Canadian author Margaret Atwood introduces The Canlit Foodbook of extracts from national writings on food with her discovery that the "authors could be divided into two groups: those that mention food, indeed revel in it, and those that never give it a second thought" (1). Women writers of the twentieth century internationally give food even more than second thoughts, and it is a proclivity benefiting from the second wave of feminist criticism since the 1960s addressing gender distinctions in culture and literature. Critics have focused on references to food or meals in the century's poetry and fiction of Atwood herself, Anita Brookner, Angela Carter, Willa Gather, Kate Chopin, Colette, Isak Dinesen, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Duras, Nora Ephron, Laura Esquivel, Duong Thu Huong, Margaret Laurence, Doris Lessing, Katherine Mansfield, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Marge Piercy, Katherine Anne Porter, Barbara Pym, Christina Stead, Edith Wharton, Fay Weldon, Elinor Wylie, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Yourcenar and others, including playwrights Caryl Churchill and Joan Schenkar.1 Usually the criticism has addressed individual works, sometimes a writer's entire oeuvre, or a small group of novels by one or more authors. But thus far no one has presented a comprehensive view of women writers recognizing how they use food imagery. Hence this paper that, deeming text in its creativity as significant as context, extends to more of the world to show how twentieth-century women's novels, short stories, and poems use food, especially through the concretizing sensory depictions of images both literal and figurative. The evidence is overwhelming; only some of it can be adduced here. (Harriet Blodgett)