ABSTRACT
The modern diet and its uneven consequences understandably become matters of increasing public concern. But the identification of these and other risks does not exhaust the meaning or experience of modern conditions, for there are benefits as well as costs associated with modern forms of life. But such thoughts about modern eating practices are difficult to digest in the absence of a wider consideration of the social and cultural context within which the modern diet and dining practices are located. It is nineteenth-century Paris with which Baudelaire is preoccupied, the forms of subjectivity that emerge with the modernization of urban space and associated modes of aesthetic representation. An analytic interest in food and eating, diet and its consequences, table manners and the rituals associated with dining, are by no means solely contemporary preoccupations, to the contrary, as a number of historical surveys demonstrate, the problematization of alimentary practices and pleasures is longstanding.
