the whole family, there are sweet potatoes to go with the Christmas turkey (248-252). Moving ahead about six years and changing the scenery from the Kansas prairie to the South Dakota prairie, the Ingalls’ Christmas with their friends the Boasts is brightened by the meal of roasted rabbit, dried apple pie and popcorn (198-200).

     And sometimes the conversation over meals can reveal insights or revelations which would have no other outlet. In a place as ultra-conservative as Philip Gulley’s Harmony, Indiana – which is anything but harmonious – the conversation in the Coffee Cup restaurant during a slow winter month revolves around the first bikini ever sold at the Five and Dime (Life Goes On 193-194). The townspeople can be unlovable curmudgeons who hate everything to the point where the best thing anyone can say at the funeral is “He did like Cheetos” (Signs and Wonders 146). But it in this town, over a piece of terrible-tasting leftover pot roast, that a father accepts that his son is gay (Signs 185-186). 

     Going back to Karon’s North Carolina in her first book, At Home in Mitford, the town’s favorite clergymember Father Tim Kavanagh meets his pretty next-door neighbor Cynthia Coppersmith the children’s book author/illustrator when she knocks on his door in a rainstorm to borrow a cup of sugar for a cake; they end up devouring a rack of barbecued ribs he had just made (At Home 142-144). From that first interaction, a friendship blossoms which eventually leads to their marriage. There are times when the strain of preaching gets to be too much, so those are where Father Tim can take a break and go visit the cabin of his friend Homeless Hobbes for encouragement and a bowl of stew in equal measure (At Home 236-240).

Edgar Guest begins his poem “The Perfect Dinner Table” by pointing out that the tablecloth is slightly dirty from little hands, the food is not fancy, and it is only him, his wife and their children at the table (Book of Virtues 241-242). The next two stanzas describe the excited chattering of the kids describing their day and the minor impolitenesses of putting elbows on the table or talking with one’s mouth full. It is a perfect example of the domestic focus and warm tone which so often comes through in Guest’s poetry. But the final stanza closes it out thusly:

“At many a table I have been

Where wealth and luxury were seen,

And I have dined in halls of pride

Where all the guests were dignified;

But when it comes to pleasure rare

The perfect dinner table’s where

No stranger’s face is ever known;

The dinner hour we spend alone,

When little girl and little lad

Run riot telling things to Dad.”

     That is idealistic, but if your dreams are not slightly out of reach, what would be the point of aiming at them? Most dinnertimes do not follow such a placid, well-trodden path – there will of course be battles over finishing the peas or corn - but that makes the times when it does happen shine brighter. Throughout this essay I tried to showcase instances of the ordinary routine affecting the extraordinary events of plotting; this does not the quality of a Red Lobster meal, instead seeming more of a Hamburger Helper type of paper. 

Works Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.

Guest, Edgar. “The Perfect Dinner Table”. 1916. The Book of Virtues. Ed. William J. Bennett. New York: Touchstone, 1993. Print.

Gulley, Philip. Life Goes On. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004. Print.

-----------------. Signs and Wonders. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants”. 1927. PDF file, Massey University. Web. 11 November 2015.

Hinton, S.E. The Outsiders. 1967. New York: Viking, 2007. Print.

Karon, Jan. At Home in Mitford. New York: Penguin, 1994. Print.

---------------. The Mitford Bedside Companion. Ed. Brenda Furman. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.

Ochs, Elinor and Merov Shohet. “The Cultural Structuring of Mealtime Socialization”. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. Wiley Periodicals. Spring 2006. Web. 11 November 2015.

O’Connell, Libby H. The American Plate: A Culinary History in 100 Bites. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2014. Print.

O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey Into Night. 1956. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. D. Ed. Nina Bayim and Robert S. Levine. 402-480. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2012. Print.

Tobias, John. “Reflections on the Gift of a Watermelon Pickle Received From a Friend Called Felicity”. 1963. PDF file, University of Florida. Web. 11 November 2015.

White, E.B. Charlotte’s Web. 1952. New York: Dell Publishing, 1972. Print.

Wilder, Laura Ingalls. By the Shores of Silver Lake. 1939. New York: Scholastic, 1953. Print.

-------------------------. Little House on the Prairie.1935. New York: Scholastic, 1953. Print.