WRITING THIS BOOK was easy, because the subject’s time had come. In the early 1980s it suddenly seemed essential, in order to look at ourselves anew, to take advantage of the point of view that food provides. Why do we eat what we eat, and where does it come from? What does each ingredient do for us, mean to us? What human choices and efforts have been made in order for it to land on our plates? What should our food bring to mind if we are to be fully aware of ourselves, our history, our politics, and our surroundings? These were clear and insistent questions. My own need to find out the answers, and the research I undertook to satisfy it, resulted in Much Depends on Dinner. The book is about food, but it is first and foremost about ourselves.
Since this book first appeared there has been an explosion of writing about food. Just why we have become so fascinated, and so recently, by this subject remains a matter for reflection and further understanding. Human beings have always loved eating, of course. It is the great flood of writing about it that is new, and typical of our own culture. Food used to be thought too “low” a subject for intellectual rumination, a merely animal pleasure, a necessity that, once we had secured sufficient supplies of it, was too obvious and too crude for discussion in public. True, eating was introduced into plays and stories, but only incidentally, or when a dinner scene was useful for dramatizing the characters of its participants or to move the plot along. Many climactic actions in fiction occur at the dining table—in Shakespeare for example, or in Dickens—but the food itself is almost never the point of any scene. It is mentioned, and the characters eat it, as they wear clothes or converse, largely in order to make themselves convincingly real. Nowadays, people conduct vast amounts of research into the eating habits of the Elizabethans or the Victorians—scholarship that the people under investigation would have found deeply curious, even disturbing. Who might we be, to be so interested in what they ate?
Eating, in earlier times as now, was part of family togetherness, of festivities of all kinds, and every town had its gastronomic specialties. But people did not normally think any of these subjects worthy material for essays or book-length treatment. There were exceptions, but they seem to us surprisingly few, as any modern food historian will attest. Recipe books were published, especially from the eighteenth century on, as instruction manuals. These were commonly assumed to be the only writings about food that could conceivably interest the public. I remember proposing Much Depends on Dinner to a publisher who rejected it on the grounds that I had written about food without offering any recipes.
Today, “food writing” has become a literary genre. Entire books are written on single food items—on mustard, on strawberries, on oysters. Novels are constructed around recipes and eating behaviour. Memoirs can turn out to be largely chronicles of food eaten. Recipe books themselves, with added commentary and narrative, have become bedside reading material. Recipe compilers unhappily suspect that their work is seldom actually used in the kitchen.
We are members of a consumer culture. Consume is from a Latin word that meant “destroy,” “waste,” or “exhaust,” and then “devour.” Consumption in English now refers to the human activity of taking what we want from nature. We have been culturally induced to be fascinated by all the things—not only the foods—that we buy and consume. We go on to question their significance, to notice their image-enhancing power. And we feel a compelling need to put all this into words, to comment on it if we can. The reason includes our awareness that things unnoticed, meanings taken in subliminally, can both influence our behaviour and suggest information about ourselves to others in ways we have not consciously chosen; we do well, then, to keep our awareness and our defences up and ready.
Eating is not only biologically necessary; it is socially significant as well. A medieval king would be assured by elaborate ceremonies performed before dinner by food tasters (whose job it was to die if the food turned out to be contaminated) that he was not being poisoned. He was flattered by the attentions ritually paid to his safety, by the open recognition that his health was of enormous significance to those around him. Food is inevitably both physical and cultural. It feeds, but it also expresses human intentions, hierarchies, social strategies, and relationships. This fact is as true today as it ever was. But the practice, now common, of recounting human history through the medium of food focuses our attention on the hard work and inventiveness that are always required to ensure a regular supply of nutrition. This interest is part of a modern democratic impulse, a preference for concentrating on the essential contributions made by ordinary people rather than on the prestige of kings.
The story of food includes greed and selfishness when those who are already well fed keep and will not share their plenty; the generosity and delight that eating can express; the art with which food is prepared; the beauty of the fruits of the earth in themselves and in their presentation; the power of eating together to unite people, to reconcile them—or to rouse them to violence. Food constantly draws mythology to itself, as well as imagination and creativity. The spectacles of human ingenuity and obsessiveness that it affords are admirable, and also frequently amusing: the frantic posturings of advertising, the careful rejections of specified foodstuffs for cultural reasons, the quasi-sacred status of spaghetti or beer or rice where they are central to whole systems of civilization. All this has been revealed in our day to be crucial to understanding human behaviour in general.
Food is now part of the “package” that is tourism. What people eat has until recently depended on where they live—the produce of the land around them, and the traditions of their culture. Food systems, and the culinary arts, are expressions of place and time. Nowadays, the affluent among us move about, grazing over the face of the earth and sampling the results of centuries of cultural endeavour. Food has become entertainment, and something worth reading about; people “consume” the culture of others. Thoughtful tourists want to understand what has gone into the composition of other people’s art forms, to be inspired by and to learn from them. Part of the experience is supplied by eating what is on offer, attempting to imagine what it means, and finding out where it came from and how it has been prepared. The tourists’ “hosts” meanwhile try to discover what it is their “guests” are after, and how to please them. The original, the authentic, in an age of globalization, have become rare and therefore increasingly what are sought. Problems arise among providers of “authentic” experience as to how to be different yet acceptable, how to provide food that is “typical” and “special” but not too offensive to the cultural categories of visitors.
Food expresses space, and how we eat is also symptomatic of our attitude to “taking time.” People who live in huge modern cities have a great deal of what is edible available to them all year round. They love to eat—but have “no time” to cook. “No time” is what constrains modern culture, as difficult transport or lack of medical science used to limit people’s lives in the past. So the modern rich might own “trophy” kitchens—large and glittering with technology, but rarely used. They might also buy glossy recipe books but regularly heat up food bought ready-prepared, or dine in restaurants. Lack of time to prepare and cook a meal has become commonplace; nor can we always find sufficient time to take pleasure in eating our food. Significant changes like these have themselves become matter for analysis and reflection—and for further articles and books.
Appetite is of course a food word, and another key to understanding the modern fascination with food as something to read and write about. No matter how much we eat for dinner, within a few hours we find our desire for food returning, as strong as ever, or stronger. Wanting to eat can stand for all of desire. We love reading about food pardy because words for it are always concrete to us, and vivid to our imaginations: they easily make us feel hungry. Writers about food, then, have a subject that is intrinsically attractive, even to jaded readers. And food in itself is rarely an offensive topic, unless we are talking about things disgusting—a word to do with taste (gustare) and therefore with food. And even disgust can produce a pleasurable frisson, provided it arises only from the written page.
But food and eating have also become tightly implicated in peculiarly modern forms of guilt. Maintaining their ancient connection with questions of greed and limit, they confirm our fears that modernity has gone too far, consumed too much: the original meaning of the word consumption, namely “destruction,” has come home to haunt us. Much Depends on Dinner, the chronicle of a simple meal, includes therefore the consideration of massive modern environmental problems, as well as the questions of just distribution, of gratitude, and of respect that arise whenever we think honestly about food as the sustenance of life.
Genetic engineering was in its infancy when I wrote this book. People had not yet begun to inject fish genes into strawberries to make them resistant to cold, or to sow genetically altered plants among conventional crops, thereby modifying the original crops as well, with consequences that cannot be foreseen. Genetic interventions are often motivated by desires for human convenience and leave the rest of nature out of account. The market for new manipulations evolves almost daily; there is no keeping up with it. People have learned meanwhile to doubt that large industrial companies place the common interest first among their priorities. And “Science” continues to show contempt for everything not itself—a barbarous principle wherever it is found.
Much Depends on Dinner attempts to look at many different aspects of our relationship with our food: it ranges from the physical to the artistic and the moral, from the delightful to the ridiculous or the sobering, from human behaviour in ancient times to our present responsibility for the future. Reading about food is a form of entertainment, but is also, and increasingly, an essential part of a modern education. We survive on our food supply, and eating behaviour is implicated in a great deal of human culture: much depends on dinner. But the very existence of what we eat, now as never before, is contingent on our own foresight, our ethical understanding, and our behaviour. Dinner depends on much.