Just while I was so troubled and bewildered by all that was happening, my old schoolmate Bighead Ding, on his way to a conference in Beijing, stopped off in Suzhou to see me. It was eight years since we’d met and I was overjoyed. “You must come out to dinner, we can go to our restaurant,” I said, a little surprised at myself wanting to take people out to dinner as soon as I saw them. It wasn’t like me.
He shook his head. “Thanks, but I’ve been there and I’ve read the posters. Tell me what you have been doing all these years.”
“What have I been doing? Well, just hold on a bit and I’ll tell you all about it.” I called my wife in and introduced Ding to her.
Ding bowed. “I’m Ding Zhen, Bighead was my nickname.… But don’t tell anybody else. I’m a manager just like you.”
My wife smiled, scrutinizing his head as if trying to determine whether or not it was really bigger than average.
“Don’t stand there gaping! Why don’t you go and buy some food?” Ding had already been to my restaurant and I didn’t want to become a laughing stock by taking him to another one. I’d better ask my wife to make something at home.
During the two years we’d been married my wife hadn’t cooked very much. All she could do was give him tea and cigarettes and say, “You two chat for a while. Mother has gone to a neighbourhood committee meeting. She’ll get you something when she comes home.”
The neighbourhood meetings were always marathons. The food market would be closed by the time she finished. “Why don’t you cook something today? You can’t depend on Mother all the time.”
“Have you forgotten?” she retorted. “You always say young people mustn’t spend time on cooking if they want to get ahead. This ambitious young woman doesn’t know where the oil is.”
Ding burst out laughing. “I’ll bet that’s exactly what he said, so let him take the consequences.”
“All right, then go and tell Mother we have a guest and ask her to come back.”
After she went out I began to unburden myself, starting right at the beginning. “You’ve read those posters. One of them was a personal attack by a young man. The rest were about my work. Where have I gone wrong in these reforms? You know what it was like in the old days. I have been working to eliminate that kind of wrong. Now those posters are attacking me for doing just that. But I haven’t done anything bad.”
Ding fell silent, inhaling deeply on his cigarette. He was probably very troubled too.
“Well say something! You’re well read, you’ve been working in a bookstore all these years. Pick up a book and give me a thump on the head. You’d better choose a hardcover one and give me a really good whack.”
Ding laughed. “That’s no good, it’ll spill your brains out. I would, however, like to draw your attention to a strange physiological phenomenon. It seems that the palate of the bourgeoisie is similar to that of the proletariat. The capitalists prefer shrimp to shredded meat and cabbage, and once they’ve tasted them, so do the proletariat. So when they’ve got the money they order shrimp, but you keep pushing shredded meat and cabbage at them. I’m surprised they haven’t come after you with a hammer!”
I blew up. “You can’t live on shrimp.”
“Of course you can’t; who can afford to do that?” he retorted.
“But we get so many people, you mustn’t underestimate bad tendencies, comrade.”
“It’s you who’ve underestimated them. They’ve got money now. If one out of a hundred wants shrimp, that’s enough to fill your restaurant to bursting. You keep rattling on about liberating the working people, but then you think they’re not up to your expectations. People want to eat shrimp now and again and are quite happy to let you make a little profit, but this grates on you.”
“It certainly does not! I don’t have anything against them.”
“I know you don’t like that Zhu character, but what can you do about him when he shuts himself away?”
“He doesn’t hide himself away entirely.”
“Of course, a lot of people other than the working masses will be eating shrimp. I’ll tell you: even when the landlords and capitalists have been eliminated, you’ll still have hooligans and thieves among your customers, even escaped murderers.”
I believed him. You needed an official letter and an ID card to get a room in a hotel, but only money to go to a restaurant. “You’re right,” I sighed. “But I still think frugality is one of our national virtues. Why should we place so much emphasis on food?”
“I know, and from your personal point of view it’s a fine thing. I hope you’ll keep on being frugal. But you’re a restaurant manager and you can’t bring all your personal feelings into your work. Suzhou cuisine is famous; it’s something created by labouring people over a long period of time. If you destroy it history will hold you responsible.”
I went cold. My schooling had taught me the importance of history. I would get nowhere if I resisted historical trends. Anyway I doubted that this cuisine was something created by labourers; it was obviously invented by people like Zhu and Kong.
On top of that, my mother shouldn’t have given us such a lavish supper, five dishes and a delicious soup.
Ding was all smiles. “Look, this trend is sneaking into your home! You’d better watch out!”
—from The Gourmet, 1982,
translated from the Chinese by Readers International
CHAPTER THIRTY
What Does It Mean?
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS ON THE IDEA OF ROTTEN
What each society understands by “raw,” “cooked” and “rotten” can only be determined through ethnographical observation, and there is no reason why they should all be in agreement about the definitions. The recent increase in the number of Italian restaurants in France has given French people a taste for raw food in a much “rawer” state than was traditional with us: the vegetables are simply washed and cut up, without being prepared with an oil and vinegar dressing, according to the usual French custom—except for radishes, which, however, are significantly felt to require a generous accompaniment of butter and salt. Through Italian influence we have, then, extended our category of the raw. Certain incidents which occurred after the Allied landings in 1944 show that American soldiers had a broader conception of the category of the rotten than the French; under the impression that the Normandy cheese dairies stank of corpses, they sometimes destroyed the buildings.
—from The Origin of Table Manners, 1968,
translated from the French by John and Doreen Weightman
MARGARET MEAD ON THE MEANING OF FOOD
We live in a world today where the state of nutrition in each country is relevant and important to each other country, and where the state of nutrition in the wealthy industrialized countries like the United States has profound significance for the role that such countries can play in eliminating famine and providing for adequate nutrition throughout the world. In a world in which each half knows what the other half does, we cannot live with hunger and malnutrition in one part of the world while people in another part are not only well nourished, but over-nourished. Any talk of one world, of brotherhood, rings hollow to those who have come face to face on the television screen with the emaciation of starving children and to the people whose children are starving as they pore over month-old issues of glossy American and European magazines, where full color prints show people glowing with health, their plates piled high with food that glistens to match the shining textures of their clothes. Peoples who have resolutely tightened their belts and put up with going to bed hungry, peoples who have seen their children die because they did not have the strength to resist disease, and called it fate or the will of God, can no longer do so, in the vivid visual realization of the amount and quality of food eaten—and wasted—by others.
Through human history there have been many stringent taboos on watching other people eat, or on eating in the presence of others. There have been attempts to explain this as a relationship between those who ar
e involved and those who are not simultaneously involved in the satisfaction of a bodily need, and the inappropriateness of the already satiated watching others who appear—to the satisfied—to be shamelessly gorging. There is undoubtedly such an element in the taboos, but it seems more likely that they go back to the days when food was so scarce and the onlookers so hungry that not to offer them half of the little food one had was unthinkable, and every glance was a plea for at least a bite.
In the rural schools of America when my grandmother was a child, the better-off children took apples to school and, before they began to eat them, promised the poor children who had no apples that they might have the cores. The spectacle of the poor in rags at the rich man’s gate and of hungry children pressing their noses against the glass window of the rich man’s restaurant have long been invoked to arouse human compassion. But until the advent of the mass media and travel, the sensitive and sympathetic could protect themselves by shutting themselves away from the sight of the starving, by gifts of food to the poor on religious holidays, or perpetual bequests for the distribution of a piece of meat “the size of a child’s head” annually. The starving in India and China saw only a few feasting foreigners and could not know how well or ill the poor were in countries from which they came. The proud poor hid their hunger behind a facade that often included insistent hospitality to the occasional visitor; the beggars flaunted their hunger and so, to a degree, discredited the hunger of their respectable compatriots.
But today the articulate cries of the hungry fill the air channels and there is no escape from the knowledge of the hundreds of millions who are seriously malnourished, of the periodic famines that beset whole populations, or of the looming danger of famine in many other parts of the world. The age-old divisions between one part of the world and another, between one class and another, between the rich and the poor everywhere, have been broken down, and the tolerances and insensitivities of the past are no longer possible.
But it is not only the media of communication which can take a man sitting at an overloaded breakfast table straight into a household where some of the children are too weak to stand. Something else, something even more significant, has happened. Today, for the first time in the history of mankind, we have the productive capacity to feed everyone in the world, and the technical knowledge to see that their stomachs are not only filled but that their bodies are properly nourished with the essential ingredients for growth and health. The progress of agriculture—in all its complexities of improved seed, methods of cultivation, fertilizers and pesticides, methods of storage, preservation, and transportation—now make it possible for the food that is needed for the whole world to be produced by fewer and fewer farmers, with greater and greater certainty. Drought and flood still threaten, but we have the means to prepare for and deal with even mammoth shortages—if we will. The progress of nutritional science has matched the progress of agriculture; we have finer and finer-grained knowledge of just which substances—vitamins, minerals, proteins—are essential, especially to growth and full development, and increasing ability to synthesize many of them on a massive scale.
These new twentieth-century potentialities have altered the ethical position of the rich all over the world. In the past, there were so few who lived well, and so many who lived on the edge of starvation, that the well-to-do had a rationale and indeed almost a necessity to harden their hearts and turn their eyes away. The jewels of the richest rajah could not have purchased enough food to feed his hungry subjects for more than a few days; the food did not exist, and the knowledge of how to use it was missing also. At the same time, however real the inability of a war-torn and submarine-ringed Britain to respond to the famine in Bengal, this inability was made bearable in Britain only by the extent to which the British were learning how to share what food they had among all the citizens, old and young. “You do not know,” the American consul, who had come to Manchester from Spain, said to me: “you do not know what it means to live in a country where no child has to cry itself to sleep with hunger.” But this was only achieved in Britain in the early 1940s. Before the well-fed turned away their eyes, in the feeling that they were powerless to alleviate the perennial poverty and hunger of most of their own people and the peoples in their far-flung commonwealth. And such turning away the eyes, in Britain and in the United States and elsewhere, was accompanied by the rationalizations, not only of the inability of the well-to-do—had they given all their wealth—to feed the poor, but of the undeservingness of the poor, who had they only been industrious and saving would have had enough, although of course of a lower quality, to keep “body and soul together.”
When differences in race and in cultural levels complicated the situation, it was only too easy to insist that lesser breeds somehow, in some divinely correct scheme, would necessarily be less well fed, their alleged idleness and lack of frugality combining with such matters as sacred cows roaming over the landscapes—in India—or nights spent in the pub or the saloon—at home in Britain or America—while fathers drank up their meager pay checks and their children starved. So righteous was the assumed association between industriousness and food that, during the Irish famine, soup kitchens were set up out of town so that the starving could have the moral advantage of a long walk to receive the ration that stood between them and death. (The modern version of such ethical acrobatics can be found in the United States, in the mid-1960s, where food stamps were so expensive, since they had to be bought in large amounts, that only those who have been extraordinary frugal, saving, and lucky could afford to buy them and obtain the benefits they were designed to give.)
The particular ways in which the well-to-do of different great civilizations have rationalized the contrast between rich and poor have differed dramatically, but ever since the agricultural revolution, we have been running a race between our capacity to produce enough food to make it possible to assemble great urban centers, outfit huge armies and armadas, and build and elaborate the institutions of civilization and our ability to feed and care for the burgeoning population which has always kept a little, often a great deal, ahead of the food supply.
In this, those societies which practiced agriculture contrasted with the earlier simpler societies in which the entire population was engaged in subsistence activities. Primitive peoples may be well or poorly fed, feasting seldom, or blessed with ample supplies of fish or fruit, but the relations between the haves and the have-nots were in many ways simpler. Methods by which men could obtain permanent supplies of food and withhold them from their fellows hardly existed. The sour, barely edible breadfruit mash which was stored in breadfruit pits against the ravages of hurricanes and famines in Polynesia was not a diet for the table of chiefs but a stern measure against the needs of entire communities. The chief might have a right to the first fruits, or to half the crop, but after he had claimed it, it was redistributed to his people. The germs of the kinds of inequities that later entered the world were present: there was occasional conspicuous destruction of food, piled up for prestige, oil poured on the flames of self-glorifying feasts, food left to rot after it was offered to the gods. People with very meager food resources might use phrases that made it seem that each man was the recipient of great generosity on the part of his fellow, or on the other hand always to be giving away a whole animal, and always receiving only small bits.
The fear of cannibalism that hovered over northern peoples might be elaborated into cults of fear, or simply add to the concern that each member of a group had for all, against the terrible background that extremity might become so great that one of the group might in the end be sacrificed. But cannibalism could also be elaborated into a rite of vengeance or the celebration of victories in war, or even be used to provision an army in the field. Man’s capacity to elaborate man’s inhumanity to man existed before the beginning of civilization, which was made possible by the application of an increasingly productive technology to the production of food.
With the rise of ci
vilizations, we also witness the growth of the great religions that made the brotherhood of all men part of their doctrine and the gift of alms or the life of voluntary poverty accepted religious practices. But the alms were never enough, and the life of individual poverty and abstinence was more efficacious for the individual’s salvation than for the well-being of the poor and hungry, although both kept alive an ethic, as yet impossible of fulfillment, that it was right that all should be fed. The vision preceded the capability.
But today we have the capability. Whether that capability will be used or not becomes not a technical but an ethical question. It depends, in enormous measure, on the way in which the rich, industrialized countries handle the problems of distribution, or malnutrition and hunger, within their own borders. Failure to feed their own, with such high capabilities and such fully enunciated statements of responsibility and brotherhood, means that feeding the people of other countries is almost ruled out, except for sporadic escapist pieces of behavior where people who close their eyes to hunger in Mississippi can work hard to send food to a “Biafra.” The development of the international instruments to meet food emergencies and to steadily improve the nutrition of the poorer countries will fail, unless there is greater consistency between ideal and practice at home.
—from “The Changing Significance of Food,”
American Scientist, 58, March–April 1970
PLATO ON THE ART OF COOKING
Choice Cuts Page 46