Unreal Unearth is built on Dante’s Inferno, since Hozier structured the record as a descent through the circles, and “Eat Your Young” sits in gluttony. That placement is the key to the whole song, because it tells you the gluttony in question is not about food.
The title is lifted from the oldest joke in political writing. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729) suggested, with a completely straight face, that the Irish poor could solve their problems by selling their children as food to the English. Swift was not being whimsical. He was pointing out that this was already the arrangement, minus the butchery.
Hozier does the same thing with war and profit: get some, get some, while there is still some going. Here are six books that treat appetite as a political position.
1. The Last Bites by Chris Weiss
My contribution to the genre, currently being written, and the smallest-scale entry on the list: one meal, one chef, one man.
Ella is asked to cook a last meal for a prisoner on death row. What interests me is the question she cannot get past: a meal is made by one person and eaten by another, so who is it for? She has always maintained that food belongs to the eater, not the cook, which sounds humble until somebody hands you a diner whose worth is a matter of public record and asks for your best work.
Swift’s question, on a plate, for one customer.
2. A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
Start here, because it is short, free, and still the sharpest thing ever written on the subject. Swift adopts the voice of a reasonable economist and follows the logic of colonial extraction to its literal conclusion, complete with costings and recipe suggestions.
The reason it endures is that the satire has no wink in it. He never breaks character, which forces you to be the one who objects.
3. Inferno by Dante Alighieri
The album’s architecture, and worth reading properly if you have only absorbed it secondhand. The gluttons lie in freezing filth under endless rain, guarded by Cerberus, a punishment about appetite producing squalor rather than pleasure.
Dante also ends the poem’s descent with an act of cannibalism, which is not incidental to why Hozier chose this frame.
4. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Sinclair spent weeks inside Chicago’s meatpacking district and wrote a novel meant to make America look at how it treated immigrant labour. What America actually took from it was food safety regulation. He famously said he had aimed at the public’s heart and hit its stomach.
That misfire is the most “Eat Your Young” fact in publishing history. A book about people being consumed by an industry was received as a complaint about the sausages.
5. Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
The modern literalisation. Animal meat has become lethal, so the industry pivoted, and the novel’s horror comes entirely from the vocabulary: the careful bureaucratic language people adopt to keep from saying what the product is.
Swift’s proposal, enacted, with an HR department.
6. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
A father and son walking south through a dead country, and the constant threat is other people who have made the decision this list keeps circling. McCarthy strips the question down to its absolute floor: what separates you from them is a line you maintain by choosing to, every day, for no reward.
The phrase the boy keeps needing to hear, that they are the ones carrying the fire, is the whole book.
7. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
Butler saw all of this coming with unnerving accuracy: a California of walled neighbourhoods, water as a luxury, corporate company towns rebuilt as debt slavery, and a teenage girl building a new belief system while walking north.
It is the most literal answer to “eat your young” on this list, a generation handed a used-up world and asked to be grateful, and the only one that is also about building something.
If You Want the Southern Gothic Version
Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter takes the same idea, love and appetite described in identical vocabulary, somewhere much more intimate. There is a reading list for that too.
For Books That Are Doing Something Underneath
Every book on this list is working on two levels, and the second one is easy to walk straight past.
Bookmark is a free reading app that keeps your place in any book, in any format, whether paper, ebook, or audiobook. It also carries an Author’s Cut: the writer’s own commentary, which unlocks exactly as you reach the passage it belongs to, so a note about the ending simply does not exist until you get there.
It is the closest thing books have to a director’s commentary, and it is free, with no account and no server.
The Book This Site Is Attached To
The Last Bites is a thriller I’m writing now. A chef named Ella, whose career came apart a year before the restaurant she built won its star, gets a call from a warden: a man on death row has requested a last meal, and the dish he named is hers. She has five days, a kitchen that can’t make it, and no idea how he seems to know so much about her while she knows nothing about him.
The first three chapters are free, and they open the moment you sign up.
Or read the premise first.