Fasting in Abundance in Canadian Literature

Food is certainly an important issue in our Anthropocene. Trade of products, grains and seeds around the world, for instance through the CETA agreements between Canada and Italy, are the cause of both concern and cooperation, while worries for the future of the agricultural production and storage in our future are increasingly alarming. On the one hand, more and more, eating becomes an art with the slow food philosophy and the Mediterranean diet, for instance. On the other hand, surprisingly enough, Canadian literature offers examples of people starving in a country that – being the Northern tip of the American continent – belongs to the First World rich lands of abundance and opulence. In particular, the Lebanese-Canadian writer Rawi Hage introduces the figure of a migrant, who is extremely lean and always hungry, who steals food and hardly ever eats enough, in his novel Cockroach (2008). In addition, the Persian restaurant, where he finds a job as a cleaner, is a den rather than an exotic food paradise. The aim of this essay is to produce a case study – within the framework of Environmental Humanities and food – on a migrant’s peculiar attitude to food, to whom lack of food and abstention is the reverse of- and the exclusion from- todays’ world of feasting and celebrating food almost obsessively.