“One Half the World was Hungry”

Abstract

Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s novels illustrate a number of different intersections between food and culture that increase in urgency over the years as her tone moves from observation to critique to polemic. An early semi-autobiographical work, In Pursuit of the English, portrays a working-class Italian woman’s ingenuity in producing a Mediterranean diet in London during 1950s rationing. A mid-career feminist novel, The Summer Before the Dark, satirizes the globalization of food and international food agencies. Her final work, Alfred and Emily, a memoir of her parents and her childhood in Africa, combines her memories of African agricultural abundance with an impassioned plea for an ecological approach to land and an ethical distribution of food.

Keywords:

• Doris Lessing
• postcolonial
• World War II rationing
• working-class diet
• Mediterranean diet
• global food industry
• food desert
• ecological re-imagining
• Africa
• ethical food distribution

Notes

1. See for instance Angelella, Lisa. 2011. “The Meat of the Movement: Food and Feminism in Woolf.” Woolf Studies Annual 17: 173–195, which has an excellent bibliography about Woolf and food.Williams-Forson, Psyche. 2006. Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food and Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press; and Adolph, Andrea. 2009. Food and Femininity in Twentieth-Century British Women’s Fiction. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

2. “Colonial-in-exile” is Judith Kegan Gardiner’s phrase (13). The “outsider-within” is Patricia Hill Collins’ phrase, applied to Lessing in Christine Sizemore’s “’The Outsider-Within’: Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing as Urban Novelists.” Sarah Sceats has written two articles on Lessing and food in which she uses psychoanalytic theory to analyze the body, especially the anorexic and grotesque body, but she does not include Lessing’s political critiques.

3. Susan Watkins focuses the first chapter of her study of Lessing on In Pursuit of the English. She argues that this mixed genre memoir/autobiography/novel “provides an excellent point of entry into [Lessing’s] . . . work. It also allows us to begin to understand some of the contexts and intertexts that have been important in her writing” (1).

4. See Christine Sizemore, “In Pursuit of the English: Hybridity and the Local in Doris Lessing’s First Urban Text” for a discussion of Doris’s hybrid immigrant perspective and her analysis of the city.

5. If there is a lingering nostalgia for an immigrant family’s culture and cuisine in In Pursuit of the English, however, a later novel makes clear that merely assimilating immigrant cultures provides no real solution. In The Fifth Child (1988) Lessing portrays Ben Lovett as “a throwback” (106), a “Neanderthal baby” (53). As a teenager Ben leads a gang of youths who survive on fast food. On a rare trip home he and his friends “brought in enormous quantities of a variety of foodstuffs that originated in a dozen different countries. Pizzas, and quiches; Chinese food, and Indian; pita bread filled with salad; tacos, tortillas, samosas, chili con carne; pies and pasties and sandwiches … they strew crumbs and crusts and cartons about” (128). Immigrant foods from all over the world are now served in the same cardboard cartons. The boys themselves are not descendants of immigrants whose traditions might enrich English culture; they are merely consumers of food that has lost its roots and been assimilated into a takeout and throwaway culture. The bad food is not portrayed as causing the boys’ lack of jobs and fondness for violence, but it is evidence of the degradation of lower class culture. I am grateful to one of the readers of Food, Culture and Society for reminding me of this passage.

6. See, for instance, Berets, Ralph. Spring 1980. “A Jungian Interpretation of the Dream Sequence in Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark.” Modern Fiction Studies 26 (1): 117–129, and the Doris Lessing Studies 24 (1 & 2) (Fall 2004) for several articles on women and aging in The Summer Before the Dark.

7. In an essay written in 1974, Virginia Tiger does note that “Kate Brown’s maniacal interior journey is tied to an explicit historical context: global starvation, the congealed irresponsibility of international managers,” but, she argues, “the real thrust of the novel is inward” (86, 91).

8. Steven Commins explains that the term “food desert” dates from the early 1990s, but clearly the inaccessibility of good nutritious food in poor urban areas has a long history. See Commins, Steven, and S. MacIntyre. 2002. “‘Food Deserts’—Evidence and Assumption in Health Policy Making.” British Medical Journal 325 (7361): 436–438. I appreciate my colleague Jerry Wever’s directing me to this reference.

9. Allison Carruth discusses pastoral and georgic tropes in Willa Cather’s novels in Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 (20).

10. Lessing would have appreciated the irony and recognized the colonial oppression of how Britain acquired margarine during World War II: “Given that it took up to a million of the feather-light [palm] kernels to make a ton in weight, West Africa’s wartime export of over 400.000 tons of kernels a year represented an incredible cracking effort on the part of its women and children. British housewives had West African villagers to thank for their weekly supplies of 2–3 ounces of margarine which supplemented the butter ration of 4 ounces” (Collingham, 140).