Tenth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Henry David Thoreau named the production of food simply our “grossest groceries.” This is an important time to consider food in terms of culture and consumption. The foods people eat and the stories we tell each other are two of the most fundamental components of human civilization, perhaps more significant now in terms of the effects of environmental changes and globalization as it has ever been. The French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously wrote, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” Extending this, farming novels tell us what we prepare, produce, and consume, through agriculture and culture. Agriculture has been connected to literature since antiquity. Some examples of narratives of agriculture throughout history and the globe include Virgil’s Georgics, the works of Willa Cather and Wendell Berry in the United States, Stella Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm and James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small in Britain, and world literature like Charles Massy’s Call of the Reed Warbler (Australia) and Héctor Abad’s The Farm (Colombia). In each case, the language and the land are deeply connected. In this paper, I discuss this connection between stories of farming and the rural life as they are used to describe and define place, authenticity, and sustainability.