The Introduction explores precisely what is meant by the terms hunger and appetite, asserting the vital importance of these drives to both collective and individual identities and to the structure of social formations. It argues that critical analyses of food in early modern literature have tended to marginalise the significance of hunger, with attention to those who lack largely confined to the topics of riot and rebellion. It emphasises the fact that the interrelation of hunger and appetite was an abiding concern of early modern discourse. It argues that these drives provided a means of conceptualising the changes affecting early modern society, while allowing the depiction of imaginary solutions to the problems which those changes produced.