Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century by Kyla Wazana Tompkins (review)

“Critical eating studies” is the framework proposed by Kyla Wazana Tompkins for the interdisciplinary cultural analysis she undertakes in this provocative book. Examining domestic architecture, novels, dietetic tracts, and color advertisements, Tompkins argues that beliefs and practices related to food and its consumption were instrumental in creating ideas about self and nation in 19th- and early 20th-century America. Eat the right foods, become the right kind of citizen is the basic idea she traces in assessing what she calls “the biopolitical life of the nation” (185). It is, as she points out, an idea that is still with us, as “like today’s locavores and food reformers, reform dietetics invited consumers to direct their desire towards virtuous objects, to substitute a hypervigilant digestive life for critical engagement with political and economic processes” (11). The book’s “overarching metaphor” (116) is that of indigestion, as white Americans struggled with notions of how non-whites might be devoured, spit out, badly digested, ejected, or—in a few instances—comfortably consumed with pleasure. One of the book’s strong points is that the notion of non-white “other” is not reserved for Africans or even Asians. Students of American culture know that until well into the 20th century, groups that today would be called cultures or ethnicities (e.g., the Irish or Jews or Teutons) were seen as distinct races, something that makes interesting appearances in the writings of anxious whites and the colorful advertisements of aggressive marketers.

The first chapter uses short works by Hawthorne and Melville to explore distress about kitchens and the people who inhabit them. Colonial homes had open hearths, and kitchens were not discrete areas. With the advent of the stove, concurrent with the middle-class ideal of separate spheres, came a world in which poorer “others” became the ones responsible for much food preparation and the talk that went with it. The result was partially nostalgia and partially anxiety, both of which show up in literature. The mouth issues gossip and orders; it also ingests food. As Tompkins summarizes, “orality gives the cook her access to power […]; while her mouth may be subject to middle-class discipline, she has access to her employers’ mouths as well. In fact, the cook’s entire worth hinges on her mouth: it metonymizes her essential value as a cook” (49).

Sylvester Graham is the star of the second chapter, in which the wholesomeness of chemical-free, whole grain bread is positioned as instrumental to the republican project. Improper eating is, according to Graham, linked to “sensualism” and the sort of spicy foods native to “foreign” lands. Wheat, originally imported by Columbus and then by virtually all colonists, was the gold standard of indigenous wholesomeness, so eating it meant ingesting Americanness to produce more of the same. In the book’s central chapter, The House of the Seven Gables and Uncle Tom’s Cabin are case studies of literature that use “the image of the black body, metaphorized as food, in conjunction with the project of construing—and at times critiquing—the idea of whiteness” (91). Hawthorne’s Jim Crow cookie is part of a spinster’s move into modernity via supporting herself with a bakery; the Irish child who buys the first cookie, though, is figured as a cannibal. Simon Legree’s filthy plantation offers the idea “that slavery as a fundamental injustice gets stuck inside the body politic, rendering it ill with symptoms that were all too familiar in antebellum America, afflicted as it so often was with typhus, diphtheria, and epidemic outbreaks of cholera” (117). In the fourth chapter, Louisa May Alcott’s novels Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom figure health in terms of a plain diet favoring oat bread and fresh milk. But Tompkins complicates that picture by pointing out that the books’ wealthy heroine is heir to a fortune built on New England’s...