In some ways, the discussion in this book has taken a fairly conservative line. Attempting to relate fictional representations of food and eating to pre-existing explanations of human behaviour – whether in terms of psychoanalytic theory, the history of manners or socio-political analyses – almost inescapably privileges continuity over change, even when context is taken into account. The more essentialist theories (such as the psychoanalytic) produce their own difficulties, not least the temptation to make sweeping generalisations about people's fundamental relationship to eating. But even the more dynamic theories invoked (Foucault's unstable power relations, for example) serve to endorse the idea of food as a language, eating an exchange.

A large part of the book's argument has been devoted to suggesting just this, for it seems to me most of the novelists considered use food and eating as communication in one way or another. Implicit throughout the discussion has been the suggestion that, when it comes to food, conventions, traditions and rituals, nostalgia and sheer human insecurity serve to reinforce existing patterns. By the same token, ‘aberrant’ appetites are measured against what is generally taken to be a social norm, whether they are predatory or insatiable or severely repressed. Both the food that is consumed and the behaviour surrounding its provision, preparation and eating, relate sufficiently to what is known, understood and expected for us to decode what is significant about them or about any and many deviations from the norm.