It is surprising, given how much Gary Snyder has written about food production, food distribution, food consumption, pomiculture, and agriculture, that so little has been said about his stance on food. In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food (2020), J. Michelle Coghlan informs us that the book will discuss “a rich array of authors and thematic approaches to literary food studies” (5). Yet, like many others before it, the work still refers to the claims of one dominant writer: Roland Barthes.1 My aim will not be to critique Barthes’s legacy in literary food studies. Yet I wonder if the general neglect of Snyder, despite the appositeness of his writings to the field, implies an ideological incompatibility between his and Barthes’s conceptions of food. In this article, I would thus be introducing Snyder as a new interlocutor into the field by revisiting both the ideas of Barthes as well as the topical concerns of food and semiosis in contemporary studies.

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In Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System (2021), Chris Campbell, Michael Niblett, and Kerstin Oloff note the recurrent emphasis on the symbolism of food in the field, and, at first glance, appear to discourage the study of food in figurative senses. They tell us that “within literary food studies, the balance has often tended to tip towards the symbolic” (10). Later, they add that:

[W]ithin literary food studies, the balance has often tended to tip towards the symbolic at the expense of maintaining a dialectical approach that shuttles between the ways in which food is produced, shipped, sold, consumed, and dominated by extra-alimentary global forces, and its meaning-making symbolic dimension [...] The present collection seeks to pursue just such a dialectical approach, emphasizing at every turn the ‘contextual and historical preoccupations’ that shape and frame individual acts of consumption. (10)

While Campbell, Niblett, and Oloff have identified symbolic interpretations of food as a periodic trend in the field, they do not urge literary food critics to abandon all interest in the representation of food. Instead, they enjoin scholars to recognise, alongside food’s representational qualities, “global forces,” such as “capitalism” (5), “global warming” (10), the “Covid-19 pandemic” (15), and “deforestation” (15), that affect the production, distribution, and consumption of food.

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While the primary works referenced in this essay—Snyder’s “Song of the Taste” (1969) and “The Persimmons” (1986), as well as Barthes’s article “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption” (1961)—were born in matrices asynchronous with that to which Campbell et al. are responding, I argue that the texts by Snyder and Barthes allude to similar “global forces” mentioned by Campbell and the others. Reading Snyder and Barthes together helps us better grasp the ways in which their writings about food signify, and are, therefore, made inseparable from, the dread of ineffective policies meant to alleviate the food crises in twentieth-century America, as well as the ethics towards food production, distribution, and consumption in a global capitalist economy.

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Food is not just Food but “A System of Communication”

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On the surface, Barthes and Snyder write about different conceptions of food with incompatible emphases: Barthes claims that the import of food is enhanced by virtue of it being reflective of socioeconomic status, whereas Snyder maintains that the structures to which food belongs are less sociological than taxonomic, that is, “the systematic classification of living organisms” (OED, “Taxonomic”). In Barthes’s famous article generally characteristic of his treatment of food, “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” Barthes counterpoises white and brown bread; he suggests that “the changeover from white to brown bread corresponds to a change in what is signified in social terms, because, paradoxically, brown bread has become a sign of refinement” (25). For Barthes, the kind of bread one eats, white or brown, is tied to larger systems of socio-economic class. However, for Snyder, food, especially in forms derived from nature, is better understood as constituting an intricate network of zoological species. In “Blue Mountains” of The Practice of the Wild (1990), Snyder states:

We could say a food brings a form into existence. Huckleberries and salmon call for bears, the clouds of plankton of the North Pacific call for salmon, and salmon call for seals and thus orcas. The Sperm Whale is sucked into existence by the pulsing, fluctuating pastures of squid, and the open niches of the Galapagos Islands sucked a diversity of bird forms and functions out of one line of finch. (“Blue Mountains” 109)

Here, one might say that the reason behind the salmon’s connection to other animal species, such as “bears,” “seals and orcas,” is simply the piscivorous appetites of these bigger mammals. But to understand the salmon as food for hunger and satiation misses Snyder’s implicit but important poetics of interrelationality that seems to undergird his semiological treatment of food at large.2

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When Snyder writes that “salmon call[s] for bears,” he is making a similar claim to Barthes who wrote that food is “a system of communication, a body of images.” This relational logic plays out in the rest of Snyder’s quotation: the “plankton” is affiliated with the “salmon” in the sentence “the clouds of plankton of the North Pacific call for salmon.” “The Sperm Whale,” when described as being “sucked into existence by the pulsing, fluctuating pastures of squid,” could also be read as an imaginative inflection of species interrelationality. The affinity between the whale and the squid could be constituted by the similar movement of limbs when swimming forward; the tail that the whale flexes up and down is similar to the undulating tentacles of the squid. The next and last line of the quote by Snyder depicts an avian genealogy, linking the finch with other avian breeds: “one line of finch” gives rise to “a diversity of bird forms and functions.” The finch becomes, like the sea creatures and mammals, synecdochic of larger taxonomic structures.

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Yet Snyder’s poetics of interrelationality is not limited to the relationship between food and animal; one of his early poems, “Song of the Taste,” explores the relationship between food and man by means of alluding to “global forces” such as unethical agricultural practices and inefficacious policies about environmental sustainability. In Ecocritical Aesthetics: Language, Beauty, and the Environment (2018), Scott Slovic contextualises the matrix in which the poem was written:

Gary Snyder’s famous poem “Song of the Taste” first appeared in his 1969 collection Regarding Wave, during the early years of the modern American environmental movement. American readers had become newly sensitized to serious environmental issues with the publication of Rachel Carson’s dark exposé of the dangers of agricultural pesticides in her 1962 book Silent Spring and Paul Ehrlich’s dire forecasts of hunger and disease resulting from human overpopulation in The Population Bomb in 1968, and the first Earth Day event took place on April 22, 1970. (205)

Despite the national sentiment of doom and gloom, Slovic holds that the poem “celebrates the essential delight of eating,” justifying his claim by saying that “[t]he poem bursts forth with the sense of fertility” (205). Slovic is not alone in noting the celebratory tone of the poem; Paige Tovey also holds that “Song of the Taste” evokes a “celebration of eating” (151). It is not difficult to understand why Tovey and Slovic would read the tone of the work as optimistic, given that the subject with which the poem begins has been overlooked in both of their discussions. The opening lines of the poem read: “[e]ating the living germs of grasses / Eating the ova of large birds” (Snyder, “Song” 17). The subject—humans—becomes apparent when the poem ends: “Kissing the lover in the mouth of the bread: / lip to lip” (17). Knowing the subject of the poem thus weakens Slovic’s claim that “[t]he poem bursts forth with the sense of fertility.” On the contrary, by “[e]ating the living germs of grasses” and “the ova of large birds,” it appears more likely that humans have denied both the “grasses” and the “large birds” of progeny and, by extension, of fertility.

 

My point in reinterpreting the opening lines of “Song of the Taste” is to suggest that we might, at first glance, register a kind of horror—or, as Snyder would say, an emotion of disgust—towards eating the foods described at the outset of the poem. In an explanation of “Song of the Taste,” Snyder anticipated the possible emotional responses towards it; he wrote that for those who encountered his work, the poem might result in “a disgust with self, with humanity and with life itself” (“On ‘Song of the Taste’ by Gary Snyder”). Consider, for instance, these few lines:

Eating the living germs of grasses

Eating the ova of large birds

 

            the fleshy sweetness packed

            around the sperm of swaying trees (“Song” 17)

Snyder abandons “grains” for “living germs” in the first line; rather than phrasing the next line as “eating the eggs of large birds,” Snyder substitutes “eggs,” with “ova.” Similarly, instead of writing “the fleshy sweetness packed / around the seed of swaying trees,” Snyder replaces “seed” with “sperm.” The substitution of comestible foods—grains, eggs, and fruit seeds—with biological terms, such as “germs,” “ova,” and “sperm,” might, then, be the source of shock, revulsion, and disgust as these foods are now rendered in completely different and arguably inedible forms.

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Snyder, or any poet for that matter, has certainly no obligation to write poetry in ways that would befit the expectations of the reader, but his mustering of disgust appears to say something more. “Song of the Taste” was written in a society plagued with “the dangers of agricultural pesticides” and the apprehension towards “hunger and disease resulting from human overpopulation.” Disgust in “Song of the Taste” could thus have served to exhort readers to reconsider the foods that they had been consuming. Robert Appelbaum has argued for the merits of disgust in Food and Literature (2018). By using Barthes’s claim that food signifies broader notions of culture, history, and politics, Appelbaum studies an instance in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938) in which Antoine Roquentin, a principal character in Sartre’s work, eats camembert. Appelbaum explains:

Roquentin’s nausea does not come only from a metaphysical intuition, it must be observed; it also comes from his perception of the cheese in his mouth as a material object, as an occasion of sensation, as a historical and cultural phenomenon, as the object of a practice, and even as a form of nutrition. (131)

As much as cheese is a “form of nutrition,” it is also emblematic of a deeper and darker “historical and cultural phenomenon” of France that causes Roquentin to feel sick and disgusted at “the cheese in his mouth.”3 We may, therefore, make a similar claim about the effects of disgust in “Song of the Taste.” Since Snyder’s poem has its roots in late twentieth-century America, the disgust in the work might tell us more about the country’s socio-political conditions affecting food production and consumption. Julia Martin writes that the words “germs,” “ova,” and “sperm” represent food as “living organisms rather than inert matter” (5). The notion of distinctions implied in Martin’s claim opens a useful line of inquiry with which we can understand these biological terms. The disgust engendered from reading these lines might come from a disjunction between the ideas with which we usually associate the words, “germs,” “ova,” and “sperm,” and the ways in which they are given new and strange senses when interpolated into Snyder’s lines. Yet “germs,” “ova,” and “sperm” are also homonyms. The point of using words with the same meaning might be to erase the categories used to demarcate, delimit, and distinguish animals from plants. When Snyder writes “[e]ating the living germs of grasses,” the word germ could mean “a part of an animal which is capable of reproducing it” and “a germinating seedling; the seedling itself; a shoot emerging from a bulb, tuber, bud, or rootstock” (OED, “Germ”). Similarly, “ova,” the plural of “ovum,” in the line “[e]ating the ova of large birds” could refer either to a “female gamete or reproductive cell in animals” or “[t]he female gamete or egg cell of a plant” (OED, “Ovum”); the term sperm in “the fleshy sweetness packed / around the sperm of swaying trees” denotes either “[t]he generative substance or seed of male animals” or a “generative matter or source from which anything is formed or takes its origin” (OED, “Sperm”). To read these lines again with the idea that words like “germs,” “ova,” and “sperm” are more semantically equivocal than we might have presumed, these words train us to recognise that the food we eat does not refer strictly to either animal or plant but retains senses, images, and traces of both species—calling attention to the motif of interspecies connection which Snyder carries forward to the remainder of the poem.

 

When we reach the end of the work, Snyder amplifies this interconnectedness by bringing in the figure of the human—as if suggesting that we are all part of a “world of one-ness” (“On ‘Song of the Taste’ by Gary Snyder”). The poem ends with a message that humans, too, might become, in this greater food chain, eaten. The stanza reads:

Eating each other’s seed

                        eating

            ah, each other. (17)

While the first line keeps the source of this “seed” unclear, we would have learnt, from the homographic senses of “seed,” that the point is not to seek out the source, the organism to which this seed belongs. The next line concentrates on the process of “eating” only to burst into a revelation that what is being eaten is not the seed of any animal or plant, but possibly humans—articulated tersely as “each other.” The seed that was putatively affixed to both a plant and an animal turns out to be coupled with us, the human. The larger point of this trope of interconnectedness in “Song of the Taste” might be Snyder’s response to the food crisis that afflicted twentieth-century America. By disclosing the connections amongst plant, animal, and human in this “world of one-ness,” Snyder spotlights the possibility that “global forces” such as the food crisis has far-reaching ramifications implicating not just Man, but plants, animals, and the wider natural environment.

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A Poem about Persimmons being more than Persimmons

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This “world of one-ness” thus presupposes, as Barthes contends, “a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior” towards food. Using sugar as an example, Barthes writes:

Sugar is not just a foodstuff [...] it is, if you will, an “attitude,” bound to certain usages, certain “protocols,” that have to do with more than food. Serving a sweet relish or drinking a Coca-Cola with a meal are things confined to eating habits proper [...] through the sugar, it also means to experience the day, periods of rest, traveling, and leisure in a specific fashion that is certain to have its impact on the American. (23)

Barthes’s point about “protocol” is that the act of serving the “sweet relish” and the “Coca-Cola” is generally reflective of American patterns and etiquettes of consumption. He adds that recognising these codes renders sugar representative of other senses and activities such as “periods of rest, traveling, and leisure.” Following Barthes, I use Snyder’s poem “The Persimmons” to claim that it reflects a similar etiquette towards the persimmon fruit.

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Snyder’s etiquette towards the fruit becomes clear when we focus first on the cornucopia of details dedicated to describing the environment in which the fruit is grown, and the effort dedicated to ensuring its flourishing. The beginning lines of the poem read:

In a cove reaching back between ridges

the persimmon groves:

leaves rust-red in October

ochre and bronze

scattering down from the

hard slender limbs of this

slow-growing hardwood

that takes so much nitrogen

and seven years to bear,

and plenty of water all summer

to be bearing so much and so well

as these groves are this autumn. (149)

We know that the “slow-growing hardwood” to which the persimmon fruit belongs requires “that [...] much nitrogen.” But with the enjambment of the quoted lines, there is an almost unspecified abundance of effort that spills over from one activity to the next. After Snyder writes the line “slow-growing wood / that takes so much nitrogen,” he prefaces the next with “and”—a word that connects this new line with its preceding one, and augments the amount of effort taken, as made clear to us in the previous line, to grow the persimmons—in “and seven years to bear.” Yet somehow, both the quantities of nitrogen and seven whole years appear inadequate to encourage the fruit’s burgeoning. We mark, then, the third and last line that, in beginning likewise with the words “and” in “and plenty of water all summer,” completes the recipe for the flourishing of the fruit. The persimmon tree, as Snyder finally tells us, “bear[s] so much and so well.”

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Some might contend that the picturesque environs of the persimmon crops as well as the apparently rigorous effort put into growing the fruit might just be a figment of Snyder’s imagination. We are, of course, unable to ascertain whether these descriptions given by Snyder are true, given that the poem tells us that he encounters the persimmon physically when he is “alongside a car road” on the site of the Great Wall of China, and not “[i]n a cove reaching back between ridges” (150). Yet, as Barthes has informed us, to encounter food is to be cognisant of the “protocol of usages, situations, and behavior” connected to it. Whether or not Snyder visited the groves is likely immaterial; rather, Snyder’s descriptions of the origins of the persimmon that he found “in the dark of a tomb” suggest a “protocol,” a particular etiquette towards the fruit that stresses an awareness of the complexities invested in growing and producing the persimmon. My use of the term etiquette is derived directly from Snyder’s essay “The Etiquette of Freedom” (1990). In it, Snyder writes about certain codes of behaviour for approaching the wild, nature, animals, and plants. According to Snyder, one of the customs requires us to “learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back home” (24). To visualise “the persimmon groves” “[i]n a cove reaching back between ridges” is hence Snyder’s way of “learn[ing] the terrain,” to understand that each persimmon must come from a tree, and each tree, a grove.

 

In the subsequent lines of the poem, Snyder continues to “learn the terrain,” of which the persimmon is a part, by ruminating on the concomitant processes of the fruit’s distribution and consumption. Snyder writes:

the persimmons are flowing

on streams of more bike-trucks

til they riffle and back up

alongside a car road

and are spread on the gravel by sellers.

Persimmons and farmers

a long busy line on the roadside,

in season, a bargain, a harvest

of years, the peace of

this autumn again, familiar,

when found by surprise at

the tombs of the dead Ming emperors.

Acres of persimmon orchards

surrounding the tumuli

of kings who saw to it they kept on consuming

even when empty and gone. (150-51)

Two new ideas extend from the previously deducible process of production: the distribution and consumption of the persimmon. These fruits that grew “[i]n a cove reaching back between ridges” are “spread on the gravel by sellers” along “a long busy line on the roadside.” Snyder then writes straightforwardly, but perhaps also unusually, that these persimmons being sold in “a bargain” after a “harvest” are similar to those eaten by “dead Ming emperors.” Part of the oddity of this line comes from its figurative weight: the persimmon fruits on sale could not have been the exact ones consumed by Chinese rulers. The deeper point about the invocation of the Ming dynasty appears, then, to be one about distinctions—a trope reinforced later in the poem with the line “even when empty and gone.” To be “empty” is to have once been filled; to be “gone” means that something or someone was there. There are contrasts that give us clues to the seemingly arbitrary mention of this particular imperial dynasty in China. It thus seems likely that the mention of the Ming dynasty is for another type of contrast: through the historical reference, Snyder juxtaposes its imperialist ecopolitics with its capitalist counterpart—a system that would have been responsible for influencing the ways in which the persimmon fruit, to which Snyder images to have been “harvest[ed]” and now sold “on the gravel by sellers.” “The development of a capitalist world-ecology,” Campbell et al. explain, “was inextricable from, and unfolded through, the development of a systemically integrated network of food production, distribution, and consumption” (4). Here, what Campbell and the others mean is that capitalism makes processes of “food production, distribution and consumption” appear integrated. In “The Persimmons,” these processes are reflected accordingly: it begins with vivid accounts of the persimmon crops, therein suggesting production, before elaborating on processes of distribution and consumption.

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But what might be the larger point behind the poem’s intimation of capitalism? We could think of Karl Marx’s claims about consumerism and capitalism.4 Yet if we look at how the poem ends, we would see that the more relevant point here is less about consumerism and ecopolitics than consumption. By consumption, I refer not only to the physical act of eating food but also to the ingestion of knowledge. The last few lines read:

I walked the Great Wall today,

and went deep in the dark of a tomb.

And then found a persimmon

ripe to the bottom

I trade him some coin

for this wealth of fall fruit

lined up on the roadside to sell to the tourists

who have come to see tombs,

and are offered as well

the people and trees that prevail. (151)

Our clue to Snyder’s ethical point about consumption is the unmistakable action in the first line: “I walked the Great Wall today.” Snyder’s essay “The Etiquette of Freedom” clarifies the import of walking and its associated ethics. On walking, Snyder asserts:

Out walking, one notices where there is food. And there are firsthand true stories of “Your ass is somebody else’s meal”—a blunt way of saying interdependence, interconnection, “ecology,” on the level where it counts, also a teaching of mindfulness and preparedness. There is an extraordinary teaching of specific plants and animals and their uses, empirical and impeccable, that never reduces them to objects and commodities.” (“The Etiquette,” 18)

Being aware of the interrelations amongst these details while walking is Snyder’s deeper ethical call. The observant walker constructs a patchwork of interrelated meanings perhaps because walking enables the eye to capture things in a panoramic vision.5 Similarly, the persimmon that Snyder finds “ripe to the bottom” while walking “in the dark of a tomb” sets off a concatenation of interconnected meanings that are ultimately reinforced through the phrase “wealth of the fall fruit,” where “wealth” here implies a richness that is agriculturally, historically, and culturally inflected.6

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To approach the persimmon fruit—and, if I may, of food at large—with etiquette is to move away from seeing it solely as edibles, “objects and commodities.” Rather, as “The Persimmon” teaches us with its final message at the end of the poem, take in not only the fruit but its signifieds—the persimmon’s embedded history in the “tombs,” “the people and trees that prevail.”

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The Future of Food and Food Relations

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When stating the principal aim of their book, Campbell and others note:

Hence our emphasis in this volume on [sic] the cultural registration not just of certain foods or forms of food-getting, but of the more expansive and complex set of food relations through which the modern world-system is constituted. These relations are necessarily global and systemic, even as they find irreducibly specific expression in particular localized contexts. (11, emphasis original)

In other words, while certain types of food might be native to one nation, culture, or society, Campbell et al. inform us that these examples of food are constituted by food relations that are more global than local, more shared than specific.

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My article has referenced particular types of food from various countries in the twentieth century: camembert cheese in France, “the ovum of large birds” in America, and the persimmon fruit in China. However, I have also shown how these foods are subject to transnational relations, to “global forces” that have the potential to influence the ways in which food is grown, harvested, shared, and eaten. There is perhaps greater urgency to recognise these semiological aspects and processes of food today, given that the food and environmental crises to which Snyder refers in “Song of the Taste,” as well as the ethics of food production, distribution, and consumption in “The Persimmons” are issues that remain germane today.7 Twentieth-century literature has much to teach us about the contemporary challenges facing food. Whether the effects of these “global forces” attenuate, exacerbate, bleed into the next generation, or the following century, lies in our hands.