Sophie Gee’s The Barbarous Feast: Eating & Writing in the Eighteenth Century World explores how food and eating appear in Georgian literature—and what they reveal about colonialism, social class, and cultural difference. Drawing on historical research, close readings of novels, and personal reflections on Australian landscapes, Gee brings together subjects that are often considered separately.
In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, food helps define the boundary between the supposedly civilized and the supposedly “savage.” Crusoe is in danger of being eaten by Indigenous people until he rescues Friday from another group of cannibals. He names Friday, teaches him European customs, and makes him his servant—a relationship that reflects the colonial project on a small scale. Gee also asks whether Friday’s apparent willingness to serve Crusoe might represent a choice of his own, even though his exploitation remains real.
Their differences emerge at the table. Friday comes to enjoy bread dipped in hot goat’s milk, but he prefers meat without salt. When Crusoe tries to teach him otherwise, Friday imitates Crusoe’s theatrical disgust at the unseasoned food.
Food is equally central to Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, a novel Gee describes as “obsessed with the getting and eating of food.” Fielding likens the novelist to a restaurateur offering readers a tempting menu. But the story’s appetites also point to the everyday struggle to eat well in rural England. Laws on hunting game favored the wealthy, while poor communities faced barriers to feeding themselves. The lack of legal access to wild food helped drive migration to cities, where provisions were still scarce for people with little money.
In the novel, appetite can signal either healthy self-sufficiency or comic excess. Tom can eat several pounds of beef, while his companion Partridge is, in the narrator’s words, “more inclined to eating than to sleeping, and more to drinking than to either.” Sophia, meanwhile, loves wild birds’ eggs. When she is served a pullet stuffed with its own eggs—a recipe recorded by Hannah Glasse in 1747—the tender dish reflects her own gentle nature.
Colonization and cannibalism
Gee sets these literary scenes against the period’s colonial expansion. European powers sought to impose order on unfamiliar lands, often disregarding Indigenous knowledge, relationships with the land, and seasonal practices. The consequences could be destructive: intensive oyster harvesting in Australia’s Gippsland region, for example, collapsed after only two years, from 1843 to 1845.
The history was not always straightforward. Gee traces parallels between the farming practices of poor settlers in Australia and smallholdings maintained by enslaved people in the Caribbean and North America. Yet exploitation left lasting marks. Oyster beds around Sydney were depleted when shells were burned for building materials. Searching for the remaining colonies, Gee describes their shells as “crinkled and creviced … they look melancholy.”
European settlers were also disturbed by Indigenous food practices. In the Caribbean, dirt-eating could reject the dietary order of a European sugar economy. Grave dirt and rum were used in ceremonies for the dead, despite efforts by settlers to suppress the practice. Fear of cannibalism, meanwhile, helped white colonists define themselves against those they portrayed as barbarous, even as the plantation economy rested on its own violence.
Earlier writers had questioned this simple distinction. In “On Cannibals,” Michel de Montaigne argued that customs unfamiliar to Europeans were not necessarily barbaric. Gee’s discussion of the essay includes a dating error, placing it in 1509—24 years before Montaigne was born.
A wide-ranging study
The book moves between literary and historical analysis and shorter passages of personal journaling. Gee, whose heritage is Anglo-Australian, writes with deep familiarity with southern Australia and its Indigenous cultures. Her reflections on the region add a vivid personal dimension to the scholarship.
Some sections, particularly the extended discussion of the Christian Eucharist and the history of sacramental beliefs, may feel less closely connected to the book’s central concerns. The work’s range can also be demanding: it combines cultural history, literary criticism, Indigenous foodways, and a personal journey through landscapes shaped by colonial conflict.
That breadth is also part of its appeal. Gee draws connections across disciplines and invites readers to reconsider familiar novels alongside the histories of food, power, and place. Her ambitious, varied study rewards those willing to follow its many lines of inquiry.
The Barbarous Feast: Eating & Writing in the Eighteenth-Century World by Sophie Gee is published by Princeton University Press.