People, international agencies and governments are increasingly concerned about the nature of our food, where it comes from, and the conditions in which it is produced. Through close reading of a wide sweep of historical literature, including works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats and George Eliot, Food and the Literary Imagination shows that such anxieties are nothing new, and that we are not confronting them alone. Too often, we engage with our rural, worked environments through the lens of apparently sentimental and incidental literary representations. This book recovers lost understandings of the materiality of life and sustenance for the authors and their first readers.