“Watch Out How that Egg Runs”: Hemingway and the Rhetoric of American Road Food

Abstract

Focusing on Hemingway’s experience before his Lost Generation years, this essay examines the gendered implications of “road food” in some of the Nick Adams stories and looks at how local culinary knowledge can forge both male autonomy and friendships, aiding survival in a world where, as Nick says in “The Battler,” “you got to be tough.”