Food and The Great Gatsby

I went to see The Great Gatsby today - a movie where the characters spend a lot of time in typical social eating environments, but rarely actually consume any food. They go to parties (and drink); they go to bars and clubs (and drink), but I don't recall them eating much at all.

Nick is the exception, but his food (the cupcakes for tea with Gatsby and Daisy) is a sign of exactly how maladapted to this particular world he is. It's played as funny: the "innocent outsider" character trying to participate in a culture that's ultimately beyond him. The other characters don't seem to eat at all; even when Nick comes to lunch at the end, all they seem to have is booze and cigarettes.

I've read the book a couple times but can't remember if the same is true in the actual novel, or if it's just the movie. But either way, I like it as an aspect of the story, as an outer sign of how emotionally and psychologically malnourished everyone in the novel seems to be. It reminds me a lot of The Sun Also Rises and the desperate expats drinking absinthe for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Epithets and Food Politics

Reading the Odyssey for the first time, I was immediately struck by the epithets - "Gray-eyed Athena," the "wine-dark sea" (over which Dawn seems to be constantly spreading out her "fingertips of rose")...they were striking enough to worm into my 13-year-old memory and stay there, long after I had forgotten the plot.

The epithets in Homer are important. The epithets in Shape magazine are also important - "heart-healthy whole grains" and "artery-clogging saturated fat." At one point when I was hunting down nutrition information for something or other, I found an entire page that read like that: "kale is full of bone-building calcium, filling fiber, immune-boosting Vitamin C, inflammation-busting antioxidants..."