Critical eating studies provides an important framework for understanding the construction of whiteness. This methodology allows literary critics to trace the material history of food, its marketing as well as its production, and the metaphorical valence of the body politic. Because of the tense relationship between white racial ideals and bodily pleasure, US literature often juxtaposes purity politics with the desirous, hungering body. This chapter gives an overview of major scholars at the intersection of food, literature, and race (Doris Witt, Anita Mannur, Kyla Wazana Tompkins) as well as readings of works by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Vladimir Nabokov that feature whiteness as an ideal impossible to embody and food as a challenge to its ineffability. Contemporary foodie culture reveals the appropriative impulses of whiteness, while satires by Ben Lerner and Jordan Peele perhaps show the way to bite back against the reign of biopolitical purity.

This essay follows scenes of threatened sexual violence in three canonical novels by women, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), Willa Cather’s My Àntonia (1918), and Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). By focusing on these scenes in isolation, I draw out their affective descriptions and resist the resolution of plot in an attempt to evince modern literature’s capacity to represent violence against women and to rupture the normalization of rape culture. In these scenes, Wharton, Cather, and Hurston use narrative innovation to dramatize these threats: Wharton using long, elliptical sentences to signal both Lily’s fear and her denial; Cather placing Jim Burden in the victim’s place, thereby reminding us not only of the vulnerability of women but also of the sexual abuse of boys by older men; Hurston using animal possession as a figure for Tea Cake’s increasingly jealous and violent attitude.

Beginning with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and ending with Levi Pinfold’s Greenling (2015), this chapter contends that children’s literature provides an imaginative map for navigating the global industrial food system, superimposed on colonial circuits of yore. Several narrative dynamics dramatize the appetite and vulnerability of the child’s body. For example, the racialized child is the object of predation in late nineteenth-century US fiction, and then Harlem Renaissance literature repurposes this trope to cherish the black child. In The Secret Garden (1911) and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), white English children demonstrate and defend their virtue with hearty English repasts. In the postwar period, Green Eggs and Ham (1960) and Where the Wild Things Are (1963) imagine eating as an expression of childhood agency and rebellion. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, picture books reveal the enmeshment of the human and the nonhuman through the ecological intimacies of eating.