In 2014, Kara Walker installed a massive sculpture inside an abandoned Domino sugar factory in Brooklyn that was slated for demolition. The sculpture, an enormous sphinx figure in the caricatured form of an African American mammy, was titled A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the Unpaid and Overworked Artisans Who Have Refined Our Sweet Tastes from the Cane Fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the Demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. The sculpture appeared to be the body of a black woman rendered in sugar, and it invited viewers to consider the fraught relationship between race and food. In a similar vein, Catherine Keyser's book Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions examines the relationship between food and race in modernist literature, analyzing the connections among technologies of production, networks of consumption, geographies of experience, and nutrition as a form of identity construction. She explores “modern fiction's movement between sweetness and umami, spectacle and olfaction, abstemiousness and appetite, individualism and enmeshment as writers on both sides of the color line interrogate the stuff that race is (or isn't) made of” (2). She reveals that works of literature invite many of the same considerations as Walker's sculpture about who is the consumer and who is consumed.

The book considers a range of texts that present food as a means of racial transformation, along with the attendant anxieties about race and racism. Jean Toomer's experimental work Cane (1923), for example, uses sugar as an overarching image, and the first chapter of Keyser's book focusses on Toomer's use of a specifically modern form of sugar consumption, carbonated beverages, as a signifier for racial transformation. She explains that Toomer worked at a soda fountain, and he found the mixing of flavored syrups with carbonated water fascinating. Keyser traces the appearances of soda in Toomer's work, and she argues that the mixing of beverages acts as a metaphor for the mixing of races. In the “Bona and Paul” section of Cane, Toomer describes a character as “a purple fluid, carbon-charged, that effervesces” (Cane, 75). Keyser points out that the description evokes an artificially colored soft drink, such as a grape soda, and she writes, “Toomer's choice of soda as a trope for the shifting prism of color consciousness is an inspired one; synthetic colors sparked debates about their natural origins, a potent analogy for race as inheritance or invention that consumed Toomer's intellectual life” (34). In this example, Keyser indicates how a modern foodway functions as a metaphor for racial construction.

The book's remaining chapters extend this analysis to other instances where modern constructions of race intersect with foodways. Keyser examines the fascinating case of Phillipa Schuyler, the mixed-race daughter of George Schuyler who was raised on a raw-food diet and publicly promoted as a prodigy as a way of challenging racist assumptions of the period. Schuyler associated nutrition with utopian societies in his science fiction, but his experiment with Phillipa was much more complicated and, ultimately, tragic. Keyser also explores how Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein describe local foodways among European peasant communities, and she investigates how F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald portray the effects of intoxicants on the white body. In the book's final chapter, she discusses Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy (1948), arguing that these books “document how animals and fruit have been racialized, black people bestialized, and exotic women botanized in a justification of the colonial world order and its pursuit of disposable labor and novel pleasure” (143). Keyser's analysis consistently emphasizes that foodways operate as a set of signifiers for consumption of the other in modernist literature.

In Artificial Color, Keyser offers a fascinating analysis of food and race in modernist literature, and her ideas intersect in interesting and productive ways with Doris Witt's Black Hunger: Soul Food and America (2004), Kyla Wazana Tompkins's Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (2012), and Allison Carruth's Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (2013). Together, these works indicate that food works as a crucial signifier in works of literature because it indicates complex biopolitical relationships involving production and consumption, identity construction, and spatial connection. Keyser's book intervenes in this dialogue in some interesting ways, offering insights into the moments when the boundaries between food and race become porous and open to interpretation.