“Food Is History of the Deepest Kind”: Eating and Utopia in Sloan's Sourdough and Sargent's “The American Cockaigne”

Abstract

This article examines Lyman Sargent's article “The American Cockaigne” alongside the 2017 novel Sourdough by Robin Sloan. Both Sargent and Sloan examine modern approaches to food and utopianism that build on earlier Cockaigne tales—medieval “peasant utopias” imagining abundant magical foods and satisfying laziness. Sargent contends that similar stories remained prevalent in America among socially marginalized groups. Sourdough imagines how a group of inventors might create a utopian community by blending food traditions with innovative technologies. Both Sargent and Sloan suggest that Cockaigne stories and their later antecedents should be seen as part of the utopian tradition and that visions of unusual foods demonstrate the importance of social communities.