Eating Like a Local

Both Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein looked to terroir, the taste of place, to facilitate their transplantation to Europe as expatriate intellectuals. They associate global cosmopolitanism with Jewishness, for good and for ill, and they connect regionalism to race through figures like the Breton, the Basque, and the Abruzzian whose deep roots complicate national mythologies and inspire desire and envy in the deracinated American. By gleaning and mushroom hunting, Stein creates new connections to the terrain and embraces queer pleasures and Jewish embodiment. Drinking and eating with local men who demonstrate both culinary and genealogical belonging lead Hemingway heroes to long for the same connection to home and to recognize their own alienation.

Genius in the Raw

In his popular science fiction serial Black Empire, published pseudonymously in the Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1938, the satirist George Schuyler associates the light-skinned love interest with hydroponic produce and science kitchens. The tragic mulatta, an icon of nineteenth-century fiction, becomes in twentieth-century fiction a racial representative pointing the way to a hybrid future. However, the raw foods diet also generates a paradox: the modern mulatta is both pure and primitive, abnegating and appetitive; Schuyler’s fiction and his mixed-race daughter Philippa’s childhood celebrity both reveal a discomfort with women’s bodies and desires that might exceed the bounds of rational control.

Introduction

In The Great Gatsby (1925), Nick Carraway gazes upon the New York City skyline: Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty of the world....

The Monstropolous Beast

In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and The Living Is Easy (1948), Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West use the backdrop of agribusiness and fruit imports respectively to dramatize the precarity of black bodies within global capitalism. Their novels feature black male characters who have come to believe in the opportunities the food industry extends them, only to be sorely disappointed and in some cases utterly destroyed. In this way, Hurston and West suggest the racist limits of the category of Man. At the same time that they debunk this ideal subject, Hurston and West use figurative language to connect black bodies with animals and fruit. As scholars of critical race studies have shown, animacy hierarchies, the ranking of bodies according to their relative liveness, frequently subtend pejorative forms of racialization. Instead, Hurston and West overturn these hierarchies, pursue ecological enmeshment, and celebrate black women, queerness, and corporeality.

“A Purple Fluid, Carbon-Charged”

Jean Toomer worked as a soda jerk in high school over his grandmother’s objections and found inspiration in the soda fountain. Through it, he derived a metaphorical alternative to the one-drop rule, imagining instead essences that effervesced past the skin and colors that exceeded the monochromatic division of black and white. In Toomer’s masterpiece of experimental modernism, Cane (1923), the trope of liquid sugar provides a model for formal experimentation and fluid identities. Toomer follows this trope from cane syrup to soda pop, from copper boiling pots to Chero-Cola advertisements. In the last section of Cane, Toomer imagines a white man transformed into “a purple fluid, carbon-charged,” an image that he uses to rebuke the segregated culture of the urban North.

“A Beaker Full of the Warm South”

According to early-twentieth-century raciologists, the Mediterranean race, which could be found all over Europe, especially in the South, had disturbing ties to Africa and Asia and, moreover, with their vitality and appeal, could win over white women and dilute Nordic bloodlines. In their fiction, the Fitzgeralds depict the Mediterranean as a fluid site of intermixture. For F. Scott Fitzgerald, the networks that connect regional Souths to global Souths compromise the purity of the white woman and addict the white man to substances that sap his vitality. For Zelda Fitzgerald, syrupy, soggy southern climes and dishes provide a medium for white women to reject purity in favor of the stickiness that connects them to abject racialized bodies and reject mind–body dualism.