“I earn that I eat”: Hungry Food Workers in As You Like It
by Lauren Shook
In the spring semester of 2020, I launched a service-learning Shakespeare course focused on early modern hunger and 21st-century food insecurity in America. Food insecurity, different from the biological state of being hungry, is when a person or family lacks regular access to nutritious foods, and is at its core a systemic issue rooted in social inequity and structural racism. Students and I were to explore the food crises of the 1590s-1620s and early modern literary responses to them, including how Shakespeare weaves the language of hunger into his plays. Although we did not complete our service-learning component due to the emergency transition to virtual learning at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw immediately that Shakespeare could help us think through contemporary plights of hunger.
That April — while we read King Lear (an eerie coincidence given that Lear was touted as Shakespeare’s plague play) and discussed the exiled Edgar’s performance of poverty via the persona of Poor Tom, who claims to satiate his hunger by eating frogs — we witnessed our home city of San Antonio, TX, make national news. On April 9, 2020, the San Antonio Express News ran a front-page story on hunger, unemployment, and COVID-19. The gut punch was the accompanying aerial shot of thousands of vehicles lined up at the San Antonio Food Bank, an image that The New York Times recirculated on April 12, 2020, with a story about national hunger.
But one story of hunger hasn’t been highlighted enough: the food workers who often cannot feed themselves. According to a 2016 report by Food Chain Workers Alliance, 21.5 million people worked in the food system, the United States’ “largest sector of employment,” and 13% of those workers depended upon SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps). COVID-19 only worsened the paradox of hungry food workers, especially among BIPOC communities and migrant food workers. Just this January, a report found that 78% of Kroger workers were food insecure. That same month, 8,000 employees of the Kroger-owned Colorado grocery store King Soopers went on strike demanding better pay.
Food workers in early modern England were also affected by plague, low wages, and hunger. Many folks hungered and/or starved to death due to failed harvests, price inflation, or the profit-driven farmers and merchants who hoarded food staples. While Elizabeth and James authorized countless proclamations against price inflation or hoarding of grain, the ‘famine’ sermon became a widespread sub-genre, and many popular uprisings occurred as a result of food inequity. According to Jane Whittle, by 1600, around “70 percent of the English population relied on agriculture for its livelihood.” Yet, agrarian workers, both men and women, lived precarious, hungry lives. “Meagre earnings and dear food” as Peter Bowden puts it.
Shakespeare captures this hunger story in As You Like It. The play’s Forest of Arden is a space where aristocrats learn to love while others labor. Take, for example, the difference between Touchstone and Silvius, both of whom use food to describe love. Touchstone constantly plays with food, peppering his jokes with a gastronomic discourse. He mockingly calls Orlando’s poetry “bad fruit” (3.2.117). When he offers up an extemporaneous love lyric, he begins, “For a taste” (3.2.100). Upon Touchstone’s marriage to Audrey, Duke Senior oddly notes that the newlyweds have a two-month food supply (5.4.201). Yet, Silvius professes his love for Phoebe through a metaphor of food labor and scarcity:
And I in such a poverty of grace,
That I shall think it a most plenteous crop
To glean the broken ears after the man
That the main harvest reaps. Loose now and then
A scattered smile, and that I’ll live upon. (3.5.107–111)
Silvius knows that Phoebe desires Ganymede but is willing to live on scraps. In Arden, to love is to feast or to famine.
The play’s aristocratic lovers, Rosalind and Orlando, enter the forest of Arden starving and leave with full bellies as the comedy concludes with a celebratory marriage feast. The question I want to consider, here and in my classroom, is “What food system in Arden ensures Rosalind and Orlando’s satiated marriage?” One way of answering this is to look at laborers such as Adam and Corin. While they may not be food laborers, they occupy positions in the plot that enable Rosalind and Orlando to live a secure life in Arden, allowing them to pursue their interests in love.
Adam and Corin ensure the material comfort of Orlando and Rosalind. In Act 2, when Adam implores Orlando to flee Oliver’s murderous wrath, Orlando balks: “What, wouldst thou have me go and beg my food” (2.3.32). So, Adam offers up his lifetime savings of 500 crowns, which by “thrift” he has saved for retirement (2.3.39–40). I imagine Orlando elicited no sympathy from an early modern audience of Adams, especially if they remembered Orlando’s initial complaint when the play opens: Oliver has given him, in his words, “but poor a thousand crowns” (1.1.2–3). Curiously, the next time we see Adam, he is starving, and Orlando must hunt for food. What has happened to the 500 crowns? Why isn’t Orlando starving? Orlando finds food for them both thanks to Duke Senior’s generosity. Adam, however, disappears from the play, as if his service to the plot is complete. Can we assume that Adam continues to serve Orlando even while in Arden?
Starvation also marks Rosalind and Celia’s entrance into Arden, where they meet Corin, a landless laborer, one who farms another’s pasture. When Rosalind sees Corin, she asks for sustenance. “There is nothing / That you will feed on,” he responds (2.4.88–89). He does not mean that he has no food, but that there is little to satisfy their aristocratic palate. As Shakespeare’s contemporary William Harrison writes in The Description of England, hunger forces folks like Corin, “the artificer [tradesmen] and poor laboring man,” to be “content” with bread made of “horse corn,” slang for “beans, pearson, oats, tares, and lentils” (133). Rosalind and Celia offer to buy the cottage and land. Celia promises to “mend [his] wages” (2.4.97). In return, Corin promises to be their “very faithful feeder” (2.4.102). Obviously, he holds his end of the bargain. We never see the duo hungry again. In fact, the cottage becomes a space where Rosalind woos Orlando.
Two things become clear within this exchange. One, upon their exile, Rosalind and Celia seem to remember to do everything except plan for a food supply. They disguise themselves for protection, pack “jewels” and “wealth,” and ask Touchstone to accompany them (1.3.138; 142). Their lack of foresight with regard to food perhaps indicates that they are used to a labor force that produces it for them. Two, even in their exile, they retain an aristocratic privilege to have food provided for them. As the play increasingly focuses on the courtship between Orlando and Rosalind, we are left to wonder about the laborers who have made it possible: is their service fully compensated? Do they eat as well as they provide?
Reading Adam’s and Corin’s labors of love through the lens of an exploitative, paradoxical food system in which food workers hunger allows us to see Arden in a new light. While Orlando and Rosalind will go back to court with more power and wealth than before and Oliver and Celia will leisurely remain in Arden, I cannot help but to wonder where that leaves Adam or Corin. Will the aristocratic, profit-driven marriages also enable a better life for their servants?
My guess is no. My hunch about the status of Shakespeare’s fictional characters is driven by my understanding of the modern food system. Like many early modern English folk, most 21st-century folks “partake” in what Gitanjali Shahani describes as the “strange cannibalism” of others, namely those colonized and racialized “bodies that cultivated” our meals (57). When I consider the food insecurity of the many Adams and Corins who labor to produce the foods that nourish my body and that I joyfully eat, I quickly become overwhelmed by my inevitable complicity in the system of hunger.
While food workers can satiate our immediate hunger, they experience an ever increasing disparity of wage inequality that will continue to oppress them unless we fight for economic justice. My own actionable steps include writing and teaching about the issue, volunteering at a community garden, donating time and money to food banks (including university food banks), tipping more than 20% at restaurants, and purchasing what I can from my local food system. I plan to make monetary donations to organizations that support restaurant workers (the City of San Antonio has a curated list of resources; check to see if your city does, too). Until the Corins of the world can “earn that [they] eat,” we should do more for those who feed us (3.2.73).
Lauren Shook is Assistant Professor of English at Texas Lutheran University. She specializes in Shakespeare, food justice, and community-engaged pedagogy. Her book project A Place at Shakespeare’s Table explores food access in Shakespeare’s works and has been supported by a Before Farm to Table fellowship at the Folger and a forthcoming SAA/Huntington fellowship. Her essays on women’s writing, race, and pedagogy appear respectively in Modern Philology (‘14), Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies (Palgrave Macmillan ‘19), and Feminist Formalism and Early Modern Women’s Writing (Nebraska UP ‘22). Book-related projects include a Shakespeare & Beyond blog post, an interview for Cassidy Cash’s That Shakespeare Life, and an introduction to Coriolanus for Ian Doescher’s Shakespeare 2020 Project. You can find her on Twitter @shooks_books.
