Jonathan Swift's Baby Recipes: (A Modest Proposal)

            What a busy day working on one research paper for my British Lit. 1600-1700 class.  Oh Jonathan Swift, I think that you are extremely funny with your satire and irony.  I appreciate that at least I have been able to have a good laugh now and then while working with you.  I truly think that your idea to eat children to save the country needs a bit of improvement, maybe exchange children for cows, pigs, goats or other edible animals.  Getting to know you through my paper caused me to get very hungry, but I was way too busy to be able to cook.  Fortunately for me, there is a short Italian guy named “Little Caesar” who prepared a special five buck pizza, plus the cheesy bread.  Yum!  Swift, I thought that our date today would end by now, but I have enjoyed bonding with you so much that I decided to spend the morning with you too.  

            Jonathan Swift's Baby Recipes:  (A Modest Proposal)

"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout." (Swift)

All in all, very snarky, especially for the seventeenth century!  Seriously, the Irish will be happy to tell you that the point was there was rule by the English for the benefit of the English, and conditions were very bad in Ireland.  What Swift was on about was that given the indifference the rulers in England were showing to the welfare of the Irish, they might just as well eat the children to control population and provide food.  The fact that the essay has lasted for three hundred years and is still taught in college says something about the quality of the satire.