To begin, we need to establish two things. First: the contemporary idea of virtue and decency was both (preferably, upper)middle-class and English. Second: eating is a deeply intimate experience, sensual and invoving letting a substance enter the borders of the body and make its influence upon it.
In the context of this Victorian vampire story, the act of consumption comes in three forms: proper, that is familiar food bringing no distress, improper, belonging to “exotic” people with assumed near-savagery, and, finally, anti-human drinking of blood.
The anxiety in the book first opens in association with food - the narrator, reportedly, hears howling dogs and has strange dreams, blaming it on a dish he ate when “leaving the West and entering the East”. Further, he is fed the food prepared in a vampire’s lair, being in Draculs’s power, it seems, completely, and then has his first encounter with Dracula’s brides, the perverse women feeding in a perverse manner.
When Dracula arrives at the British land, his corrupting influence is displayed through the very act: Lucy, needing the more life essence of others’ the more under his influence she is, Mina, who is shown to be forced into drinking his blood, Renfield, a miserable pawn, is compelled to consume the lowest of creatures, distanced from his humanity.
It all is in a stark contrast from the food we see protagonists choose of their own volition in fighting for their freedom and, really, their Western state free of oriental and vampiric corruption: the tea at an Aerated Bread Company establishment. Keep in mind that late Victorian era is when people start commonly understanding the idea of microorganisms, of pathogens. In striving for cleanliness, a process was invented in which bread can be produced without yeast and fermentation, and with decreased human contact through the elimination of hand-kneading. A dramatic opposite: food that is devoid not only of corruption, but also is bestowed a higher degree of virtue from “barbarous” (a Victorian journal’s words, not mine) methods of the past and of foreign lands.
Ergo: you can directly follow the incorruptibility, a XIX century take on it, anyway, of the characters by the consumable substances they are surrounded with.
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