Eating Words and Worlds: Food Writing, Othering, and the Aftertaste of Power Open Access
Ferguson, Fiona (Spring 2026)
Abstract
Abstract
Eating Words and Worlds: Food Writing, Othering, and the Aftertaste of Power
By Fiona Ferguson
The genre of food writing persists because eating is among the most universal human practices, and because that routine conceals extraordinary complexity. It is a form that touches postcolonial studies, the body in literature, media studies, material history, ecocriticism, and contemporary food culture—though not via abstraction, but beginning with appetite, hunger, and taste. The act of cooking and eating is frequently considered from a theoretical and anthropological perspective, but the proliferation of food writing and its relation to the larger scales of world literature is underexamined. By drawing together the ‘zoom out’ of world literature, privileging distant reading, systems, and patterns, to the inward pull of food writing, to the mouth, the stomach, and the memory, this thesis asks: How does food writing function as a site of world-making—one that exposes, complicates, and sometimes resists the power structures embedded in world literature’s modes of circulation and translation?
For this literary research, I draw on three primary books centering not only food, but the contexts in which food is rooted. This thesis proceeds by moving across scales. It begins within the internal culinary politics of the United States, then expands outward to questions of global encounter, translation, and representation. The first chapter situates food writing within American racial and cultural formations, engaging with race, labor, and national myth to argue that food writing renegotiates the “world” of the United States from within. The second chapter leaves the American context to examine global encounters through the multimodal figure of Anthony Bourdain, considering how multicultural food-centered media navigates Othering, privilege, and ethics of consumption. The final chapter expands further, turning to textual forms that foreground translation, including the political and historically-centered recipes published by Michael Shaikh. Across these chapters, I argue that food writing belongs within the canon of world literature because it exposes, complicates, and resists the contexts food is enmeshed in. It reorganizes how we inhabit the world, one bite and one sentence at a time.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction: Beginning with Hunger...1
Why Food Writing?...4
Structure of the Project...8
Chapter One: Worlding Through Food...11
The Old South and Its Food: A Tale of Discomfort...14
Chapter Two: The Discontents of the Gastronomic Gaze...23
Eating the Other...25
Food Adventuring and the Rhetoric of Conquest...27
A Cook's Tour: The Quest Narrative on Shaky Ground...30
Counter-Worlding: Bourdain's Field Notes...36
Chapter Three: Counter-Worlding and the Violence Against Food...43
Cuisine Under Occupation...47
Counter-Worlding and Change...54
Conclusion...58
Where Food Writing Goes Next...59
Bibliography...63
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