Extension and amputation of sense and sentiment: food as medium in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere

Drawing on McLuhan’s approach to medium as extension of man, this article explores food’s mediatory function to extend and amputate sense and sentiment in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere. Given the overpowering influence of secrecy as a structuring principle in both texts, food becomes a meaningful channel for communicating emotions. By preparing and cooking food, the sentiment of love and affection is extended between James and Marilyn, though their relationship becomes increasingly fraught within the social matrix of race and gender. By offering and sharing food, the sentiment of sympathy and kindness is extended between friends and strangers in Fires, wherein the community of secrecy consisting of singularities is formed when the operative community of family fails. By contrast, rejecting food represents an amputation of senses of cultural and gender identity, as seen in James and Marilyn’s alimentary practices. In particular, Ng’s narratives accentuate the multiple roles of leftovers as markers of social marginality and ethnic otherness, means of subsistence, extension of kindness, and arena for understanding the interconnectedness between human and nonhuman actants. Representing the production and consumption of food, Ng’s works respond aesthetically to political unpalatability and social injustice within American society.