The categorical separation of food from drugs, of pure food from fermented food—and thereby the creation of newly visible and newly regulated classes of illicit lively materials—at the turn of the century might be best understood as what Deleuze and Guattari characterized as a “macropolitics of society by and for a micropolitics of insecurity.“Tompkins considers four different invocations—in literature, political theory and pornographic art—of a texture she calls “the gelatinous” in order to pursue the implications of this development for thinking race, sexuality and the molecular movements of the everyday. Kyla Wazana Tompkins is a former food writer and restaurant critic. Today, as a scholar of 19th-century U.S. literature with a continuing interest in the relationship between food and culture, she writes about the connections between literature and a wide range of topics: food, eating, sexuality, race, culture, film and dance. Her 2012 book, “Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century,” received the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize from the American Studies Association and tied for the Best Book in Food Studies Award, presented by the Association for the Study of Food and Society. Talk Abstract: Food entered the sphere of the juridical on a significant scale at the turn of the U.S. 20th century, with the passage of the Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Narcotics Act of 1914.