“Weevils Floated on the Gravy”: Disgusting Food in African Fiction

This paper examines the uses of food in several African novels where descriptions of food might trigger the reader’s disgust. Visceral disgust might be elicited either by the senses, such as taste or smell, or by the nature and history of an object, that has been termed “ideational disgust." Visceral disgust differs from moral disgust, when an individual might feel something is profoundly wrong. Fictional descriptions of something disgusting may elicit similar emotions to those evoked by the material object, and this imagining has been called “the paradox of fiction." The reactions of individual readers may differ according to cultural expectations as well as arising from individual “disgust sensitivities.” In the African novels discussed, the triggering of disgust would sometimes appear to be the taste or smell of certain foods, such as the putrid vapour of rotten fish. Elsewhere it is the idea of the object itself that is significant, for example, the prospect of eating roasted rats or insects. While disgusting smells may elicit disgust across many cultures, disgust generated by the nature of an object may rest rather on the cultural background of an individual.