The Bluest Cheese

As a piece of blue cheese and a member of food society, I always appreciate it when authors incorporate food in interesting or important ways in their novels.

Blue Cheese

An excellent example of this is The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Often times, she uses food to describe situations or objects where one would not expect it. For example, she compares love to “Alaga syrup” and mentions how she could “taste it.”

Because syrup is sweet, she is trying to explain how the love shown to her by her mother is very sweet. However, because syrup is unhealthy, she makes a larger point about love and how it has the capacity to be harmful. Another example of this is when she describes Maureen Peal as having “fluffy sweaters the color of lemon drops.” Instead of just saying yellow to describe her sweaters, Morrison uses lemon drops to create an image of manufactured and false brightness.

This shows how Maureen is a false person and is someone who cannot be trusted. Also, Maureen Peal is nicknamed Meringue Pie by Frieda and Claudia which is another example of food.Meringue Pie is a white food with fluff on the top which represents the whiteness of Maureen and her dislike of darker people.

Another example of her use of food is the ice cream incident involving Maureen, Pecola, Frieda, and Claudia. When the four of them are walking Maureen pulls out a “multifolded dollar bill” in order to buy ice cream. However, Frieda and Claudia don’t have money to buy their own ice cream. This reveals the large class difference between whites and blacks and how it affects the girls in their everyday lives. She also shows Pecola’s dependence on Maureen to buy her ice cream which symbolizes the dependence of blacks on whites and how blacks were not able to accomplish anything without whites being involved. Another use of food is when Pecola buys “Mary Janes” from the store owned by Mr. Yacobowski. 

This incident reveals racial tensions because Mr. Yacobowski is afraid to even touch Pecola’s hands because she is a black girl. The only reason he ends up touching them is because he gets money out of it. Because of Pecola’s humiliation, she leaves feeling ugly and unwanted in society. The use of food in this novel is very carefully done and the audience should pay attention to it in order to extract deeper meaning.