Morbid Dining: Writing the Haunted History of Last Meals

Abstract

Although preparing and serving food and consuming the results are among the most foundational of human activities, these are also acts that are loaded with meaning and significance. While at its most basic, food can be understood as the fuel that keeps the machine of the body functioning, and its provision couched in those practical terms, its preparation and consumption are today rarely understood within such a straightforward framework. As Lorna Piatti-Farnell (2011, 1) recently observed — as have others including Claude Lévi-Strauss (1964) and Margaret Visser (1986, 1991) — food ‘intersects with all aspects of human existence: the material functions of food range from simple organic nourishment to being a symbolic agent in the development of sociocultural politics’. In this role of ‘symbolic agent’, culinary production and consumption can be read as positive, life-affirming and celebratory, yet everything concerned with food (what, when, how, who with, and why it is produced and consumed) is also the site of considerable personal and societal anxiety. The culinary is also the subject of numerous taboos, and this is one area where, as cultural objects and processes, food and cookery intersect with the Gothic.