This study explores the subtle and complex significance of food and eating in the fiction of contemporary women writers. Sarah Sceats' lively analysis demonstrates that food and its consumption are not simply fundamental to life but are inseparable from questions of gender, power and control. Focusing on the work of Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Michèle Roberts and Alice Thomas Ellis, she makes powerful connections between food and love, motherhood, sexual desire, self identity and social behavior, and engages with issues as diverse as cannibalism and eating disorders.