Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (21 page)

The heady mix of food, politics and philosophy made the Agora a favourite target of comic poets – the satirical comedians of their day. This extract from Euboulos is typical:

Everything will be for sale together in the same place at Athens: figs, summoners, bunches of grapes, turnips, pears, apples, witnesses, roses, medlars, haggis, honeycombs, chickpeas, lawsuits, bee-stings-pudding, myrtle berries, allotment machines, irises, lambs, water clocks, laws, indictments.
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For Aristotle, the fact that political life was carried out in such a melee was degrading to the lofty ideals of the polis.
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He pleaded for a separate food market to be built in Athens – an arrangement already adopted in some other Greek cities – but his pleas fell on deaf
ears. It seems that most Athenians liked the Agora just the way it was.
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Today it seems both strange and wonderful that Athenian politics were conducted in such a marketplace, yet for a society in which political life was tantamount to a philosophical calling, nothing could have been more appropriate.
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Where better to debate the human condition than in its very midst? The ancient Greeks had no use for ivory towers: for them, privacy was the realm of
idion
, the isolated world of idiocy.
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The true calling of civilised man was
praxi
s, public action, and the Agora was its perfect stage. It was where the idealised conditions of Greek theatre – tragic, satyric and comic – could come to life. Whether Aristotle liked it or not, the Agora was as critical to the functioning of Athenian democracy as the food it sold was to the people it fed. It was
negotiated
space – somewhere the drama of human existence could be played out, in all its chaos, triumph and frailty.

The Agora was unique in its range of uses and meanings, but something it shared with all marketplaces was its potential for comedy. As well as being naturally political, markets are naturally comedic spaces: pageants and parody, oaths and wisecracks are as essential to them as speeches and tedium are to parliaments. Markets in the past acted as the safety valves of cities, places to let one’s hair down and forget one’s sorrows. In Christian cities, that role was never more explicit than during Carnival, a time of Rabelaisian excess common all over Europe in the weeks leading up to Lent, when every bodily pleasure was given one last fling before the annual prohibition. Nothing was taboo during Carnival: kings and beggars wandered around disguised as fools and bishops; people borrowed one another’s clothes, dressed in drag and wore grotesque masks – often with suggestively long noses. Behaving badly was de rigueur: people entered strangers’ houses, insulted one another, or ran about hitting each other with inflated pigs’ bladders or sticks, throwing flour, sugar plums and eggs.
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As the festival’s name suggests (from the Latin
carnis
, meat +
levare
, to put away), meat was
central to Carnival, and the final feast on Shrove Tuesday was described by one seventeenth-century English observer as

a time of such boiling and broiling, such roasting and toasting, such stewing and brewing, such baking, frying, mincing, cutting, carving, devouring, and gorbellied gourmandising, that a man would think people did take in two months’ provision at once into their paunches, or that they did ballast their bellies with meat for a voyage to Constantinople, or the West Indies.
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Butchers’ guilds often played a key role in proceedings, organising competitions and games, and putting on displays such as the Koenigsberg procession of 1583, in which 90 butchers carried a giant sausage weighing 440 pounds through the town. The sausage, like the pigs’ bladders, embodied the many sides of
carnis
at once: carnivorousness, carnal desire, and carnage. Food, sex and violence shared centre stage during Carnival: all the pleasures – and dangers – of the flesh mingled together. It was a popular time to hold weddings, as well as less exalted ceremonies, such as the German custom of harnessing up unmarried women for a highly suggestive public ‘ploughing’ in the market square.
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In his book
Rabelais and His World
, the social historian Mikhail Bakhtin described Carnival as embodying ritual laughter: the archaic tradition in which, as he put it, ‘the serious and the comic aspects of the world and of the deity were equally sacred, equally “official”’.
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Carnival, in other words, was a celebration of ‘otherness’ – all the things that ordinary life suppressed. Urbane respectability was stripped away to reveal its grotesque underbelly, and the depredations of the flesh were celebrated as part of human mortality:

… copulation, pregnancy, birth, growth, old age, disintegration, dismemberment. All these in their direct material aspect are the main elements in the system of the grotesque image. They are contrary to the classic images of the finished, completed man, cleansed, as it were, from all the scoriae of birth and development.
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In Pieter Bruegel’s painting of 1559,
The Fight between Carnival and Lent
, we see the festival at its culmination. It shows a busy market square in which people are going about their daily business: a woman in a white cap sells fish from a basket; another makes pancakes over an open fire; a man hurries along carrying firewood; two children play with spinning tops. All are apparently oblivious to the harlequin in their midst, wandering around carrying a lit torch, even though it is broad daylight. But these figures are all in the background. The main event is in front: a joust between a fat man sitting on a barrel with a pie on his head, and a wizened old ‘woman’ (in fact a man) dressed in a nun’s habit. Both are holding weapons: a sucking pig on a spit for the man; a wooden fish pallet for the woman. Contemporary viewers would immediately have recognised the figures as Carnival and Lent, fighting for the spirit of the marketplace. They would also have known that Carnival would lose the battle, and that his defeat would presage his
mock trial, sentencing and public ‘execution’. The ritual was a convulsive moment in the rhythm of urban life, when fleshliness confronted religious abstention head-on – and lost. But by Bruegel’s day, the ritual itself was under threat from Protestant reformers, who found its pagan violence and licentiousness distasteful. From the mid sixteenth century onwards, the excesses of Carnival (which were, after all, its whole point) were gradually suppressed in northern Europe. People afterwards had to look elsewhere for their fun – had to find new outlets for their ritual laughter.

In London, the comic role was taken up – entirely against its creators’ intentions – by Covent Garden Piazza. Designed in 1631 by Inigo Jones, the piazza was inspired, as its name suggests, by the Italian Renaissance, and with elegant arcaded terraces and the temple-like portico of St Paul’s Church at its western end, it certainly looked the part. Jones and his employer, the 4th Earl of Bedford, were hoping to emulate the success of the Place Royale (now Place des Vosges) in Paris, a speculative development by King Henri IV which had, through his patronage, become the most fashionable square in the city, counting Cardinal Richelieu among its residents.
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To begin with, all went well for the London piazza: the newly completed houses to the north were soon sold off to noble residents. But the scheme had a fatal flaw. Unlike the Place Royale, with its fashionable parades and royal patron, there was nothing much going on in the space. While the Earl was away during the Civil War, fruit- and vegetable-sellers took to gathering there to profit from London’s increasing demand for garden produce; and before long the market was well established – along with its attendant mess. Just 10 years after Covent Garden’s noble residents moved in, they began to move out again, complaining about all the noise and rubbish.

One could see the story of Covent Garden Piazza as a cautionary tale to architects. Inigo Jones should have seen it coming: in his day, open spaces in cities became unofficial markets in a flash – it happened every time the Thames froze over, for example. Jones failed to anticipate the way his piazza would be inhabited, but he did at least produce a magnificent void into which all of London’s life could pour; and pour it did, once the food-sellers had lowered the tone to a suitable level. The piazza was soon popular for football matches, puppet shows and
firework displays, and the area filled up with taverns, ‘hummums’ (Turkish steam baths that were essentially glorified brothels) and coffee houses, the latter becoming the focus of London’s cultural and intellectual life, as well as its bawdier, seedier side. Tom King’s Coffee Shop, perched underneath the portico of St Paul’s, was the notorious haunt of London’s rakes and roués. In William Hogarth’s engraving
Morning
, a group of well-heeled revellers, much the worse for wear, are shown emerging from its doorway at dawn, blearily oblivious to the pickpockets depriving them of their remaining cash.

By the nineteenth century, even Covent Garden’s vegetables had achieved comic status. The market buildings in the centre of the piazza (built by the architect Charles Fowler for the 6th Duke in 1830) failed to contain what was by then the largest fruit and vegetable market in the world. As
Punch
noted, keeping the streets clear was proving well beyond the authorities’ control:

Mud-salad market, like its own vegetables, has now sprouted out in all directions. You may start from cabbage-leaf corner, near the site of Temple Bar, on a market-morning, and may go as far as turnip-top square in Bloomsbury, or cauliflower-place at Charing Cross, and it is all mud-salad market. Houses are barricaded with mountainous carts of green-stuff, cabs lose themselves in vain attempts to drive through the maze of vegetables … while the roads are blocked with waggons, carts, donkey-trucks, and porters struggling under the weight of huge baskets. Carrots, turnips, vegetable-marrows, potatoes, lettuces and onions are masters of the situation.
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Carrots and turnips remained masters of the situation until 1971, by which time the 4,000 or so lorries coming to the market each morning caused a semi-permanent gridlock throughout the whole of central London. The fact that Covent Garden stayed put for as long as it did is testimony to the staying power of markets. Nothing is ever quite the same when they are gone – but if their fabric is preserved, something of their spirit remains. Covent Garden still celebrates its comic past with ‘Punch’s birthday’, held annually on 9 May, the day in 1662 when Samuel Pepys first saw the Italian puppet Pulcinella
(Punch’s ancestor) in the piazza. With his big nose, baton, lack of respect for authority, and violent tendencies, Punch is clearly Carnivalesque. He now plays mainly to children at the seaside, but his annual sermon in St Paul’s Church is an echo of the very adult ‘otherness’ he once brought to the city.
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The same qualities that lent markets so well to comedy also lent themselves to the opposite. Protests, riots and executions often took place in markets, with the theatricality of the arena lending the events heightened significance. The culmination of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt was a case in point. An army of angry countrymen led by Wat Tyler had marched on London demanding an end to a crippling new poll tax. After several days of inconclusive rampaging around the city, Tyler finally came to Smithfield to confront the 14-year-old Richard II and the Lord Mayor, Sir William Walworth. After a public stand-off, the Mayor stabbed Tyler and strung him up outside the church of St Bartholomew, bringing the revolt to a decisive end. It was a major event in English history, but just one of a long litany of hangings, burnings and executions in Smithfield’s violent past.

The thin line between comedy and carnage was often demonstrated by Carnival itself, when its ritualised violence could spill over into the real thing. Carrying weapons during the festival was often banned for that reason; yet, as some civic authorities recognised, controlled rumbustiousness could also have its uses. One such occasion was Carnival in Palermo in 1648, held during a period of simmering tension in the city after a failed harvest. The Spanish viceroy came under pressure from his nobles to cancel the festival for fear that it would spark riots, but the viceroy was cleverer than that. Rather than cancel the festivities, he arranged for them to be celebrated on a more lavish scale than usual. The ruse worked. After several weeks of boisterous revelry, all the tension in the city was dissipated, and order restored.
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Public disorder can be threatening, but it can also have its uses. The trick is in knowing how to deal with it.