Book excerpt: The book offers readings of discourses about food in a wide range of sources, from canonical Victorian novels by authors such as Dickens, Gaskell, and Hardy to parliamentary speeches, royal proclamations, and Amendment Acts. It considers the cultural politics and poetics of food in relation to issues of race, class, gender, regionalism, urbanization, colonialism, and imperialism in order to discover how national identity and Otherness are constructed and internalized.