Food in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: Eating as Narrative by Kim Salmons (review)

Scholarly studies of food in British modernist texts can often salivate over their subjects. Readers have recreated the boeuf en daube at the center of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, or Ford Madox Ford’s recipe for bouillabaisse in Provence. Even if Leopold Bloom’s breakfast of kidneys are not to our taste, we’re happy for him and appreciate the gusto he brings to his meal.

Kim Salmons sets herself a less appetizing project with Food in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: Eating as Narrative. Instead of French haute cuisine, or local comfort foods, Conrad’s characters consume rotten tinned meat, hippo, and, most disturbingly, human flesh in “Falk.” Food in Conrad is rarely a signifier of culinary beauty or refined taste; rather, it serves as a vehicle for two of his main themes, humans’ elementary struggles against death, and the empires of Europe.

Salmons, who has also written a companion piece, Food in the Novels of Thomas Hardy: Production and Consumption (Palgrave 2017), looks to a few texts where she finds food most prominent: Almayer’s Folly, Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, and of course “Falk.” The colonial texts, Salmons argues, depict “the ideological environment of an era when food becomes a politically encrypted commodity within a colonial and capitalist market” (4). In Conrad’s works, the empire and its trade networks manifest in the tinned food that sailors eat, the food commodities being produced in the colonies for the British home market, and the changes to local colonial cuisine due to imperial pressures, as in Heart of Darkness, where the native, nourishing millet traditionally cultivated in West Africa has been “destroyed and replaced with maize which could be exported to Europe to provide a cheap means of cereal for the consumer” (33).

The study opens with an historical overview of the role that food played in the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Victorian population explosion in cities meant England would forever after rely on foreign food imports (a fact with renewed and urgent relevance via Brexit). While a painting by Constable attempts to position dairy farming as central to English life, by 1900, 87% of butter was imported (22). Such demographic shifts put pressure on imperial trade networks to supply adequate food for the home market, raising concerns about food safety (much meat was imported from Upton Sinclair’s Chicago), and also the political implications of some commodities: in the early nineteenth century, sugarcane had already become a contested symbol of plantation slave labor (28). Such an historical context adds a layer of meaning to the ending of “An Outpost of Progress,” when the two protagonists die in a fight over sugar (29). Inevitably, colonial food networks altered English cuisine. Examples abound, but Salmons points out the prominent place of curry and rice in Jessie Conrad’s A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House (1923), which “represent[s] the swift appropriation of a colonial dish into the English diet in the same way that England appropriated people, customs and their land” (32).

The first words of Conrad’s first novel are “Kaspar! Makan!”, a call to dinner to Almayer using the Malay word for “eat.” Salmons notes how this sentence begins a career-long process of using food to think through issues of empire, and her first two chapters on Conrad’s texts investigate how the attempts by European powers to distinguish themselves from their colonies inevitably falter: “The international representation of food in Conrad’s novels erodes the division between East and West” (12). For as Almayer is called to dinner, he dreams of meals he had back in Amsterdam, failing to notice the richness of the local cuisine. Nina, however, welcomes the meal of rice, an act that “confuses the distinction between what is savage and what is civilized” (54). By the novel’s conclusion, “Rice represents life, daily routine, wealth...