The Economics of Abundance and Scarcity Food Consumption and Class Distinction in Selected Iraqi and American Narratives

Abstract

This study examines how food and drink articulate class hierarchy, bodily vulnerability, and political authority in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Inaam Kachachi’s Al-Nabeeza (2017). Through comparative close reading, it treats abundance and scarcity as unequal relations within each fictional world. Veblen’s account of conspicuous consumption and Bourdieu’s sociology of taste are brought into dialogue with scholarship on gastro-politics and commensality. The analysis uses coercive consumption to describe participation in eating or drinking under a credible threat associated with refusal. Attention to narrative perspective distinguishes outward compliance from appetite, judgement, and consent. Fitzgerald’s parties expose the uncertain conversion of expenditure into social legitimacy; Kachachi’s drinking and banquet scenes reveal how intimidation restricts the bodily expression of refusal. Taji’s encounters with elite hospitality complicate this comparison by placing culinary pleasure and paternalistic patronage alongside her subsequent criticism of bread scarcity. Across the selected scenes, material provision supplies an incomplete measure of advantage. The capacity to judge an offering, express displeasure, or leave the table helps determine what access to food permits a character to do. The study thus connects literary representations of consumption with the unequal distribution of recognition and agency.