Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  Above all else, the shared meal is a social tool; open to manipulation, use and abuse, gestures of friendship or betrayal. Paradoxically, some of the easiest meals to ‘read’ in these terms can be elaborate feasts such as those held at the Inns of Court. However arcane their rituals, one at least knows what the main purpose of such meals is: to reinforce the prestige, traditions and fellowship of the Inn. The message is clear. But the social dynamics of private hospitality can be far more ambiguous, as the etymology of the words ‘host’ and ‘guest’ suggest. Both derive from the Indo-European ghostis (stranger), from which the Latin hostis (stranger, enemy) comes: the root of our word ‘hostile’.22 That the words host and hostile should share a common root may seem odd until one considers that it is the act of hospitality itself that binds people together; that can turn strangers – and potential enemies – into friends.

  Table Talk

  After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relatives.

  Oscar Wilde23

  Good table manners may be unnecessary for survival, but they can be critical to social acceptance, which comes close to the same thing. Nothing short of blasphemy is more guaranteed to give offence than rudeness at table, and gestures that can seem innocent enough to us can cause mortal offence to others, especially when we share food with those from another culture. You would be unlikely to seal a business deal in Japan, for instance, if you tried to pass someone food with your chopsticks – always assuming you had the skill to commit such a transgression in the first place. The way we touch food at table is a matter of convention and varies greatly from one culture to another. In India, for instance, it is polite to eat food with one’s fingers, whereas in our own culture it is considered the height of bad manners. The social historian Margaret Visser cites the case of one American businessman whose career took a nosedive when his son attended a formal dinner and proceeded to eat spaghetti by scooping it up with his hands.24 Such catastrophic misdemeanours are not merely comic; they can be offensive, even threatening. As Visser points out, part of the function of table manners is to ensure mutual conformity, to reassure one’s fellow diners that one is not about to perform some transgressive act – like Agamemnon’s murderer – when they are at their most vulnerable.25 Eating is a serious business; table rituals a cultural expression of the fact.

  Manners have always been more than a question of ‘the way you hold your knife’, as Ira Gershwin once put it. Above all, the table is a social space, and learning to behave there is as much an exercise in communication as anything else. It is not only lawyers who can benefit from being lucid, companionable, and good at listening – these are skills we could all benefit from, and it seems that the table is where we learn them best. Several recent studies have linked many of the social ills of modern British youth – short attention spans, inability to listen, fidgetiness, depression – to the fact that children no longer eat regularly with their elders. A 2001 survey found that three quarters of British families have abandoned regular meals, and that one in five never sit down together to eat.26 No wonder, then, that a recent study of pre-teens eating in restaurants found that 20 per cent were using their fingers more than the cutlery – ambitious parents of spaghetti-eating progeny beware.27 But the likelihood of British youths blighting their futures, or those of their parents, by manhandling pasta is as nothing compared to the handicap their lack of social skills is likely to cause. With children spending increasing amounts of time plugged into iPods, MySpace and other personalised universes, many are failing to acquire even basic social skills, such as how to listen, communicate and share. The process is starting ever earlier too: one recent report found that parents were turning increasingly to ‘electronic babysitters’ (children’s television programmes) during mealtimes, so that even toddlers are being left to eat on their own. Forget learning how to hold a knife – at this rate, the next generation will be struggling to hold a conversation.

  But perhaps the most crucial outcome of learning to eat properly is that of developing a healthy relationship with food itself. Long before the age of the nuclear family, mealtimes formed an essential part of a child’s upbringing. Children were rarely if ever given a choice of menu, so they were faced either with eating what was put in front of them, or going hungry – a process that over time accustomed them to accepting their given diet. British children today have a greater choice of food than ever before, yet perversely many refuse to eat most of it, sticking to just a few dishes – often highly processed ‘kiddie’ foods – they have grown used to. This apparent paradox is explained by the fact that children need to be taught how to eat. Unless they are encouraged to try different foods from an early age – a process that can take up to 14 attempts – they can develop food aversions and a resistance to new tastes that will last into adulthood. Seen in this light, the British habit of feeding children special foods – often blander or sweeter than their adult counterparts – is at best unwise, at worst downright harmful. In failing to educate our children’s taste buds, we are breeding a generation with little or no sense of their own food culture – and few defences against a food industry keen to sell its products to them.

  The idea that you have to feed children special food is unheard of beyond the Anglo-Saxon world. The Indian food writer Madhur Jaffrey has talked of her love as a nine-year-old child for hot mango pickle, while children in most parts of Europe are expected to eat adult food from an early age, both at home and at school.28 Three quarters of French families still eat regular meals together at table, and French school meals commonly consist of four courses – including one of cheese – that children sit down to eat together.29 Children in France and Italy are also encouraged to drink a little diluted wine with their meal from an early age. Feeding young children hot pickle and alcohol might seem like irresponsible parenting to the British mindset, but in reality it is the reverse. Early exposure to adult foods teaches youngsters healthy eating habits that will stay with them all their lives. A childhood taste for spices is arguably preferable to the Anglo-Saxon lust for salt, sugar and fat; while the habit of drinking a little wine with food from an early age is generally acknowledged as the best defence against a later addiction to alcohol. The fact that drinking in order to get drunk is almost unheard of in Italy – despite the fact that wine there is often cheaper than water – is a constant source of puzzlement to the British, yet it is the direct result of Italian food culture.

  Manners Maketh Man

  Let us not drink and eat everything merely to satisfy our belly, like the persons whom we name parasites or flatterers.

  Athenaeus30

  Some aspects of table manners, such as not licking shared utensils, being greedy, or coughing up one’s food, are simple common sense. One does not want to disgust one’s fellows, deprive them of food, or threaten their meal with contamination. However, other matters of etiquette (the correct use of a grapefruit spoon, how to dispose of an artichoke) are rather more complex. In the same way that dinner invitations can be used as social weapons, table manners can be used as a second line of defence by the powerful against those they wish to exclude. As one Victorian etiquette manual put it, manners are ‘the barrier which society draws around itself; a shield against the intrusion of the impertinent, the improper, and the vulgar’.31

  Whenever dining has been socially important (and there have been few periods in history when it hasn’t), knowing how to eat properly has been an essential social skill. In ancient Athens, for example, meals generally consisted, as they do in modern Greece, of individual pieces of bread (sitos), dipped into shared dishes known collectively as opson: the taramasalata and hummus of our day. Then, as now, the success of the meal depended on everyone taking their fair share and no more: opsophagia (guzzling opson) was considered a major sin. Socrates was so outraged by one man’s greed that he called on his neighbours to watch him ‘to see whether he treats the sitos as opson, or the opson as sitos’.32 In ancient Athens, greed at table could bring you more
than dirty looks: it was seen as a clear sign of moral corruption, and to be branded an opsophagos was enough to ruin a political career.33

  In times of great social mobility, manners have also taken on huge significance. For the bourgeoisie of the Italian Renaissance, knowing how to throw a dinner party was matched only in importance by knowing how to behave at one – and the undisputed guide was Il Libro del Cortegiano, written by Baldassare Castiglione in 1528. In describing the life of a courtier, Castiglione penned the ultimate manual for the socially aspirant, listing the various accomplishments – urbanity, swordsmanship, conversational skills and, of course, exquisite table manners – essential to courtliness. But the defining feature of courtliness, according to Castiglione, was an effortless grace unique to those of proper breeding, and a sprezzatura (contempt) for those without it. Ostensibly aimed at courtiers, the book was naturally avidly devoured by just about everyone else in the hope that its wisdom would gain them access to the highest social circles; a vain hope, since the very effort it took them to get there would automatically exclude them.

  A significant counterblast to this elitist approach came from the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, whose 1530 De civilitate morum puerilium (On the moral civilising of boys) argued that all boys, not just those of the nobility, should be trained to eat properly at table. For Erasmus, table manners were fundamental to the civilising process; valuable in that they recommended morality ‘to the eyes of men’.34 Good manners should be accessible to all, for ‘no one can choose his own parents or nationality, but each man can mould his own talents and character for himself’.35 In Erasmus’ hands, table manners became a passport to self-betterment, and the openness of his approach ensured that De civilitate enjoyed widespread popularity, remaining a standard school textbook all over Europe until well into the nineteenth century.

  That table manners should have aroused such passions in the class-bound societies of the past is perhaps understandable, yet they have by no means been limited to such social milieux. Even in the supposedly meritocratic democracy of 1920s America, the debutante Emily Post made a career out of terrorising her fellow Americans over such questions as whether to serve their guests soup in two-handled cups or bowls (the latter was ‘never’ done at luncheon, apparently) or whether it was polite to pass food to one’s fellow guests at table (it wasn’t).36 As well as instructing readers on how to give immaculate dinner parties, Post taught them how to recognise when their hosts were failing to come up to the mark. ‘To eat extra entrées,’ she wrote, ‘Roman Punch, or hot dessert is unknown except at a public dinner or in the dining room of a parvenu.’37 Yet despite her fondness for faultless manners, Post was an Erasmusite at heart, believing that they could – and should – be acquired by everyone: ‘Manners are made up of trivialities of deportment which can be easily learned if one does not happen to know them; manner is personality – the outward manifestation of one’s innate character and attitude toward life.’38

  A daunting sight for any parvenu. A formal table setting from Emily Post’s Etiquette in Society, 1922.

  Even in eat-off-your-lap Britain, manners retain significance. ‘Having dinner with the Queen’ was the dream–nightmare scenario with which my generation was shamed by our parents into behaving properly at table, and despite British dining habits since having largely followed the path of increasing entropy, such an honour remains a real, if distant, possibility for the highest achievers among us. At the very top of the social tree (and despite the revelation that Her Majesty’s breakfast table is graced with Tupperware), the distinctions of table manners in Britain remain terrifyingly intact.

  Political Dining

  Read the historians, from Herodotus down to our own day, and you will see that there has never been a great event, not even excepting conspiracies, which was not conceived, worked out, and organised over a meal.

  Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin39

  The table is where the politics of food are at their most explicit. Apart from the problem of getting oneself invited to the right meals, there is always the hierarchy of the table itself. For the lawmaker Solon, the symbolism of the table made it a natural tool with which to shape Athenian democracy, and he bade the standing committee dine regularly together in public to express their equality. In 465 BC a special dining chamber, the Tholos, was built in the Agora for the purpose. It was the only round building there: a deliberate sign that the committee was sharing a humble meal together, not engaging in the privileged couched dining of the symposion. From King Arthur and his knights to the parliamentary chambers of contemporary democracy, the political symbolism of the round table is familiar to us: the gathered circle implies equality and friendship. But not all political dinners in history have been that equitable.

  Roman dinners were ruthless exercises in one-upmanship. Guests were arranged strictly according to rank, with the most important placed next to the host on his right, and the rest taking their places accordingly. The food served was often hierarchical too: the equable sharing inherited from the Greeks was swept away in imperial times by the need to entertain on a lavish scale, which, for those who struggled to afford it, led to serving inferior dishes to lower-ranked guests as a compromise. The practice disgusted Pliny the Younger, who wrote, ‘I serve the same to everyone, for when I invite guests it is for a meal, not to make class distinctions.’40 However, Pliny was in the minority: for the majority of Romans, making class distinctions was precisely what dinner was about.

  As famous fictional dinners go, Petronius’ account in his Satyricon of dinner with Trimalchio is up there with the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Long considered a gross parody of the truth, the account is now thought to be somewhere close to reality. Trimalchio, a notorious social climber, is trying to impress his guests with a feast that lasts all night and includes, among other things, a wooden hen that lays pastry ‘eggs’ with tiny birds inside, a hare dressed up to look like Pegasus with wings attached, and a wild boar with date ‘acorns’ dangling from its tusks, surrounded by cake ‘piglets’.41 Each dish is presented as a coup de théâtre: the boar, for instance, arrives with a fanfare, and a pack of hounds is set loose to run around the room while the beast is carved by a ‘huntsman’ slave. Throughout the meal, guests are regaled with a running commentary by their monstrous host, who even manages to spoil the effect of his own dinner by admitting that the boar had been offered to guests the night before and refused. The evening descends into debauchery, with diners peeing freely into vases, farting, and having sex with anything that moves.

  Whatever the accuracy of the Satyricon, historic descriptions of Roman civic feasts (convivia publica) make Trimalchio’s excesses seem pardonably modest. One banquet given by the emperor Vitellius is described by Suetonius as ‘the most notorious feast’, involving ‘two thousand magnificent fish and seven thousand game birds’, plus a dish dedicated to the goddess Minerva that ‘called for pike-livers, pheasant brains, peacock brains, flamingo-tongues, and lamprey-milt; the ingredients collected in every corner of the Empire’.42 As Roman palates became increasingly jaded – and the Empire depleted – the city’s feasting became more and more theatrical. Guests seated at imperial banquets far enough away from the emperor could even find themselves being served fake food, reducing them to mere props in the display. As produce poured into Rome’s great maw, respect for food was replaced by a hunger for novelty and excess unmatched even in the post-industrial West. Although individuals battled with their consciences, conspicuous consumption in public became mandatory.43 The fact that many ordinary Romans lived in fear of starvation simply added to the drama of excess. When food loses its social value, it also loses the ability to bring people together – and to civilise.

  Conspicuous consumption in the ancient world was by no means limited to Rome. King Solomon slaughtered 22,000 oxen at the dedication of his temple, while the ninth-century BC king Assurnassipal of Assyria dedicated his palace with a 10-day feast for 69,000 guests.44 Such epoch-making blowouts served th
e dual purpose of emphasising the importance of the rulers who gave them, while currying the favour of their subjects – a principle that extended to the catering of royal households until medieval times. In fourteenth-century England, Richard II kept a staff of 300 to feed the thousand or so who ate at his table. Communal dining was also typical of noble households of the period, when lord and family, guests, servants and pets would all gather together in the great hall for the sort of chuck-the-bones-to-the-dogs feasts beloved of early Hollywood. However, by mid century, it was becoming more common for noblemen to eat separately from their retinues, a development lamented by William Langland in Piers Plowman:

  Wretched is the hall … each day in the week

  There the lord and lady liketh not to sit.

  Now have the rich a rule to eat by themselves

  In a privy parlour … for poor men’s sake,

  Or in a chamber with a chimney, and leave the chief hall

  That was made for meals, for men to eat in.45

  The new division soon spread to civic feasting, so that instead of sharing food with their subjects, rulers took to eating in front of them. Much as gods in the ancient cities were fed sacrificial food, the public feeding of monarchs – who increasingly claimed divinity – came to represent their subjects’ well-being by proxy. The Habsburg kings dined in public four times a year from 1548; Henry VIII dined from time to time in a ‘presence chamber’; and although his daughter Elizabeth I never dined in public, the ceremony was performed every day as if she did, with the Queen’s place being laid at table ‘with the utmost veneration’ and her food served as if she were present.46 Yet as the historian Roy Strong described in his book Feast, even this dumb show was as nothing compared to what was going on in France. At the death of Francis I in 1547, a meal was served to the king’s coffin, while a wax effigy (complete with moving parts) was set up in a salle d’honneur, where it was ritually fed until the king was buried.47 The public feeding of French kings, both alive and dead, went on until the Revolution. Louis XIV’s meals at Versailles, whether taken in public (au grand couvert) or in private, took on ever greater ceremonial complexity: for instance no fewer than 15 high-ranking officers were required to serve the king’s meat.