The Pleasure of Food, and the Spiritual: Eat, Pray, Love and Babette's Feast

Abstract

Summary This article explores the significance of the enjoyment of food in relation to spirituality, as (re)presented in two texts -Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love (2007) and the cinematic version of Karen Blixen's novel Babette's Feast (1987). It is argued that the pleasure derived from food occupies a crucial position in both texts, firstly in its own “hedonistic” right, but secondly also as far asit functions allegorically (Babette's Feast), or temporally (Eat, Pray, Love) regarding the (re)presentation of spiritually significant experience. That is, the enjoyment of food is (re)presented as a means of repeating (and perhaps anticipating) spiritually meaningful culinary experience (Babette's Feast). In Eat, Pray, Love, the spiritual awakening of the protagonist, in the “dark night of her soul”, is succeeded by a kind of “carnival”, followed by something resembling the Lent of the Christian tradition. Hence, her journey through space and time takes her from sensuous (though celibate) pleasure in food (Eat) to spiritual sacrifice (Pray) and eventually romantic love (Love). The narrative logic of this sequence, it is argued, consists in sensuous, culinary enjoyment preparing her for the meaning of sacrifice through spiritual commitment. These two phases of her journey, or existential quest, become intertwined (their complex interlacement being constituted by a kind of interpenetration of pleasure and sacrifice through commitment).