It is fall in Montana, with low, slanting, afternoon sunlight and evenings tinged with the nip of frost. The languorous days of summer are surrendering to the coming season, another year folding into the longer cycle of my own life.
There are ways to celebrate such days. If I am lucky enough to have shot a few pheasants, I smoke them on a grill all through a long afternoon, and hope that the frost has not yet stopped the squash and tomatoes ripening on my garden’s vines, that a few ears of fresh sweet corn remain. There will be music, hours spent in the afternoon sun with my 1926 Martin guitar and all the fully aged tone I can pull from it, a profound pleasure, and all the stories I can’t pull from it, a tantalizing vexation. I think of a nine-thousand-year-old flute archaeologists recently unearthed in China. It was made from the leg bone of a crane, and it could still play the A-major scale it was built to play, in recollection of the crane’s call. The maker probably hunted the crane as I hunted the pheasants, so I play an A-major scale.
Toward sunset, the food is ready. My wife and I sit, pour wine, and watch the last bit of light shine in our glasses. My attentiveness to the wine’s rich, voluptuous red is far more anciently encoded than my ear for an A-major scale. There is no telling where the food and music end and the sex begins, but it has always been so. Human taste buds, lips, tongues, noses, and genitals all are wired with the body’s most hypercharged sensory equipment, the sharpest cells, called Krause’s end-bulbs. Night deepens on our Montana hillside and we bask in that rarest of human luxuries, pure silence, pure dark, sensuality.
I insist on sensuality. I guard my smoked pheasants, old guitars, and quiet as jealously as any miser guards gold. They can do far more to protect me from what we humans have become: insensate, insensitive, inhuman. For the millions of years of evolution that made us, the ability to fully sense food and sex was the foundation of our humanity and the core determinant of survival. For ten thousand years, those same pleasures have been reserved for a few of us. Complete indulgence of sensuality is rare, and, as a rule, the purview of the rich. For ten thousand years, Homo sapiens has been unable to take its humanity for granted. Those who would resist dehumanization do so by daily staking a claim to it, by self-consciously adopting an aestheticism our hunter-gatherer forebears practiced by simply living. With the advent of agriculture, those qualities that united us—in fact, quality itself—came to divide us. Civilization did indeed modify the human genome, but only slightly, only around the edges. We remain at our genetic core largely what our hunter-gatherer history made us, which is to say, sensual beings. All of humanity at some level still requires the aesthetic. What was invented with civilization was the ability of some to deny sensuality to others.
Because Western tradition pays most of its attention to Western tradition, our foremost examples of the ancient elitism of cuisine comes from the Romans. Details of their banquets are well recorded and, in line with the rules of Krause’s end-bulbs, read like descriptions of orgies, because they were. In her hypnotic A Natural History of the Senses, the poet Diane Ackerman writes:
Romans adored the voluptuous feel of food; the sting of pepper, the pleasure-pain of sweet-and-sour dishes, the smoldery sexiness of curries, the piquancy of delicate rare animals, whose exotic lives they could contemplate as they devoured them, sauces that reminded them of the smells and tastes of lovemaking. It was a time of fabulous, fattening wealth, and dangerous, killing poverty.
The poor were but servants at the banquets.
This arrangement was by no means original to Rome; it already had been well established in the centers of agriculture. By 500 B.C., the kings of the Persian empire were commonly dining daily with about fifteen hundred guests, the nobility of that society. They ate a wide variety of animals, including camels and ostriches. They employed specialized chefs, including bakers, pastry makers, drink mixers, and wine attendants. They drank from gold and silver vessels. One king, Darius III, had as many as four tons of such vessels. Meantime, the diet of the country folks at about the same time and place was “simple and monotonous,” according to one food historian, consisting almost solely of dates and milk from camels, goats, and sheep.
Similarly, the nearby Turkish monarchs thought so highly of cuisine that a pot and spoon became the symbol of their elite military forces, an emblem of a higher standard of living. The Ottomans maintained royal households with four sub-kitchens: one for the king alone, a lesser kitchen for nobility, one lesser still for the harem, and the simplest for the palace staff. At times the Ottomans officially stratified breadmaking, with the most refined flour reserved for the sultan’s bread, middle-quality loaves going to officers, and the coarsest dark bread left for servants.
This hierarchy of cuisine remained the rule in Europe, typified by an Ottoman-like stratification of bread. As the food historian Kenneth Albala writes, “Because it has been the staple of the West, bread preferences are almost always an encapsulation of social climate. In fact, at times, the whiteness and texture of bread have been arranged hierarchically and have matched precisely the structure of society.” But for the peasantry, bread—or one of a few other carbohydrates—was all. The writer Larry Zuckerman observes in The Potato that for French peasants, even into the twentieth century, “Grain was their sustenance, and when it failed, they starved.”
Peasants, of course, also grew the produce for the tables of the rich, and so had firsthand knowledge of what they were missing. Zuckerman cites the memories of French novelist Pierre Gascar, whose grandmother produced goose livers for the pate of upper-class tables:
Following the time-honored practice, she force-fed the birds so that their livers would enlarge. Cruel as this was to the animals, it was also a painful irony for herself, because she performed the chore throughout a life during which she seldom satisfled her own hunger. “It makes you pitiless,” [Gascar] wrote, “when you have to force-feed an animal: It is just, in your eyes, that satiety becomes a punishment.”
Sumptuary rigidity held sway among native agriculturalists as well, arguably more so. The Aztecs were the gourmands of the New World; besides gold, Spanish conquest gave the rest of the world maize, tomatoes, squash, chilies, beans, turkey, a long list of fruit, and, above all, chocolate. Yet the conquerors’ reports of the diet of common folk among the Aztecs speak mostly of maize and a few local meats on feast days, while the accounts of feasts in the court of the emperor Motecuhzoma II are wide-eyed and detailed. The Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún was so taken with what he saw that he took great pains to catalogue Aztec foods, devoting pages to a single banquet. As a result, we have a fairly complete accounting of the royal diet. Maize was a part of it, but only the whitest of maizes. There was a wide variety of fruits, elaborate sauces and spices, and meats, including waterfowl, turkey, venison, and human flesh. The friar dedicates pages to descriptions of casseroles alone, detailing ingredients such as fowl, red chilies, tomatoes, ground squash seeds, yellow chilies, fish, frogs, tadpoles, locusts, maguey worms, shrimp, and unripe plums. He found tamales made of frogs, tadpoles, mushrooms, rabbit, pocket gophers (“tasty, very tasty, very well made, savory, of very pleasing odor”), fruit, beans, and turkey egg, as well as salted tamales, pointed tamales, white tamales, white fruit tamales, red fruit tamales, tamales of tender maize, tamales of green maize, brick-shaped tamales, plain tamales, honey tamales, bee tamales, squash tamales, and maize flower tamales, to name a few. All of this flowed from a complex trade network in conquered regions. Tribute came in the form of a variety of goods, but especially elaborate foods to feed the court.
Friar Bernardino claimed that chocolate, which the Aztecs mostly
took as a drink, was reserved for royalty, specifically male royalty. (The women ate separately, and at the point in the banquet where men drank chocolate, the women’s table got a bit of grain gruel.) Other writers suggest that cacao was so widespread across the Aztec tribute network, which ran south at least as far as what is now Guatemala, that common people must have skimmed a bit along the way. Regardless, chocolate remained a marker of status. Individual cacao beans, in fact, were used as money.
The Spaniards were quick to adopt this strange new drink, and it almost immediately became fashionable among the nobility of Europe. The chocolate fad became so widespread that bishops had to issue decrees forbidding people from drinking chocolate during Mass,
There are some exceptions to the practice of culinary elitism in the civilized world, instructive for what they say about the symbolic importance of food. It was an Arab tradition, for instance, for servant and master to dine together, an expression of a fundamental egalitarianism among early Muslims. Japanese rulers in the earliest part of that island’s civilization eschewed elaborate food, adhering to long-established Buddhist asceticism that, by limiting the attention expended on food, implicitly acknowledged its power. Japan finally did develop an elaborate cuisine during the Edo period, which began in 1639, and most modern Japanese dishes date to then. It developed not among the aristocracy, though, but among the merchant class that arose during that period, a new cuisine tied to a new elite.
The most revealing of the exceptions, however, arises in the Christian tradition and also is rooted in asceticism. The early Christian Church in the Middle East was a slave-class movement, a counterculture to Roman opulence. Thus, as the Romans indulged their bodies, the slaves made a virtue of simplicity and denial of the pleasures of the flesh, developing the body-soul dualism unique to Christianity. In the extreme—and there were many periods of extremism throughout Christian history—it crescendoed into a loathing of the body, expressed in hair shirts and self-flagellation. The drive toward asceticism did not thwart the development of cuisine, but kept pace with it. By the third century after Christ, the church fathers were officially
endorsing fasting as a means of atonement, as well as what would become the abstemious monastic diet. The practice of forgoing meat on Fridays has only recently faded, and Lent is still with us. So is Mardi Gras, though, and so is the tension inherent in all of this indulgence and abstention. The body remains, and won’t be denied.
The feast is probably older than the fast, but just as the fast arose as a religious counterweight, so in turn did features like gluttony, drunkenness, and sexual license take on feastly importance. The word “carnival” is rooted in the Latin word for meat. Kenneth Albala writes:
The most universal feast was held on the day before Ash Wednesday, Martedi Grasso, or Mardi Gras, when all meat and eggs had to be consumed before Lent. This day of meat eating or “Carnevale” often became the occasion for gross indulgence. Drunkenness, flesh eating, violence and sexual license were all associated with this binge preceding the rigors of abstinence. By the late Middle Ages, mock battles would be held between personifications of Carnival and Lent, and the natural order of society would be subverted in mock trials, mock weddings and even mock prayers. Indeed, the world was said to be turned upside down. Gluttony was still considered among the seven deadly sins, though this rule, too, was momentarily suspended.
The best example of Christian dualism at work may well be the Benedictines, an order of monks who at times backslid so thoroughly from the monastic diet that outsiders complained of their inappropriate corpulence. There was some basis for the complaints. The Bendictines spread viticulture through Europe, developing along the way renowned cheeses, pastries and confections, cordials, Chartreuse, vermouth, and champagne (Dom Pérignon). In reaction to such excesses, new monastic orders steeped in asceticism arose, perpetuating the dichotomy within the Church. The asceticism survived in several strains of Protestantism, including the Shakers, the Quakers, and the Puritans, a group that banned all spices on the grounds
that they were sexually arousing. Writes Ackerman, “Food has always been associated with cycles of sexuality, moral abandon, moral restraint, and a return to sexuality once again.”
We use food to set ourselves apart, on religious and moral grounds, certainly along economic lines, but also ethnically, as is nowhere more clear than in the great melting pot, which has not melted as much as we think. Hispanics were called “beaners” just a generation ago, the French were “frogs,” Germans “krauts,” and Italians “spaghetti snappers” or “macaroni heads.” Among bikers, an Asian-made motorcycle is a “ricer.” At the same time, the 1950s era American obsession with the notion of “sanitation” and the hyper-processing of food beyond anything recognizable as once growing or living was a way of removing food—and oneself—from barbarism.
There is nothing new in this. Betty Fussell, in her book The Story of Corn, notes that nineteenth-century settlers in the American Midwest considered the wheat they brought with them from Europe clean and fit to be made straightway into bread, but settlers, unlike the natives, processed indigenous corn into something unrecognizable (as Americans still do). Writes Fussell:
My grandfather prayed in words, because dancing, in his language, was a sin. So was the body, so was all matter. Flesh and blood were of the earth, earthy, corruptible and corrupted, not God’s but the Devil’s work, awaiting the lightning blasts of the Apocalypse and the trumpets of Armageddon. The split between body and soul was as complete as between man and God, Indian and white. In their westward migration, my tribal Presbyterians were aliens among the heathen and fundamentalists among the heretic. As self willed exiles, they could not comprehend a people whose gods were rooted in a particular earth, both patch and globe, as strongly as stalks of corn.
Nor were such sumptuary distinctions between civilized “us” and barbarian “them” limited to the West. In fact, long before the Persians were gourmands, the Chinese linked elaborate cuisine to the heart of their civilization. Chinese mythology held that preagricultural
people ate raw flesh, like barbarians, and so cooking became the very definition of civilization. The more elaborate the preparation, the greater the distance from barbarism. In the sixteenth century B.C., the emperor Tang appointed a cook as his prime minister, and thereafter the proper seasoning and handling of food became a metaphor for good government. One Chinese expression for “seasoning the soup” came to mean “to be a minister of state.” And of course the most sophisticated dishes were concocted for the most elaborately civilized of Chinese, the emperor.
The us/them distinction has played out regionally as well, reflecting and reinforcing regional, political, and ethnic tensions. China, for example, has throughout its history been more or less divided into northern and southern regions that coincide with the country’s two main agro-ecological areas, one growing primarily wheat, the other rice. As the capital periodically shifted between north and south, Beijing and Nanjing, the change in regimes run by northern or southern people brought with it a shift in the ability to set fashions and tastes for the elite, especially in cuisine. Food historian Françoise Sabban writes:
The struggle for preeminence has always been mirrored in the cuisine and food habits of the Chinese. A political exile, for instance, might evoke a specific food to signify his homesickness, and indignation about the injustice he is suffering. Or again, one who has betrayed an unfamiliarity with foods peculiar to the “other” China gives a reason for others to stigmatize his or her ignorance, or naivete or haughtiness. The strong allusive value of some foodstuffs that assumed the rank of regional emblems thus made deep or nuanced comparisons unnecessary.
This use of cuisine to divide arises most clearly in the form of food taboos, which are not wholly cultural artifacts but grew out of the omnivore’s dilemma: we needed to range afield to try new foods, but some of them were toxic. So we learned to identify the toxic ones. This helps to explain both our attraction to sweet foods, sweetness
being a signal for carbohydrates and dense energy, and our aversion to bitter foods, bitterness being a signal for toxins. At the same time, we revel in some bitter foods, such as coffee, tea, and alcohol. Why? One answer I imagine is that if it is the omnivores’ dilemma to live on the edge, we have internalized a certain pleasure in beating the odds, in winning at dietary Russian roulette. Consuming certain bitter foods is a way of celebrating a victory over our environment. Biology offers corroboration for this theory: some bitter foods provoke a powerful endorphin reaction that heightens our sense of taste. Even as our defense systems shout, “Be careful, this is bitter,” the endorphins make us more alert and attentive, and increase our sensual enjoyment as a side effect.
Yet our information about toxins is not entirely the product of personal experience. Often people discovered a given food was toxic because someone else died from it, and others were told. In other words, we are deeply conditioned to pay attention to cultural information about food. If an authority figure tells us a food is unclean, we believe it. This authority can be used for practical purposes. For instance, the raising of swine for food was banned in the Middle East, as, more recently, was coffee use among Mormons, because omnivorous swine ate scarce protein, and coffee, which had to be imported in nineteenth-century Utah, took a heavy toll on resources. That is, the taboos were used to enforce a social good not rooted in avoiding toxins. Taboos could be useful, but just as often they were used to divide people.
Taboos preceded agriculture. Among surviving hunter-gatherers, there remains a widespread belief that we become like what we eat. By consuming a certain animal, the theory holds, we too take on qualities of that animal, which explains why there is still a vigorous Chinese trade in tiger penises. Just as easily, we can become disgusting by eating something disgusting, a useful way to render a whole gender or race or ethnic group or caste disgusting in the eyes of those who do not share a certain habit of diet.
There may be a rationale behind many taboos, but it is hard to imagine what it might be in the case of, for instance, the Hindu prohibitions against all foods offered by an actor, artisan, basket maker,
blacksmith, carpenter, cobbler, dyer, eunuch, goldsmith, harlot, hermaphrodite, hunter, hypocrite, informer, jailer, leaser of land, manager of a lodging, menstruating woman, miser, musician, paramour of a married woman, person who is ill, physician, police officer, ruler of a town, seller of intoxicating beverages, spy, tailor, thief, trainer of hunting dogs, usurer, weapons dealer, or woman with no male relative, as enumerated in the Dharma-Sutra.
Food divides. In its mildest form, it simply reinforces ethnic identification, but the impulse to divide seldom limits itself to the mildest form. Hindus reinforce a brutal caste system with food taboos. Tribalism, racism, prejudice, even genocide are coded in food, and these, unlike poverty or disease, are not artifacts of agriculture. Recall the bands of male chimps wiping out all of their counterparts in a neighboring band. Throughout human history, even beyond human history, we primates have been vicious to any of our own species we could define as “other.” The line dividing us and them can be as arbitrary as skin color, religion, political allegiance, or, in modern times, loyalty to a particular football team. This racism is the downside of what is nonetheless a useful trait in our existence. Evolution tells us it must be useful, or it would no longer be with us. These lines of prejudice are how we reinforce the internal ties of community that hold us together; they are the flip side of social cohesion. We are able to define and defend ourselves as a group by using the concept of “other” to draw the line around us. Food plays a defining role in the cohesion as well.
In contemporary life, the assertion of dietary distinction can be a way of marking one’s individuality within the group, or one’s allegiance with a subgroup. Is there an American urbanite alive who has not waited to order coffee while a twenty-something at the head of the line loudly asked, “Can I have that with soy milk? Was it made with organic bananas? Was the coffee shade-grown? Is the carrot cake vegan?” This is no different from young people’s adoption of other on-the-edge affectations—from piercings and shaved heads to loud music and black clothing—that paradoxically reinforce their place within a group even as they proclaim their rebellion. How many mothers have heard a teenage daughter (vegetarianism is more
common among women) announce that she will no longer be eating the “poison” (meat) served at her family’s table, thereby announcing her emergence into full-blown adolescence? And a mild form of distinguishing herself it is, considering the self-defining and self-defying food maladies available to the modern American. (This avenue is not restricted by age or gender. Once, during lunch break at a weeklong workshop I was attending along with fifty other adults, a man in his fifties, a skinny guy with a beard and long straight hair, marched to the table, examined the goods, and announced to the entire room, “There is vegetarian lasagna here for anyone with a conscience.”)
In the worst cases, this sort of line-drawing reinforces racism and discrimination, while, in lesser cases, it stands as one of modern society’s irritants. This power of food to define is not, however, all negative. We all need to define ourselves, to have a sense of identity.
The Mayan people knew where they came from: they were created by maize, and not just in the sense of “you are what you eat.” The Mayan sacred text, the Popul Vuh, said unequivocally that the gods manufactured the first humans from maize dough.
Likewise, the Pueblo Indians to the north knew of their own maize lineage. They descended from the seed people, particularly the flesh of seven sisters: yellow, blue, red, white, speckled, black, and the youngest, sweet corn. Flute music summoned these seven to gather for a night’s dance; then they departed, leaving their flesh behind. Maidens selected for Aztec sacrifices spent the month before their final day performing a dance in which they shook their hair across their breasts like corn silk, a dance that urged the corn to grow.
Confucius wrote that all he required in life to make him happy was a little rice and water. Christians’ fundamental plea to their god was “Give us this day our daily bread,” and it was not metaphor. They meant bread. Distinctions between royalty and commoners aside, mainstream agricultural people came to define themselves, their very creation and essence, as identical to their central carbohydrate: wheat in Eurasia, rice in tropical Asia, maize in America. This translated to true reverence for the food in question. In places in Eastern Europe, there were still people in the twentieth century who practiced
the long-standing custom of kissing a piece of bread that has been carelessly dropped on the floor. Scrap bread was never thrown to the garbage but fed to animals. Aztec women breathed gently on maize headed for the pot so that it would not fear the fire. This reverence is deep and fundamental, just as it is defining of a person’s culture. Food carries culture.
In the Sierra Madres of northern Mexico one finds entire villages where Nuatal, an Aztec dialect, is still the principal language. Once when I was visiting such a village, a farmer—a poor man, really—invited me into his house. Its roof was supported by a central post that had become a sort of shrine. On it hung a drawing of his household’s saint and a big bundle of ears of dried corn, his seed corn saved from that year’s harvest. The line of corn was as entwined with his family’s line as was the household saint.
The Mexicans in these villages are indeed poor in one sense, but not in another. As noted, a farmer here grows as many as forty different varieties of corn, largely still sorted along the same lines as the Pueblo’s seven sisters: yellow, red, black, blue, white, speckled, and sweet. Each has its season. Each has its preferred place and time of growing. Each is tied to a particular recipe, so a single species sponsors a varied cuisine.
This, however, is only the beginning. These same farmers grow several varieties of squash and beans, and a long list of greens derived from wild chenopods. On a single day, a single farmer took to market plums, black cherries, pears, chilies, prickly pear cactus fruit, amaranth, squash, radishes, lemongrass, thyme, avocado, mamey, fava beans, sweet potatoes, and blackberries, all from a plot of perhaps two acres. Presumably her own table is as varied. The land around grows coffee, turkeys, vanilla, pimienta, plums, nuts, quince, strawberries, and marijuana. The people here use something like 250 species of edible plants. Poor as they may be, these people hate the thought of leaving their villages and going to cities, where they will have to eat what city people eat. City dwellers do not have access to the variety of foods that this rural life has maintained.
In a sense, this is what biologists would call a refugium, a place where a suite of plant and animal life can survive in the face of natural
upheaval like glaciation. This place is a refugium against the dulling monotony of catastrophic agriculture. If agriculture is culture, this is subculture in a truer sense than is signified by body piercings, black clothing, and cacophonous music. It maintains a full complement of foods coevolved with this people over thousands of years. These people still know who they are because their ancestors and those ancestors’ corn still occupy a central place in their lives.
When I returned to Mexico City from the highlands, the newspapers were abuzz with editorials denouncing American corn. Cuisine is not a trivial matter, and editorialists, in Mexico at least, understand this. NAFTA is part of a long series of devices, ranging from the padded horse collar through smallpox and the musket to the multinational corporation, for spreading the dominant culture. The treaty is helping put small Mexican farmers out of business, condemning with them their forty varieties of corn. This variety is replaced in Mexican tortilla factories with the bland American corn bred primarily for feeding livestock, and now Mexicans. It is a bitter pill to swallow. Some won’t swallow it, in Mexico and in like pockets around the world. They are the heroes of this story. They are insisting on their cuisine and, accordingly, staking a claim to their humanity.
It seems to me, then, that I guard my smoked pheasants, old guitars, and quiet for the very same reasons these Mexicans guard their corn.