ABSTRACT
Food is at once the most basic necessity and the most mediated of cultural forms. It can be used in fiction to represent life at its most simple - daily bread, a bowl of rice, the humble potato - or at its most sophisticated, as haute cuisine. It can attract to the point where it becomes the object of our greatest desires, or repel and disgust. What is a delicacy in one culture can be taboo in another. Within cultures, distinction can be established by the status of different kinds of food, sliced white bread versus a wholemeal loaf, for example. Political struggles can be fought over or through food. Boycotts of Californian or South African grapes, or the choice of fairtrade coffee each translate received tastes into political actions that are all the more salient because they connect to visceral denials or satisfactions. Where we eat and how we eat are as important as what we eat. The trashing of a McDonalds or a Starbucks is a significant act because restaurants and cafes are points at which the public and the private (including intimate relations - the romantic meal) are negotiated. What is at stake in the destruction of such symbolic spaces is not just the Americanization of culture, but a sense of a civility lost to the processes of modernization. Italy's 'slow food' movement, to which Gissing might have been an ardent adherent, offers an alternative model of modernity, where taste, the distinctiveness of local or regional production and a different vision of the public sphere combine to re-establish family or community relationships in the face of the pressures of globalisation (see Slowfood).
