Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [296]

“Oh, no I don’t,” she protested. She sat up straight, almost stiff, her lunch forgotten for the moment. … I bit into a piece of acorn bread that was full of dried fruit and nuts. It’s a favorite of mine, but I managed to chew and swallow without tasting it. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 296

Note

The narrator spends a sentence on the texture of food in the middle of an argument about whether the community will be massacred — the dried fruit and nuts are lovingly catalogued and then cancelled by “without tasting it.” That’s grief displaced into appetite. Jo’s body language (“almost stiff”) at this point in the exchange also anticipates the rigidity described a few paragraphs later, so the scene’s physical vocabulary is consistent.