Emile Zola: Food and Ideology

Zola the novelist is obsessed with food he describes innumerable meals, but his intent is always ideological! to document his dialectical division of France into "gras" and "maigres." Simply naming foods serves to signal the consumer's economic status, his social aspiration. This article focuses on Le Ventre de Paris where Zola's encyclopedic listings of the merchandise of the various foodhalls have a documentary purpose subverted by the mythification of the "Ventre," not as vessel but as decomposition machine: food eaten is excremental not sacramental. Though Zola himself had gourmet pretensions, as novelist food is simply a way of dividing his world. The lower-classes are noble when underfed; when they indulge they become "la bête humaine." (AS)