SOURCE: “The Raw and the Cooked: The Role of Fruit in Modern Poetry,” in Mosaic, Vol. 24, No. 3-4, Summer/Fall, 1991, pp. 127-44.

In the following essay, Dietrich examines the use of the fruit metaphor in modern poetry.

Claude Lévi-Strauss once proposed that some foods are chosen not because they are “good to eat” but because they are “good to think” (Totemism 89). Indeed, when we think about food, we are often ambivalent in our conception of the moral status of eating and drinking. On the one hand, ingestion supplies the imagery of our largest and most intense experiences: we speak of the wine of life and the cup of life; we speak also of its dregs and lees; sorrow is something to be drunk from a cup; shame and defeat are wormwood and gall; divine providence is manna or milk and honey; we hunger and thirst for righteousness...