"Tropical nature left to herself creates foodless jungles and miasmic swamps," a historian wrote at the time.
But both men have bullocky wills: after four nearly foodless days on the road, John Clare eventually reached his wife's cottage, and managed to stay there for a few months.
A Little Richard book is a great icebreaker, and on a foodless flight recently, I asked if there were anything to eat, and the flight attendant gave me a banana.
It is this childhood world that surges forth, as he continues his letter, "full of memories, cricket unexpectedly with brother's huge bat, hardly lift it, loss of railway ticket, fear of whiskered porter, walk home devious ways 10 miles, huge bag, father rampaging on Mrs Rooney's road, mother in furious swoon, police alerted in vain, midnight, foodless to bed … part of boyhood, heroic days".
What metabolic processes enable such a long, motionless, foodless existence for the mother?
"I lay in a backyard in Bow, foodless and drinkless, urinating and defecating where I was," he writes, "treating as hostile the humans in the row houses all around — which wasn't hard".
Whether evoking a family meal so spare it is almost foodless or childhood pranks playing chicken with hyenas, Mezlekia's writing at its finest rests on precisely such "exercises" in "subtle detection".
Paul Williams, a travel consultant at Linden Travel in New York, started advising his clients to pack meals after a foodless day of travel last November.
Is it possible that a co-worker would actually steal the Hot Pocket you brought for lunch and leave you foodless?
"Suddenly, I was homeless, foodless, clothesless," Mr. Mathurin said.
According to the tough British food writer Jane Grigson, Stargazy pie (sometimes spelled "Stargazey") is a Cornish creation traditionally made on Tom Bawcock's Eve, two days before Christmas, commemorating the night on which brave Bawcock went to sea to find sustenance for his foodless hometown of Mousehole.
