A feast for the eyes and a taste for fiction: the literature of food

Gastronomy can capture the imagination in times of revolution or indeed in times of severe hunger. The third biennial Dublin Gastronomy Symposium will take place in DIT Cathal Brugha Street on May 31st and June 1st around the theme of revolution. The most downloaded paper from the archives of the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium to date is Michael Flanagan’s Cowpie, Gruel and Midnight Feasts: The Representation of Food in Popular Children’s Literature from the inaugural event in 2012. This reflects the global interest in food and literature and a certain generation’s nostalgia for Enid Blyton’s tales of “lashings of ginger beer”.Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to Email App

If food is fundamental to life and a substance upon which civilisations and cultures have built themselves, then it is also fundamental to the literary imagination. Whether in memoir, fiction or poetry, writers continually hark back to childhood experiences of food, even when the intended audience is adults rather than children, as with Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

Read original article at irishtimes.com