There is a Vietnamese saying which roughly translates as ‘A morsel of food is like a morsel of shame’, for the offer of food can be as much an expression of contempt as of generosity.—Annabel Doling
‘FOR WHAT IS FOOD?’ queried Roland Barthes, immediately replying: ‘It is not only a collection of products that can be used for statistical or nutritional studies. It is also, and at the same time, a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behaviour.’
Tourists in Rome can go to St Peter’s and make their confessions in any language—including Esperanto, the so-called universal language. Esperanto might hope to supply the words, but the universal medium of communication is food.
Words are still important, but food—in its widest sense, including drink—provides the inspiration. Everyone has opinions, experiences, memories of food, and all are equally valid; food is the democratising influence par excellence. At a dinner in France that threatened to be as boring as a university lecture on logic—the aperitif conversation consisted of an alphabetic recital of the various départements and the corresponding numbers on car registration plates—I introduced the topic of food, based on what we were eating and about to eat. Eventually it animated the whole table, and I heard the wartime recollections of a sprightly grandmother who, with sparkling eyes (accompanied by flashes of jealousy in those of her husband), told of the illicit chocolates she kept in a drawer with her illicit nylons, and how she rationed them—and how the rats discovered her treasure before she had managed to consume it all.
In the Languedoc village of Nizas (population: 391; attractions: medieval château, now a winery), I was introduced to the wild asparagus that grew under the disused railway line, the wild capers that were pickled in late spring, and the wild leeks that sprang up amongst the vines and opened the opportunities for communication. ‘You’ve never eaten poireaux sauvages?’ asked one of the tribe of black-suited old men who would pass by our house on their morning rounds. ‘Don’t you have wild leeks in Australia?’ Early one morning one of the old men (we never reached the intimacy of introductions, so had to bestow our own names; this one we called Poireau Sauvage) brought a bundle of wild leeks and told me how they should be prepared. There was only one way, and that was to trim them, boil them until tender, dress with oil and vinegar, and eat them lukewarm as a first course. I did as instructed, and next day offered him a taste. That exchange initiated a kind of relationship. These village elders were fascinated by les étrangers, the foreigners, and came to learn as much about Australia as we did about Nizas. It was almost incomprehensible to them that there should be a country where wild leeks were not part of the landscape, where sheep looked after themselves without the constant care of a shepherd, where villages were 50 rather than five kilometres apart. We might as well have come from outer space as from the other side of the globe. Without that spark of a common interest in food, how much poorer would be my understanding of Nizas and its inhabitants!
People who are interested in food, and who care about what and how they eat and drink, are generous with it, and generous by nature. Travelling in Normandy, near Mayenne, I was given a lift by a farmer who incidentally asked whether I had ever drunk the local speciality, bottle-fermented cider, cidre bouché. To my negative, he wheeled round and stopped in front of a very ordinary-looking service station. ‘She’s never had cidre bouché,’ he offered, by way of explanation; so we sat down and drank a bottle. By then, it was nearly midi, so he invited me to lunch at the farm. But first, we had to make a detour to a certain épicerie to buy another Normandy speciality, camembert—this particular one made by his mother-in-law. Dinner was roast leg of lamb with green beans, plus the cheeses, fruit and patisseries—all leftovers, I was told, of a First Communion feast of the day before. And so I learnt about the ritual of the First Communion, on the first Sunday in May, and its family significance, and the associated traditions of eating and drinking. I learnt about camembert and Normandy cows, and the grass that grows overnight, and the symbiosis of cows and apple trees. And I learnt that people who enjoy eating and drinking and talking with honest gusto are rarely inhibited or hypocritical or cheerless.
All food carries a meaning, whether through symbolic associations or through the way in which it is used to deliver a message. The ornamental sugar and marzipan sculptures of Renaissance banquets represented Love, or Peace, or the union of two powerful families. Different dishes, often richer and more elaborate than our everyday fare, are offered to welcome and honour guests. Green salads with an abundance of fresh herbs announce spring, and a pot of steaming soup in the centre of the table signifies generosity, an invitation to share. A golden soufflé can be an expression of love, an overdone chop a demonstration of disaffection. On learning that Matisse was staying to dinner, Gertrude Stein’s cook, Hélène, who had taken a dislike to the artist, retorted: ‘In that case I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of eggs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand.’ And of course, the refusal of food is the ultimate statement of distrust, rebellion or autonomy.
Symbolic significance can be individual or universal, or both. For me, puftaloons (fried scones) say Queensland, because it was always my father who cooked them then saturated them in golden syrup, while telling us about his Queensland boyhood, which included puftaloons. Sea urchins I associate with the Mediterranean, because the first one I ever ate was on a beach near Palermo. These personal meanings are subsumed into a larger scheme in which meat is associated with masculinity, roast meats carry a higher prestige than boiled or stewed, and any sort of bubbly wine intimates a celebration.
It is because food is nuanced at different levels that banquets can make statements, taking advantage of the symbolic attributes of particular foods—and the more complicated the message, the deeper the symbolism. Cookbook author Claudia Roden once described a wedding reception in Italy where an ornate, towering, multi-tiered wedding cake was wheeled into the salon for guests to admire and applaud—while in the kitchen behind, another, more ordinary cake was being cut up and packed into special little take-home boxes. Here, symbolism was all—the cake itself had been hired for the occasion, the pasticceria offering several models from which to choose. Similarly, the decorative pieces sculpted from ice or margarine—perhaps in form of a coat of arms, or a state emblem—are pure symbolism, having no edible function whatsoever. But artefacts such as these, however impressive, are only accessories; their message is limited. It is only when we take the food into our bodies and incorporate it, together with its values and meanings, that its meaning can be realised.
Gastronomy, said Brillat-Savarin, ‘examines the effect of food on man’s character, his imagination, his wit, his judgement, his courage, and his perceptions, whether he be awake or asleep, active or at rest.’ He expressed the general idea more succinctly in the best-known of his aphorisms: Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es—Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are.
It’s trite, and a generalisation, but has validity. It’s a maxim that can be applied at many levels. Most simply, it says that nationalities or regionalities can be differentiated on the basis of national or regional diet or food preferences: I like cheese and milk chocolate, therefore I am Swiss; he eat lots of barbecued beef, he is Argentinian. At a deeper level, eating habits are identified with national character. Indeed, some of the most clichéd images of a country are those which associate particular national characteristics with typical national foods. Australian apathy in the late nineteenth century was blamed on a monotonous diet of meat, bread and tea, as Francis Adams wrote in The Australians: A Social Sketch (1893).
The horrible condition of the coatings of stomachs perpetually drenched with tannin (speciously termed ‘tea’) doubtless counts for something in the action and reaction of body and climate, climate and body.
After a good spell of drought, endured on a diet of mutton, bread, jam, and stewed Bohea, one’s indifference to life becomes all but complete.
There is nothing wild or hysterical about it.
It is merely a profound and passionless heedlessness of danger and death.
Perhaps perceptions depended on the diet of the writer, for Marcus Clarke, writing at about the same time, saw a meat-centred diet producing slightly different characteristics in Australians. Meat-eaters, he said, are ‘rash, gloomy, given to violences’. In one of his essays he even ventured a portrait of ‘The Future Australian Race’, based on the Australian appetite for meat:
The custom of meat-eating will square the jaw and render the hair coarse but plentiful. The Australasian will be a square-headed, masterful man, with full temples, plenty of beard, a keen eye, a stern and yet sensual mouth. His teeth will be bad, and his lungs good. He will suffer from liver disease, and become prematurely bald; average duration of life in the unmarried, fifty-nine; in the married, sixty-five and a decimal.
The conclusion of all this is, therefore, that in another hundred years the average Australasian will be a tall coarse, strong-jawed, greedy, pushing, talented man, excelling in swimming and horsemanship. His religion will be a form of Presbyterianism; his national policy a Democracy tempered by the rate of exchange. His wife will be a thin, narrow woman, very fond of dress and idleness, caring little for her children, but without sufficient brain power to sin with zest. In five hundred years—unless recruited from foreign nations—the breed will be wholly extinct; but in that five hundred years it will have changed the face of nature, and swallowed up all our contemporary civilisation.
Belief in the power of food to influence personality has waxed and waned. In the years immediately after the first world war, meat-eating was often linked to aggression and violence. The determining influence of food on character was a strong tenet of the Italian Futurist movement, spearheaded by Marinetti. In the Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine of 1930, Marinetti declared:
Though we recognise that in the past, men who have eaten badly or crudely have still been able to achieve great things, we proclaim this truth: one thinks one dreams one acts according to what one has drunk and what one has eaten.
Marinetti’s passion was directed against pasta, which for centuries has been associated with Italians. In his view, pasta produced ‘lassitude, pessimism, and a tendency to inactivity, nostalgia and neutralism’, which conflicted with ‘the mental vivacity and passionate, generous, intuitive soul of the Neapolitans’. Calling pasta ‘an absurd Italian gastronomic religion’, Marinetti campaigned for its abolition.
If there have been heroic fighters, inspired artists, orators capable of moving crowds, brilliant lawyers, determined farmers, it is in spite of the voluminous dishes of daily pasta. And it is because of eating it that they become sceptical, ironic and sentimental—characteristics which often constrain their enthusiasm.
The English writer Norman Douglas, who lived in Italy for many years, contributed an outsider’s view. In Old Calabria (1915) he named envy as the Italians’ most conspicuous native vice and attributed it to their meagre breakfast.
Out of envy they pine away and die; out of envy they kill one another. To produce a more placid race, to dilute envious thoughts and the acts to which they lead, is at bottom a question of nutrition. One would like to know for how much black brooding and for how many revengeful deeds that morning thimbleful of black coffee is responsible.
However reasonable Brillat-Savarin’s saying appears, perhaps it would be wrong to take it too literally. It seems so natural that ‘you are what you eat’, in a figurative sense, that it is tempting to let the matter rest at the level of popular culture and folk wisdom, in the assumption that the relationship is one of simultaneity rather than one of causality. You can believe in its validity without pursuing the reasons why. Perhaps it works best as a literary device, allowing novelists to portray characters through what and how they eat and cook. Readers will recognise ‘Mrs Jones’ when they learn that she buys tinned peas and carrots, margarine and mincemeat, uses instant coffee and prepares it in a microwave. Mrs Williams can be nothing else but ‘plump and jolly’ after you read, in Marion Halligan’s short story ‘The Marble
Angel’, that ‘she cooked big roast dinners and steak-and-kidney puddings and light-as-air sponge cakes with strawberry jam and cream’.
It is tempting to leave it there, yet epidemiological studies show that butchers father more sons than daughters, a result interpreted as the result of a greater consumption of meat, and hence a greater supply of testosterone. Research indicates that different diets produce different body smells, that fragrances can modify mood, and that pheromones (present in certain wines and certain foods, such as truffles) can influence patterns of behaviour. So perhaps Norman Douglas and Francis Adams were hinting at a deeper reality when they associated caffeine and tannin with envy and pessimism—and perhaps Brillat-Savarin was exceptionally perceptive, not to say prophetic, when he invited our dietary confessions.
It all goes to show that food is far more than ‘a collection of products that can be used for statistical or nutritional studies’. As our medium of expression as well as a way of reading others, it is undoubtedly a universal language.