'If God is a snail': Angela Carter on food in the London Review of Books

In her writing about food for the London Review of Books in the 1980s, Angela Carter found a potent subject for her unique combination of savage wit and political commentary. In the ‘piggery triumphant’ of modern foodism she saw a ‘hysterical new snobbery’ in which a kirsch roulade is photographed according to the conventions of pornography. In the history and origins of the potato – that ‘godless vegetable’ – she describes a long and turbulent story of imperialism and class politics. And in the cookery writing of Elizabeth David, Patience Gray and others, she found a rich literary form that, much like folk and fairy tales, had been unfairly neglected. In this film, Marco Alessi revisits these pieces and, with Susannah Clapp and Edmund Gordon, explores their humour, style and intellectual background. Read the pieces: Noovs' hoovs in the trough: https://lrb.me/carteryt1 Wolfing it: https://lrb.me/carteryt2 Potatoes and Point: https://lrb.me/carteryt3 ABOUT THE LRB The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance. As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.