Food

All food is plant-based

For more than a decade, my interest in the food chain has been directed towards finding the common ground on which science and literature meet. This has meant tackling the Himalayas of the English literary canon, and fortunately my sherpas were the best in the business – Jayne Archer and Richard Marggraf Turley. The story of how this came about and where it’s going is told in the blog Idle Weeds, and the following publications (links to downloads where available here):

H Thomas, J E Archer. 2021. Chaucer and famine. The Chaucer Encyclopedia (in press)
H Thomas. 2019. Grass blindness. Plants, People, Planet DOI: 10.1002/ppp3.28
J E Archer, H Thomas, R Marggraf Turley. 2017. The millers’ tales: sustainability, the arts, and the watermill. In: Literature and Sustainability. Concept, Text, and Culture (eds A Johns-Putra, J Parham, L Squire) pp 13-32. Manchester: University Press
H Thomas, J E Archer, R Marggraf Turley. 2016. Remembering darnel, a forgotten plant of literary, religious, and evolutionary significance. Journal of Ethnobiology 36: 29-44
J E Archer, R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas. 2015. “Soper at oure aller cost”: the politics of food supply in the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer Review 50: 1-29
J E Archer, R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas. 2015. “Moving accidents by flood and field”: The arable and tidal worlds of George Eliot’s ‘The Mill on the Floss’. English Literary History 82: 701-728
J E Archer, R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas. 2014. Reading Shakespeare with the grain: sustainability and the hunger business. Green Letters 19: 8-20
J Archer, R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas. 2014. Food and the Literary Imagination. London: Palgrave
JE Archer, R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas. 2013. Reading with the Grain: Sustainability and the Literary Imagination. INSPIRE-ASLE-UKI Essay Competition Winner
H Thomas. 2013. ‘Cultivating Common Ground’: a participant’s perspective. In: R Crossland. Cultivating common ground: interdisciplinary approaches to biological research. New Phytologist 197: 362-365
R Marggraf Turley, JE Archer, H Thomas. 2012. On St Giles Hill. Keats’s Ode ‘to Autumn’ in the Market. Times Literary Supplement No. 5723 (5 December 2012) pp 14-15
R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas, JE Archer. 2012. Keats, ‘To Autumn’, and the New Men of Winchester. Review of English Studies 63: 797-817
JE Archer, H Thomas, R Marggraf Turley. 2012. The Autumn King: remembering the land in King Lear. Shakespeare Quarterly 63: 518-543
H Thomas, J Archer, R Marggraf Turley. 2011. Evolution, physiology, and phytochemistry of the psychotoxic arable mimic weed darnel (Lolium temulentum L). Progress in Botany 72: 73-104