Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (34 page)

Although ritual slaughter is not practised by Christians, the idea that sacrifice is both necessary and redemptive remains embedded in the religion. Christ’s ultimate sacrifice is remembered through the Eucharist, a re-enactment of the Last Supper, when Christ bade his disciples eat bread and wine as symbols of his body and blood. Of course, the sacrifice is also celebrated at Easter, a feast preceded by the ritual fasting of Lent. Although modern observance of Lent often consists of only modest acts of self-denial (such as the giving up of chocolate or alcohol), Easter nevertheless derives much of its spiritual power from the period of abstinence that precedes it.

Although Easter is the most spiritually significant festival in the Christian calendar, the feast itself has long been outstripped in secular popularity by its rumbustious counterpart, Christmas. A joyous feast that embraces the pagan spirit of the winter solstice, Christmas has always been an excuse for a jolly good knees-up: the sort of revelling and abandon capable of banishing the dark and cold of a deep, black winter’s night. Although early Church fathers called for fasting during Advent, the practice was less rigorously observed than during Lent, and was never common in the Protestant north, where the natural privations of winter ensured Christmas would have plenty of festive impact. Those of us for whom those privations no longer exist can find the obligation to make merry during the ‘festive season’ something of a trial, even oppressive. Christmas for many in modern Britain has dissolved into a non-stop noshathon devoid of spiritual significance – and, as many of us discover each year, roast turkey with all the trimmings rather loses its appeal when one has spent the previous month stuffing oneself with sausage rolls and devils-on-horseback at various Christmas parties. Even in the secular world, abstinence has a part to play in the enjoyment of a feast.

As Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin observed almost two centuries ago, if one is not properly hungry, one can’t properly eat. Yet hunger, even of the mildest sort, is something most of us rarely experience in the
West. The nearest many of us come to fasting is when we go on a diet; an act that, whatever it might do for our waistlines, does little for our positive mental outlook. Nothing is more calculated to reduce us to a state of miserable, food-obsessed isolation: very different to the cathartic experience of ritualised communal fasting.
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For most people in history, fasting has been a spiritual act; not a desperate attempt to rectify overindulgence. The preciousness of food made eating a highly conscious process; every meal an occasion to give thanks. Yet few of the meals we eat today recognise the provenance of our food, let alone its importance. Most of the time we eat distractedly, even grumpily; either while doing something else, or wishing that we were. We graze, we nibble, we bolt our food – even when it does manage to claim our attention, few of us are truly grateful for what we are about to receive. The only time most of us think before we eat is when we find ourselves confronted by table rituals derived from the past; from a time when famine reigned more often than plenty.

Life, death, sacrifice, rebirth – the eternal subjects of every religion – lie at the heart of all ritual feasting, and whether or not we believe in a god or gods, they are implicit in every meal we eat. Every culture has its own table rituals, yet their great diversity pales in comparison with their far more striking affinity. The rituals of food transcend doctrine, myth or belief: they carry deeper messages, about life itself. Nothing could speak more eloquently of our basic commonality: of what it means, in the end, to be human.

There is no preparation so sweet to me, no sauce so appetising, as that which is derived from society …

We are omnivores, which means that the ritual sharing of food goes deep into our past. Our hunter-gatherer forebears had to find ways of distributing the spoils of the hunt equably among themselves, and the fellowship of those far-distant meals resonates with us still. Although
modern lifestyles have made solitary meals increasingly common, we generally prefer to eat in company.

Few acts are more expressive of companionship than the shared meal. As the Latin derivation of ‘companion’ indicates (from
cum
‘together’ +
panis
‘bread’), someone with whom we share food is likely to be our friend, or well on the way to becoming one. Eating among friends instils a powerful sense of well-being in us, arousing primitive emotions of which we are barely aware. In the final scene of Charles Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
, Bob Cratchit and family sit poised to tuck into an enormous turkey, sent round unexpectedly by Bob’s miserly, but now repentant, employer Scrooge. As we contemplate this heart-warming scene, we cannot help but feel the future happiness of the Cratchits is assured, and that, by extension, all is well with the world. Splendid dinners such as this, fictional or otherwise, exert a powerful influence over us, creating a paradigm against which all other meals are judged.

Sharing food with those to whom we are closest is a primal act, but as people who grew up in a large family can testify, the rules of engagement still have to be learnt. Restraint at table is a cultural, not a natural skill, and when we are young, we can be tempted to deprive our siblings of the juiciest slice of beef, the largest piece of cake. Watch a pride of lions eat, and you get some idea of what table manners are covering up. The default state of wild animals is hunger; the satisfaction of that hunger a basic instinct. When hunting animals share a kill, they eat warily but fast, with the more powerful animals getting the ‘lion’s share’. That is not to say that animals do not have elaborate strategies for sharing food (they do), or that animal parents do not regularly deprive themselves of food in order to feed their young (ditto). But in the animal world, the right to eat, like the right to mate, usually depends on the display of individual power. While good for speeding up the effects of Darwinian evolution, this approach to food-sharing could scarcely be called civilised. Yet its principles lie under the surface whenever people share food too.

In his 1910 essay ‘Sociology of the Meal’, the sociologist Georg Simmel touched on the primitive underpinnings of shared meals.
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Hunger, he argued, brings people together by necessity at certain times and in certain configurations, making the common meal the most
potent ordering device in society. Inclusion or exclusion at such gatherings is socially defining; yet the civility of the table is just a veneer to mask the real motive of the meal: the satisfaction of individual selfishness. Whether or not one signs up to Simmel’s somewhat misanthropic view, there is no doubt that in human society, power and status have a large part to play in determining what, when, how much and with whom one gets to eat. Merely to sit at table confers a certain status: in order to eat, someone has to cook; in order to be seated at table, somebody must serve. All meals, however humble, have an implicit hierarchy, in which diners enjoy a higher status than those who cook and serve their food. Since cooking and eating occupy complementary positions in the social order, that means that the social and gender divisions of the kitchen translate – in reverse – to the table. Everyone has to eat; but the history of dining has been dominated, like society itself, by men, and powerful ones at that.

Long before Brillat-Savarin made his most famous observation – that you are what you eat – the essential tribalism of the table was well understood.
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We are hard-wired to feel close to those with whom we share food, and to define as alien those who eat differently from us. The tribal nature of food is clear from the frequency with which it has been used by one nation as a term of abuse for another, as in ‘Frog’, ‘Kraut’, ‘Rosbif’ and ‘Limey’. The latter reference, from the British practice of carrying lime juice aboard ship to avoid scurvy, is pertinent. Food rituals have always been integral to life at sea, as a way both of boosting morale, and of ordering the social and fighting hierarchy of warships. Nineteenth-century gun crews ate together at tables slung between their weapons, taking turns to serve each other from the ship’s galley. The natural camaraderie of the table was thus transferred directly to the fighting effectiveness of the ship: men who ate their meals together worked better as a team and would more readily die together.

The power of shared meals to forge human bonds makes their context particularly significant. Beyond the table, a series of questions arises. Does the meal have a ‘purpose’ other than the mere feeding of those present? Who is allowed to attend? Whose table is it anyway? The answers to these questions, and to others like them, hold the key to food’s influence in society. In ancient Greece, Zeus himself was the god
of hospitality, and no crime was considered more heinous than the betrayal of trust at table. Participation in a
xenia
, a friendship meal, bound host and guest together in a bond of loyalty close to that of kinship – even the diners’ descendants were forbidden to fight one another in battle.
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All of which would have made Homer’s description of Agamemnon’s return from the Trojan Wars doubly horrific to the audience of his day. The hero was murdered at his own table, slain by his wife’s cowardly lover Aegisthus, who had plotted to murder his superior opponent by laying on a feast for him and attacking him as he ate.
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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’.
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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.

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

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.