A Natural History of the Senses (22 page)

Companies design potato chips to be too large to fit into the mouth, because in order to hear the high-frequency crackling you need to keep your mouth open. Chips are 80 percent air, and each time we bite one we break open the air-packed cells of the chip, making that noise we call “crispy.” Bodanis asks:

These are high-tech potato chips, of course. The original potato chip was invented in 1853 by George Crum, a chef at Moon Lake Lodge in Saratoga Springs, New York, who became so angry when a guest demanded thinner and thinner French fries that he sliced them laughably thin (he thought) and fried them until they were varnish-brown. The guest loved them, envious fellow guests requested them, word spread, and ultimately Crum started up his own restaurant, which specialized in potato chips.

The mouth is what keeps the prison of our bodies sealed up tight. Nothing enters for help or harm without passing through the mouth, which is why it was such an early development in evolution. Every slug, insect, and higher animal has a mouth. Even one-celled animals like paramecia have mouths, and the mouth appears immediately in human embryos. The mouth is more than just the beginning of the long pipeline to the anus: It’s the door to the body, the place where we greet the world, the parlor of great risk. We use our mouths for other things—language, if we’re human; drilling tree bark if we’re a woodpecker; sucking blood if we’re a mosquito—but the mouth mainly holds the tongue, a thick mucous slab of muscle, wearing minute cleats as if it were an athlete.

Romans adored the voluptuous feel of food: the sting of pepper, the pleasure-pain of sweet-and-sour dishes, the smoldery sexiness of curries, the piquancy of delicate and rare animals, whose exotic lives they could contemplate as they devoured them, sauces that reminded them of the smells and tastes of lovemaking. It was a time of fabulous, fattening wealth and dangerous, killing poverty. The poor served the wealthy, and could be beaten for a careless word, destroyed for amusement. Among the wealthy, boredom visited like an impossible in-law, whom they devoted most of their lives to
entertaining. Orgies and dinner parties were the main diversions, and the Romans amused themselves with the lavishness of a people completely untainted by annoying notions of guilt. In their culture, pleasure glistened as a good in itself, a positive achievement, nothing to repent. Epicurus spoke for a whole society when he asked:

Fighting the enemy, boredom, Romans staged all-night dinner parties and vied with one another in the creation of unusual and ingenious dishes. At one dinner a host served progressively smaller members of the food chain stuffed inside each another: Inside a calf, there was a pig, inside the pig a lamb, inside the lamb a chicken, inside the chicken a rabbit, inside the rabbit a dormouse, and so on. Another host served a variety of dishes that looked different but were all made from the same ingredient. Theme parties were popular, and might include a sort of treasure hunt, where guests who located the peacock brains or flamingo tongues received a prize. Mechanical devices might lower acrobats from the ceiling along with the next course, or send in a plate of lamprey milt on an eel-shaped trolley. Slaves brought garlands of flowers to drape over the diners, and rubbed their bodies with perfumed ungents to relax them. The floor might be knee-deep in rose petals. Course after course would appear, some with peppery sauces to spark the taste buds, others in velvety sauces to soothe them. Slaves blew exotic scents through pipes into the room, and sprinkled the diners with heavy, musky animal perfumes like civet and ambergris. Sometimes the food itself squirted saffron or rose water or some other delicacy into the diner’s face, or birds flew out of it, or it turned out to be inedible (because it was pure gold). The Romans were devotees of what the Germans call
Schadenfreude
, taking exquisite pleasure in the misfortune of someone
else. They loved to surround themselves with midgets, and handicapped and deformed people, who were made to perform sexually or cabaret-style at the parties. Caligula used to have gladiators get right up on the dinner table to fight, splashing the diners with blood and gore. Not all Romans were sadists, but numbers of the wealthy class and many of the emperors were, and they could own, torture, maltreat, or murder their slaves as much as they wished. At least one high-society Roman is recorded to have fattened his eels on the flesh of his slaves. Small wonder Christianity arose as a slave-class movement, emphasizing self-denial, restraint, the poor inheriting the earth, a rich and free life after death, and the ultimate punishment of the luxury-loving rich in the eternal tortures of hell. As Philippa Pullar observes in
Consuming Passions
, it was from this “class-consciousness and a pride in poverty and simplicity the hatred of the body was born.… All agreeable sensations were damned, all harmonies of taste and smell, sound, sight and feel, the candidate for heaven must resist them all. Pleasure was synonymous with guilt, it was synonymous with Hell.… ‘Let your companions be women pale and thin with fasting,’ instructed Jerome.” Or, as Gibbon put it, “every sensation that is offensive to man was thought acceptable to God.” So the denial of the senses became part of a Christian creed of salvation. The Shakers would later create their stark wooden benches, chairs, and simple boxes in such a mood, but what would they make now of the voluptuousness with which people enjoy Shaker pieces, not as a simple necessity but extravagantly, as art, as an expensive excess bought for the foyer or country house? The word “vicarious” hinges on “vicar,” God’s consul in the outlands, who lived like an island in life’s racy current, delicate, exempt, and unflappable, while babies grew out of wedlock and bulls died, crops shriveled up like pokers or were flooded, and local duennas held musicales for vicar, matrons, and spicy young women (riper than the saintliest mettle could bear). No wonder they lived vicariously; giving pause, giving aid, and, sometimes, giving in to embolisms, dietary manias, and sin. Puritanism denounced spices as too sexually arousing; then the Quakers entered the scene, making all luxury taboo,
and soon enough there were revolts against these revolts. Food has always been associated with cycles of sexuality, moral abandon, moral restraint, and a return to sexuality once again—but no one did so with as much flagrant gusto as the ancient Romans.

Quite possibly the Roman empire fell because of lead poisoning, which can cause miscarriages, infertility, a host of illnesses, and insanity. Lead suffused the Romans’ lives—not only did their water pipes, cooking pots, and jars contain it, but also their cosmetics. But before it did poison them, they staged some of the wildest and most extravagant dinner parties ever known, where people dined lying down, two, three, or more to a couch. While saucy Roman poets like Catullus wrote rigorously sexy poems about affairs with either sex, Ovid wrote charming ones about his robust love of women, how they tormented his soul, and about the roller coaster of flirtation he observed at dinner parties. “Offered a sexless heaven,” he wrote, “I’d say
no thank you
, women are such sweet hell.” In one of his poems, he cautions his mistress that, since they’ve both been invited to the same dinner, he’s bound to see her there with her husband.
Don’t let him kiss you on the neck
, Ovid tells her,
it will drive me crazy
.

When the chic, sophisticated Romans conquered the wilds of Britain, their cuisine conquered, too. As Pullar has pointed out, the Anglo-Saxon words “cook” and “kitchen” derive from the Latin, so the Romans no doubt greatly raised the level of sophistication in both spheres. Medieval tastes were still Roman tastes (sweet and sour sauces, spicy, currylike dishes). It was the crusaders who developed a taste for the spices of the East—cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, mace, cloves, and rose attar—as they had for the perfumes, silks, dyes, ornate sexual practices, and other delicacies. The poor Britains lived in squalor and the rich lived in ostentation, holding magnificent feasts in honor of marriages and other celebrations. Many people have written that medieval cooks used a heavy hand with spices to mask the odor of their half-decayed meat, but ladling on the spices was a legacy from the Romans and the crusaders.

Some of the strangest culinary habits arose in England during the eighteenth century, when bored city dwellers became fascinated by sadism, sorcery, and a dungeons-and-skeletons sense of fun. The idea arose that torturing an animal made its meat healthier and better tasting and even though Pope, Lamb, and others wrote about the practice with disgust, people indulged in ghoulish preparations that turned their kitchens into charnel houses. They chopped up live fish, which they claimed made the flesh firmer; they tortured bulls before killing them, because they said the meat would otherwise be unhealthy; they tenderized pigs and calves by whipping them to death with knotted ropes; they hung poultry upside down and slowly bled them to death; they skinned living animals. Recipe openers from the era said such things as: “Take a red cock that is not too old and beat him to death.…” This was all sponsored by the peculiar notion that the taste of animal flesh could be improved if the poor thing were put through hell first. Dr. William Kitchiner, in
The Cook’s Oracle
, cites a grotesque recipe, by a cook named Mizald, for preparing and eating a goose
while it is still alive:

It’s not to my taste, we say, by which we mean a hankering or preference, and it’s amazing how individual taste can be—but only if survival is not at stake. When I worked on a cattle ranch in New Mexico, I used to eat in the cookhouse with the rest of the cowhands, most of whom were Mexican-Americans with little schooling and absolutely no education in nutrition. Their workdays were so arduous that their bodies took over for them, dictating what they needed to survive the physical labor and blinding heat of the day. Each morning, they would eat pure protein—as many as six eggs at once, with two glasses of whole milk, and bacon—for breakfast. Although they drank a lot of water and lemonade, they spurned coffee, tea, or other drinks with caffeine. They ate almost no desserts and very little sugar, but each meal included the hottest of hot peppers. Often they would spread them on bread to make a scalding jalapeño-pepper sandwich. At night they ate lightly, and the meal consisted mainly of carbohydrates. If asked, they would say simply that they ate what tasted good, what they liked to eat, but their taste in food had clearly evolved to fuel the rigors of their life.

This self-protective yen is also true on a larger scale: whole countries prefer cuisines that help them keep cool (in the Middle East), or sedated (in the tropics), or protect them against regional illnesses—as Pete Farb and George Armelagos say in their book which, like Pullars’, is entitled
Consuming Passions
, “Ethiopian
chow
, consisting primarily of chili but containing up to fifteen other spices, has been shown to inhibit almost completely staphylococcus, salmonella, and other microorganisms.” Hot peppers contain high amounts of beta carotene (converted by the body into vitamin A), which has antioxidant cancer-fighting properties, as well as capsaicin, which makes one sweat, lowering the body temperature. Consider the age-old English habit of drinking tea with milk: Tea contains a lot of tannin, which is toxic and can cause cancer, but milk protein reacts with the tannin in a protective way, preventing the body from absorbing it. Esophagal cancer is much higher in countries like Japan, where tea is drunk unadulterated, than it is in England, where
people add a milk buffer to it. Farb and Armelagos describe some interesting additional national cravings: