This introductory essay examines moments of culinary transformation in literature. It turns to food as subject, as form, as landscape, as polemic, as political movement, as aesthetic statement, and as key ingredient in literature. It looks at food in the literary text, food text as literature, and literature as food for thought. It asks: What if we think of the tasting, chewing, and digesting of Frances Bacon’s maxim—“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”—as a kind of theme and method? It posits an omnivorous method for the field at large. Beginning with an abstract consideration of food (as language, as metaphor, as form, as sex), with Eagleton’s stipulation that “it is that it is never just food,” it finds its way to a consideration of food as material substance (the stuff of colonial loot, of agricultural cycles, of industrial plants). It traces the intersections of food studies with work in critical race studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and other fields that have shaped its central concerns. It examines the possibilities for the applications of its methods in different literary and cultural texts. It thereby offers a method and structuring principle for the volume as a whole, imagining the possibilities for different approaches and objects of inquiry in literary food studies.