Cult Fiction and Food

From Confederacy of Dunces to Absolute Beginners and On The Road, Dan Saladino explores cult novels to find out how writers Jack Kerouac, Colin MacInnes and John Kenney Toole used food.

Authors have always used food and drink in their narratives to help develop plots, bring characters to life and give a sense of place but Dan chooses three novels with in which food and drink plays a very specific role.

In Jack Kerouac's On The Road, the "beat life" of the 1940's and 1950's turns out to be one of feast or famine. The book, a disguised autobiographical work based on his travel journals across America, contains some of the most delicious and rich descriptions of food, as well as mournful accounts of hunger and longing.

Colin MacInnes, the author of the novel Absolute Beginners, set in late 1950's London, uses brief food and drink references to reveal the lifestyle and mind-set of a teenage counterculture and early modernist movement. DJ Ed Piller helps explains the surprising significance of a smoke salmon sandwich.

And then there's A Confederacy of Dunces. A comic novel whose main character Ignatius has a legendary appetite for the junk food of New Orleans.