Eating Like a Local: Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and the Stakes of Terroir

Examines the intersection of food and race in the expatriates’ interwar fiction, connecting their focus on consumerism and metaphorical treatment of food to racial transformation and categorization. Drawing on the French concept of terroir (taste of place), Keyser concludes that in spite of Hemingway’s depiction of the potential for his white American protagonists to belong transnationally through their immersion in regional food and drink, they ultimately resist such transformation in favor of modern distraction and moral decadence. Pays particular attention to Jake’s interludes with the Basques in The Sun Also Rises and Frederic’s wartime experiences in A Farewell to Arms