This double special issue on diet and discourse contains eleven essays that take orality as their theme. As Editor Evelyn J. Hinz writes in her introduction, “here the instrument of speech is allied with the orifice of ingestion.” The topics discussed in this issue cover both the excess and the paucity of food, drink, and eating disorders in a variety of texts, from Lord Byron’s Don Juan, Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” Charles Dickens’s novels, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, and the novels of Michel Tournier.