Near a Thousand Tables (2 page)

FIVE
Food and Rank
Inequality and the Rise of Haute Cuisine

SIX
The Edible Horizon
Food and the Long-Range Exchange of Culture

SEVEN
Challenging Evolution
Food and Ecological Exchange

EIGHT
Feeding the Giants
Food and Industrialization in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Notes

Index

 

Il faut vivre pour manger et ne pas manger pour vivre.

—MOLIÈRE, LE MALADE IMAGINAIRE

What shall I tell you, my lady, of the secrets of nature I have learned while cooking?… One can philosophize quite well while preparing supper. Ioften say, when I have these little thoughts, “Had Aristotle cooked, he would have written a great deal more.”

—JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ, EPÍSTOLA A FILOTEA

And oft I thought (my fancy was so strong) That I, at last, a resting-place had found;

“Here will I dwell,” said I, “my whole life long, Roaming the illimitable waters round; Here will I live, of all but heaven disowned, And end my days upon the peaceful flood.”-

To break my dream the vessel reached its bound; And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.

—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH,
GUILT & SORROW, OR INCIDENTS ON SALISBURY PLAIN

T
he great press baron Lord Northcliffe used to tell his journalists that four subjects could be relied on for abiding public interest: crime, love, money and food. Only the last of these is fundamental and universal. Crime is a minority interest, even in the worst-regulated societies. It is possible to imagine an economy without money and reproduction without love but not life without food. Food, moreover, has a good claim to be considered the world's most important subject. It is what matters most to most people for most of the time.

Yet food history remains relatively underappreciated. Most academic institutions still
neglect it
. Many of the best contributions to its study are made by amateurs and antiquarians. There is no consensus about how to approach it. For some people, it is all about nutrition and malnutrition, sustenance and sickness; for others, less anxious to avoid condemnation for frivolity, it is essentially about cuisine. Economic historians see food as a commodity to be produced and traded. When it gets to the stage of being eaten, they lose interest. For social historians, diet is an index of differentiation and changing class relations. Cultural historians are increasingly interested in how food nourishes societies as well as individual bodies—how it feeds identities, defines groups. In political history, food is the stuff of tributary relationships and its distribution and management are at the heart of power. The small but gallant and growing band of environmental historians sees food as linkage in the chain of being: the substance of the ecosystems which human beings strive to dominate. Our most intimate contact with the natural environment occurs when we eat it. Food is a subject of pleasure and peril.

Increasingly, in recent years—indeed, in some ways since before the Second World War, when the
Annales
school of French historical geography began to teach historians to take food seriously—the diversity of approaches has multiplied the scholarly output and made it harder to synthesize. Today, the materials available to a writer attempting a general conspectus are wonderful but intractable. Following the example of
Annales,
many historical periodicals carry
frequent relevant articles. A specialist periodical,
Petits propos culinaires,
has appeared for more than twenty years. The Oxford Symposium on Food History, established by Alan Davidson and Theodore Zeldin, provided a focus for interested students and a steady output of published transactions. Excellent general histories include Reay Tannahill's
Food in History,
first published in 1973 and still deservedly popular, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat's
Histoire naturelle et morale de la nourriture,
which first appeared in 1987, and the compilation edited by J.-L. Flandre and M. Montanari in 1996,
Histoire de l'alimentation.

Yet the rate at which new material appears makes it increasingly hard even for the best works of previous decades to be satisfactorily updated by periodic revision, Tannahill's book, despite its tide, is determinedly in the “how-we-got-to-where-we-are” tradition and is not much concerned with an aspect of particular interest to many readers: the relationship between food history and history in general. Tous-saint-Samat's work is a wonderful quarry but a sprawling and indisciplined work, chiefly composed as a series of essays on the histories of various foodstuffs. Flandre and Montanari, who launched the most scholarly and professionally ambitious attempt up to their time, only aimed to cover the history of food in Western civilization and its ancient predecessors. Like most volumes by multiple contributors, theirs is endlessly interesting but lacks the coherence of some of its rivals.
The Cambridge World History of Food
appeared late in the year 2000, when the present book was almost finished; together with Alan Davidson's
The Oxford Companion to Food,
which preceded it by about a year, it is invaluable for reference and unbeatable for browsing. But its massive dimensions make it a work
sui generis;
and its greatest strengths are on the study of food as a source of nutrition, rather than culture.

In this book, I aim not to replace other histories of food but to offer readers a useful alternative: to take a genuinely global perspective; to treat food history as a theme of world history, inseparable from all the other interactions of human beings with one another and with the rest of nature; to treat evenhandedly the ecological, cultural and culinary concepts of the subject; to combine a broad conspectus with selectively detailed excursions into particular cases; to trace connections, at every stage, between the food of the past and the way we eat today; and to do all this briefly.

The method I have adopted is to classify the material under the headings of eight great “revolutions”—as I call them—which seem to me, between them, to provide an overview of the entire history of food. This method should have enabled me to be more concise than is possible in traditional approaches which categorize the subject product by product or place by place or period by period. By calling my divisions revolutions I do not mean to suggest they were rapid episodes, narrowly confined in time. On the contrary, though I think it is fair to say that they all began at
particular moments, they all had stuttering starts, long unfoldings and enduring reverberations. The origins of some are truly lost in the vast expanses of prehistory. Some of them started at different times in different places. Some of them began long ago and are still going on. Though I have tried to give my account of them a very broad chronological structure, it should be obvious to readers that my revolutions did not happen in sequence, but overlapped in unpatterned complexity. All of them are in a special sense part of the history of food but have obvious repercussions beyond it, in other aspects of world history. To emphasize these continuities, I try to keep up a program of shifts between past and present, place and place.