Food insecurity is a major issue within the United States. Millions of households experience limited food availability, especially in regions deemed food deserts. Food deserts are geographical regions across the United States that possess limited access to grocery stores or supermarkets, and thus limited access to healthy food options. Individuals living in food deserts are at an increased risk of developing a mental illness, including depression, bipolar disorder, Alzheimer’s Disease, and Attentional Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Mental health is often associated with one’s environment or genetic susceptibility, and treatments are often focused on psychotherapeutic methods and prescription medication. In investigating food deserts and diets characteristic of food deserts, one can begin to make connections between food and mental health. Dietary patterns that exhibit greater concentrations of fats and sugars are associated with many of the symptoms of common mood disorders and are significant in producing biological indicators, like inflammation, which is identified in various neurodegenerative disorders. Brain foods like vitamins and omega-3 fatty acids among others, provide a unique lens into the ways the food and the brain interact, specifically through a concept termed the gut-brain axis. Research surrounding these connections, especially in a newer field called nutritional psychiatry, inform the ways in which researchers, scholars, and medical professionals understand mental health and food insecurity. These connections may also prompt future research in the field focused on food-based treatments and the use of food as a preventative form of medicine.

As a contribution to what has emerged categorically in medieval scholarship as gentry studies, this dissertation looks at the impact the development of obligatory taxation beyond customary dues and fees had on late medieval English society with particular emphasis given to the emergent view of the medieval subject as a commercial-legal entity. Focusing on Middle English popular romance and drawing on the tenets of practice theory, I demonstrate the merger of commerce and law as a point of identification in the process of meaning and value making for late medieval gentry society. The introductory chapter provides an overview of the historical development of taxation and the emergence of royal authority as an institutionalized form of public welfare, or a state. The second chapter examines the use of contractual language in Sir Amadace to highlight the presence of the state as an extra-legal authority able to enforce contractual agreements. The attention paid to the consequences of economic insolvency stage a gentry identity circumscribed by its position in a network of credit and debt that links the individual to neighbor, state, and God. The third chapter explores conservative responses to economic innovation during the period and the failure of the state to protect the proprietary rights of landowners in Sir Cleges. Specifically, the chapter examines the strain the gradual re-definition of land as a movable property put on the proprietary rights of landowners and challenged the traditional manorial organization of feudal society by subjecting large estates to morcellation in the commercial market. The fourth chapter examines the socioeconomic foundations of late medieval English sovereignty in Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle. By dismissing the cultural fantasies of power and authority bound up in the Arthurian narrative, the author reveals the practical economic mechanisms of exchange that sustain and legitimize sociopolitical authority, resulting in a corporate vision of English society. Collectively, the analyses demonstrate the influence the socioeconomic circumstances of gentry society exerted on the production and consumption of Middle English popular romance and the importance of commerce, law, and taxation in the formation of a sense of self in late medieval England.