ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals the manner in which hunger and taste, both metaphorical and literal, merge even further to combine as a social force, on the one hand to control social identity of the self or others, but on the other, to challenge the boundaries of relatively newly established social norms within the mid-nineteenth-century context. Hunger intervenes in this understanding of taste, acting as a radical dimension within the social organisation, while satiety becomes a form of social conservatism. What to eat, how to eat, and when to eat become at once deeply personal and political, conventions that act as social markers within a cultural milieu that aimed to separate itself from the all-too-recent Hungry Forties. Harold's transgressive tastes, explored abroad, must be trained and tamed anew. He encounters a new hunger: a desire to return to the exotic sensory and cultural flavours of the East.
