Critical eating studies provides an important framework for understanding the construction of whiteness. This methodology allows literary critics to trace the material history of food, its marketing as well as its production, and the metaphorical valence of the body politic. Because of the tense relationship between white racial ideals and bodily pleasure, US literature often juxtaposes purity politics with the desirous, hungering body. This chapter gives an overview of major scholars at the intersection of food, literature, and race (Doris Witt, Anita Mannur, Kyla Wazana Tompkins) as well as readings of works by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Vladimir Nabokov that feature whiteness as an ideal impossible to embody and food as a challenge to its ineffability. Contemporary foodie culture reveals the appropriative impulses of whiteness, while satires by Ben Lerner and Jordan Peele perhaps show the way to bite back against the reign of biopolitical purity.