My guts they yawl, crawl, and all my belly rumbleth

HODGE: Daintrels, Diccon? Gog’s soul, man, save this piece of dry horse-bread,
Cha’ bit no bit this livelong day, no crumb come in my head.
My guts they yawl, crawl, and all my belly rumbleth,
The puddings cannot lie still, each one over other tumbleth.
By gog’s heart, cham so vexed, an in my belly penned,
Chwould one piece were at the spitalhouse, another at castle’s end! (Gammer Gurton’s Needle II.i.17-22)

Why food now? Because it's vital. What we put into our bodies is as significant to the formation of identity as are the technologies of gender, race, nation, class, sexual orientation. Food constitutes our bodies; food provides texture for life; food enriches life with meaning. We see this everywhere food is deployed as metaphor in literature.

The past decade has seen plenty of interesting work in this nascent field as it relates to early modern studies (Timothy Morton, Ken Albala, Robert Appelbaum, Julian Yates, Bruce Boehrer, to name a few; seminal works from scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum have also recently attracted new attention). But by and large food has escaped sustained critical attention. How can this be given how essential food is to the structure of daily experience? My initial hypothesis (one that I am sure I will be revising many times through the lifespan of this blog and my dissertation) is that contemporary society has made food too ordinary. As if it is something that magically materializes ex nihilo in our fridges or in the freezer aisles at the supermarket. As we become increasingly distanced from the processes of food production and as food becomes increasingly plentiful, we de-vitalize and disenchant food.

The gourmand James Beard claimed that “Food is our common ground, a universal experience.” Following Beard, the recent popularization of farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture, and food co-operatives speaks to the ongoing centrality of food as a method of defining and forming community. Against this over-idealization of food, however, I will attempt to trace in this blog an examinationn of the alienating and exclusionary processes of food production in late medieval and early modern foodways. I hope to use this blog as a forum for exploring ideas about how late medieval and early modern literature conceptualized foodways and foodsheds.

By developing a literary history of local English foodways, I seek to show that the supposed “common ground” of food habits conceals a series of oppositional binaries between producer and consumer, urban and rural, and, perhaps most starkly, between human and animal. Just as enclosures demarcate boundaries between human and animal, we might also remember that food is necessarily place-based, creating cuisines that define and divide regions, ethnicities, and nationalities. A whole terroir of signification lies beneath cultural ideas and representations of food.

Recent efforts in critical food studies identify culinary traditions as positive unifiers of culture and community. For food historians and anthropologists, culinary habits constitute a text signifying the dietary and ethical values of a culture. For example, the dietaries analyzed by Ken Albala in his recent book, Eating Right in the Renaissance (UC Press, 2002), speak vividly about the aspirational goals of nutritional science and the developing practices of healthy eating.

These dietaries, however, only refer to food on the dining room table, forgetting the animals, marketplaces, and labor that precede the finished product. Early modern dietaries direct their audiences to whole health by promoting an idea of food, food as an abstraction. The realm of literature, drama, and poetry provides an alternate perspective on food as a site of conflict, as the difference between haves and have nots, between the wheat and the chaff, between cow and beef, sheep and mutton. As the character Hodge says in the Tudor comedy Gammer Gurton’s Needle, the deep-seated class difference in the cultures of food are loudly proclaimed in between the desperations of the spitalhouse and the aspirations of the castle.

Investigations into food and rural agricultural economies in the late medieval and early modern period frequently reveal conflated images of animals and underclass labor. For example, Hodge and Gyb the Cat must compete for the same meal. Food, then, is not a universal human experience, but common to all animals. The permeability of the human/animal divide becomes apparent in the portrayals of provincial labor and domesticated animals in comedic drama. Food economies depend upon a naturalization of this labor, creating an unstable and uncomfortable relationship of human and animal that is buried by ideology.

An investigation into the literary history of early modern foodways will prove wide-ranging. It will take us from the deer parks of The Merry Wives of Windsor, the pastures of English Shepherds' Plays, the markets of Bartholomew Fair, and elsewhere. My hope is that this project will prove surprising - for both you and me. Like Hodge, my guts yawl, crawl, and all my belly rumbleth in anticipation of the table we are setting on this blog.

Welcome Post

Welcome to the Early Modern Food Network, a blog dedicated to the study of food, diet, and theories of consumption from roughly 1500 to 1800. For more information on who we are, what we do, and what extras this blog has to offer, check out our "About" page.

We warmly encourage you to feast your eyes upon the generous offerings of our "blog table," and strongly invite students and scholars of Early Modern food to consider submitting to be a guest contributor to our weekly reflections, discoveries, reviews, and inquiries on this fascinating area of focus.