ABSTRACT
In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding – that bedrock of Enlightenment thought – John Locke illustrates empiricism with an unlikely example: the pineapple, for only direct experience can give one “the true Idea of the Relish of that celebrated delicious Fruit” (1710, 2.28). In truth, many of the century’s most influential texts have intimate connections to food. Robinson Crusoe’s hard-won bread, cultivated from “perfect green Barley of the same Kind as our European, nay, as our English Barley”, counterpoints the “monstrous appetites” of native cannibals (Defoe [1719] 2007, 67; Campe 1789, 129). Voltaire’s Candide traces the limits of thinking as it embraces the virtues of eating, pushing away philosophy to reach for “candied citron peel, oranges, lemons, limes, pineapples and pistachios” ([1759] 2005, 92). Cultural history has begun to align the Enlightenment appetite for new ideas with the Enlightment appetite for new tastes. Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power (1986), now a food studies classic, demonstrates how the eighteenth-century sugar trade ushered the West into modernity. In Fruits of Empire, James Walvin traces how a “British addiction to key tropical staples”, among them tea and tobacco, “changed forever the domestic face of Britain” as it transformed the world (1997, x and xi). And recent work by Markman Ellis – most notably, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History (2004) – elaborates and complicates the Habermasian link between the Enlightenment coffee-house and the emergence of a public sphere. Fewer scholars, however, have related food to the rise of new genres in the period – most notably, the novel, perhaps the century’s most enduring contribution to literature.
