Social Gastronomy

Abstract

This article examines the imbricating discourses of modernity in the works of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and Charles Fourier. In signalling significant intertextual relationships between Fourier's utopian writings and Brillat-Savarin's iconic gastronomic treatise, Physiologie du goût (first published 1825), the author proposes to elucidate the role that food writing played in fantasising about new forms of sociability in the post-Revolutionary period. Both Brillat-Savarin and Fourier propose a rational and pleasurable ordering of the objects and spaces of consumption, through which individual appetites and social function are harmonised. This pleasurable ordering is, it will be argued, the central operational imperative of an emerging class of gastronomic administrators. It is here, however, in the failed management of appetite, that the gastronomic systems of our like-minded authors can be seen to diverge, exposing the deeply political nature of the alimentary knowledge they propose.