Lucky Choatmeal

For breakfast the past couple of days: oatmeal mixed with Lucky Charms. Or, Lucky Choatmeal. The name's pretty appropriate as it indicates my feelings toward the dish as well as what it looks like. Yet it's actually surprisingly tasty and relatively filling.

On the way to and from class, I was thinking about how Shakespeare writes about food. There is the famous banquet scene in Macbeth; in Pericles, Pericles delivers grain to the citizens of a starving city; and in The Tempest, an elaborate banquet is laid out for ship-wrecked and hungry characters, but it cruelly disappears when they try to eat from it. Also, Caliban itemizes the produce of the mysterious island. Another character, Gonzalo, imagines governing a commonwealth in which all resources are held in common and are available without undue hardship: "All things in common nature should produce / Without sweat or endeavour." According to Gonzalo, riches and poverty will no longer exist. He doesn't mention explicitly hunger, though.

Sometimes Shakespeare uses food figuratively. The opening lines of Twelfth Night, for instance, are: "If music be the food of love, play on, / Give me excess of it." In Coriolanus, battles are depicted as crude feasts, and Coriolanus (a heroic soldier) is depicted as a voracious eater of men. Recently, I heard a paper in which metaphors derived from sixteenth-century cooking techniques appeared with some regularity in Shakespeare's history plays.

In The Taming of the Shrew, Petruccio starves Kate, his newly-wed wife, until she agrees to submit to his authority. In one scene, Petruccio throws away their meal, falsely claiming that the meat was burned. In another scene, Kate begs a servant for some food, and the servant teases her by offering her unpalatable dishes, which Kate begs him to bring. Yet he refuses. Only when Kate finally obeys him does Petruccio permit them to travel to Kate's father's house for a feast.

Now that I think of it, Shakespeare repeatedly treats food in political terms. Kate is "tamed" in part by Petruccio's withholding of food, and, the disappearing feast in The Tempest functions partly as Prospero's revenge for his loss of political power and partly as one of his maneuvers to reclaim it.

A relationship between food and politics is explicit at the beginning of Coiolanus. The opening scene stages the beginning of a food riot. The rioters believe that the city's governors are hoarding grain (effectively starving the city's citizens) in order to drive its price up and profit from this higher price. One of the rioters rather astutely argues that the sign of their starvation--"the leanness that afflicts us"--also serves as a sign of the city elite's abundance: the more the rioters suffer, the more the governors stand to gain. One of the governors attempts to calm the rioters by telling them the famous parable of the body-politic. The city is like a body, he says, and the governors are its stomach, receiving food first before shipping it off to the other body parts. Unsurprisingly, the rioters aren't satisfied with this explanation. Nevertheless, the rioters are calmed: they receive both food and political representation among the governors.

Also, Coriolanus represents this political representation partly in terms of food. While the citizens now have a political voice, several of the elite deride this "voice," noting repeatedly that this "voice" reeks of garlic and onion, food commoners typically ate. In other words, this food marks the citizens' participation in political governance and marks a class hierarchy within that participation.

I'm struck, though, by the rioter's analysis of the situation, by his claim that his and his fellow rioters' (and their families') lean bodies have value as a sign of others' abundance, as if their bodies are status-symbols for the governors. He claims that their "misery is an inventory to particularize their abundance." Their lack of food itemizes how much the governors have.

On the one hand, his critique is an extreme extension of the "keeping up with Joneses" notion. Yet here the idea is not to keep up with the Joneses but to have more than them. Or, in the rioter's formulation: one succeeds when one sees that the Joneses have less.

Yet the rioter's critique is more radical than this because it does not focus on luxuries. It's focused on a fundamental need. It's an interesting critique because it brings to light the relativity inherent in a market of scarcity: one's success is marked by what others lack.

OK. I'm getting preachier the longer I write, and the entry's long enough already, so I'll sign off.