Reading is Eating

Growing up, my favorite place to read was the kitchen table. Few habits feel so decadent to this day. Sitting there, beloved novel in one hand, twirled forkful of spaghetti in the other, I almost missed my lips sometimes as I read and ate. I was too busy marveling at my fictive heroine’s latest caper or licking my lips at whatever *she* was eating or drinking. (Surely it tasted better than whatever was on my plate.)

But it wasn’t just her cheese-stuffed mushroom cap or Singapore Sling I would hanker after — rather, it was the things these foods represented: her character, her flair, her life.

I credit my childhood habit of reading while eating with imprinting on me from the beginning that the two acts are helplessly intertwined. Both reading and eating are nourishing, satisfying, even sustaining. Both can serve as vehicles of pleasure, and also escape. And, most interestingly, both are character defining.

For, if we are what we eat, then so, too, must our favorite novels’ characters be defined by those meals which they linger over and consume. Yet, these protagonists and ingénues have not plucked their food out of thin air, nor have they chosen it for themselves off an elegant oversized menu or crowded supermarket shelf. No, every bite of food to pass through an imagined character’s lips has been selected carefully by his or her author.

Okay. But shouldn’t we ask why? What do the breakfasts, brunches, dinners, late night snacks, the lovingly prepared family feasts and cobbled together leftovers that appear in our favorite novels and poems reflect or reveal about the characters who make and eat them? Why do these figures nibble on certain morsels and not others, and how do their author-bequeathed tastes help us to better understand who they are in their fictive worlds?

Chew on that.