Near a Thousand Tables (12 page)

Liebig's was an enterprise typical of an age which tried to reduce everything to science: at about the same time, Constable claimed that painting was science; Laplace convinced readers that love was mere chemistry; Darwin conceived the notion that aesthetics and morals were produced by biological processes. Food, like most of what is worthwhile in life, is intractable to such reductionism. Meat products in fact gain no nutritional value by “extraction”; but rival firms vied to improve on Liebig's efforts. Meat extract wars, comparable to the corn flake crusades, followed in the 1870s (below, p. 200-201). Diets high in protein, or consecrated to meat, were propounded as vigorously as those of the vegetarians and Fletcherites. The most eloquent spokesman was James H. Salisbury, author of
The Relation of Alimentation and Disease
(1888). He was an adept of what he called “nerve force” and an exponent of hot-water libations to “wash out the digestive organs like
an old vinegar-barrel
.” His experiments on himself—subsisting on an exclusive diet of one kind of food after another—left him with a revulsion of vegetables. Baked beans and oatmeal had tortured him with flatulence. Too many greens caused “vegetable dyspepsia” or chronic diarrhea. They filled

the stomach with carbonic acid gas, sugar, alcohol, acid and alcoholic and acid yeast plants. These products of fermentation soon begin to paralyze the follicles and muscular walls of the stomach, so that it becomes flabby and baggy, and will hold an unusual amount of trashy foods and fluids. The organ has been turned into a veritable sour “yeast pot.”

Vegetables, Salisbury thought, should be forbidden to invalids and strictly controlled for everybody else. Man, he argued, is by nature “two-thirds carnivorous,” with teeth and stomach designed by evolution to
tear and digest meat
. Starch, the staple of the cereal-mongers, was

the enemy of health…. Eat the muscle pulp of lean beef made into cakes and broiled. This pulp should be as free as possible from connective or glue tissue, fat and cartilage…. The pulp should not be pressed too firmly together before
broiling or it will taste livery. Simply press it sufficiently to hold it together. Make the cakes from half an inch to an inch thick. Broil slowly and moderately well over a fire free from blaze and smoke. When cooked, put it on a hot plate and season to taste with butter, pepper and salt; also use either Worcestershire or Halford sauce, mustard, horseradish or lemon juice on the
meat if desired
.

This recipe, devised by Salisbury for consumptives but recommended for virtually every condition, was evidently the type or epitype of the “hamburger steak,” which was then just beginning its career as the world's future favorite dish. Salisbury's theories are forgotten and almost every informed eater today would repudiate them. But their curse lives on in nearly 46,000 McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's restaurants worldwide.

In the early years of the twentieth century, as the debate over protein stalled and palled, “purity” became the new priority: dirt was one danger on which almost all dietitians were agreed. Hygienic preparation was part of the public image on which all the great early food giants of America—Heinz, Kellogg's, Franco-American—built their business. “Stacey's Forkdipt Chocolates were fork-dipped because ‘the fork is cleaner than the hand'” and “Bishop's California Preserves were ‘the only fruits in the world with a $1,000 purity guarantee
on every jar.'
” Yet the nutritionists' world was rife with corruption. Lack of niacin caused pellagra, one of the few deficiency diseases actually current in America when the vitamin craze took over after the First World War; but it was confined to urban black poor who lived off cornmeal and the connection was effectively suppressed
until the 1930s
. Until then, producers of quack remedies with impressive names—“Stream of Life,” “Pellagracide”—defended their markets, while employers of the pellagraprone blamed heredity, immorality, “bad blood”: anything to justify low wages and
unhealthy food doles
. Elmer McCollum was one of the most influential nutritionists of all times. His experiments with rodents at Yale convinced the world that vitamin-rich foods were good for general health—promoting the big physiques habitually overvalued in America. He spent years decrying white bread's “deficiency in dietary factors.” Yet when he joined General Mills as a consultant he appeared before a committee of Congress to denounce “the pernicious teachings of food faddists who have sought to make people afraid of
white-flour bread
.” Dr. Harvey Wiley, campaigner against processed foods, became the health columnist of
Good Housekeeping
magazine and endorsed advertisers' mush, like Jell-O and
Cream of Wheat
. Appropriate industries proselytized for the coffee-and-donuts diet; a crash diet of fruit and raw vegetables was promoted by Californian fruit
interests; the United Fruit Company backed the “bananas and skim milk” diet of the Johns Hopkins University researcher Dr. George Harrop. This became Americans' favorite, just ahead of the “
Grapefruit-juice Diet
.”

Some of the dietary gurus were dazzled or self-deluded. Some were mere cranks. Some were charlatans. Among the breadlines of the early Depression and Dust Bowl, the overnourished of America were morally beleaguered. They wanted food to give them more than sustenance. This represented an opportunity for a new brand of grand-scale snake-oil hucksters. None was greater than Gayelord Hauser. With his advice, you could “gargle your fat away” at reducing parties. His laxative diet—one of many which imperiled dieters' health, tortured their bodies and flushed their guilt—was followed by
the Duchess of Windsor
. His “Be More Beautiful” diet was “a one-day house-cleaning regimen…. You will be amazed at how the
fat rolls off
.” Dr. William Hay, creator of “Fountain of Youth Salad,” insisted on separating proteins from carbohydrates and both from what he called “alkalines”: many people continue to be suckered by the scientific sound of his nostrums. Lewis Wolberg's language was typical of the exploitative nutritionists—pretentious, sententious, didactic:

Human eating is rich in tradition. It is cloaked in glamorous adornments, customs and taboos. It is disguised by convention and adorned with numerous social embellishments. These often corrupt nutritional efficiency and frequently lead to gastronomic sins…. Civilized people live on foods which are pitifully devitalized and
improperly balanced
.

He opposed sauces, variety (“too much variety breeds gastric discontent”) and midnight snacks. He recommended milk, mastication, bananas and the “splendid physiques” produced by the diets of “the pre-European Maori, the savage Samoan, the African native and the
Greenland Eskimo
.” His scale of progress was phony and the assumptions on which it is based were false. He characterized those at the bottom of the scale as “tribes whose methods of food pursuit and cookery are reminiscent of the Stone Age.” His description of such peoples, as far as I can judge, was fantastic in every particular:

At the bottom of the eating scale are the African Pygmies and the Brazilian forest men. The Pygmy subsists on an unadorned diet of fruits, nuts, insects, grubs, honey and shellfish. He eats his food raw and he frequently starves. Like his ancestor, the Eocene lemur-monkey-man, he is content to gather food in
times of plenty without bothering to make provision for times of dearth. The Brazilian forest-man is a barbarous creature whose eating habits are disgusting and who, when hunger grips him, is wont to poke a stick into an ant hole in order to allow ants to crawl
into his mouth
.

In a climate dominated by nonsense, each scientific discovery passed instantly into the hands of shysters. Vitamins were the twentieth century's new obsession—the discovery which impacted on dietary doctrines in the Western world in the new century with a force similar to that exerted by proteins and carbohydrates in the nineteenth. The vitamin could almost be classed not as a discovery but an invention, postulated just before the First World War by scientists engaged in an alchemical quest for the “life principle”—the essential ingredient that made food sustain life. Rats fed on “pure,” isolated carbohydrates, fats, proteins and minerals did not survive unless they were also given real food. Frederick Gowland Hopkins, the Cambridge professor who demonstrated that milk was such a food, called it an “accessory food factor.” This was a better name than vitamins, which are not amines—hydrocarbon compounds
produced by rotting
. They are, however, vital, though not all are diet-dependent. Most people rely on sunlight for vitamin D and there is a vitamin called K which is synthesized by bacteria in the intestine.

Vitamins began as science and became a craze. Vitamin A—the retinol natural in offal, butter and animal fat—or beta-carotene, which abounds in carrots, had to be added to margarine, even though deficiency in it was virtually unknown in the countries which adopted the measure. In Britain and America, food processing which reduced the vitamins in comestibles became a focus of anxiety in the 1930s, even though there was no evidence that it caused diet-deficient disease. In 1939 the American Medical Association recommended reinjecting processed foods with enough nutrients to bring them up to their “
high natural levels
.” Before the Second World War, America was swept by a craze for thiamin—the so-called “morale vitamin”; Dr. Russell Wilder declared that a policy of thiamin deprivation of subject peoples was “Hitler' secret weapon.” Vice President Henry Wallace endorsed the jingle “What puts the sparkle in your eye, the spring in your step, the zip in your soul?
The oomph vitamin
.” “Vitamins will win the war” was a slogan of the
U.S. Food Agency
. An army nutritionist claimed he could turn five thousand draftees into supermen—invincible shock troops—with vitamin pills. In the civilian world, cafeteria food was officially judged “poor” if it missed any two of the following: an eight-ounce glass of milk or equivalent, three quarters of a cup of a green or yellow vegetable, one “serving” of meat, cheese, fish or eggs, two slices of whole grain or vitamin-enriched bread, one pat of butter or vitamin-enriched
fortified margarine, and four to five ounces of raw fresh fruit or vegetables. While servicemen supposedly learned about “balanced meals” from compartmentalized trays, the president of the American Dietetic Association believed the return of demobilized “apostles of good eating … would save the country's undernourished from themselves.” “I've got my vitamins” sang Ethel Merman, “A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-I-I-I-I've still got my health so what do I care?” This appropriate satire was wasted on a public probably disposed to believe that vitamins F, G, H, if not known to exist, would surely be discovered.

War or the prospect of war stimulated and warped governments' appetites for nutritional research. Wartime efforts to get “food for children” had to be concealed under the slogan “Eat more food and
kill more Japs
” Healthy armies would guarantee victory. Sir Robert McCarrison, Britain's most influential nutritionist on the eve of the war, proved to his own satisfaction the advantages of “a perfectly constituted diet” by feeding it to “some dozens of healthy monkeys from the jungles of Madras.” Those he deprived of vitamins and mineral elements developed conditions ranging from gastritis and ulcer to
colitis and dysentery
. Meanwhile, three or four years' nurture transformed slum children in Deptford from invalids “rickety and bronchitic … with adenoids and dental caries … [and] inflammatory states of eyes, nose, ears and throat” into specimens of the “well made child, with clean skin, alert, sociable, eager for life and new experiences.” Four hundred tuberculosis sufferers' children at Papworth Settlement were made healthy by “adequate food.” McCarrison's grand strategy was to “build an Al nation.” Hence the medical profession's campaigns in the 1930s to “bring the nation's diet up to the optimum” with milk, butter, eggs and meat. This menu reflected the prejudices of another food Tartuffe, John Boyd Orr, who during colonial service was impressed by the Masai of Kenya, eaters of meat and drinkers of milk and blood, who towered over their high-fiber, low-fat
Kikuyu neighbors
.

The experience of war, when it came, seemed to belie all the dietary theory which preceded it. British fruit consumption went down by nearly 50 percent, though this was offset by potato eating, which rose by 45 percent, and consumption of vegetables, which rose by a third. Loss of meat and fish had to be made up by milk and cereals, unrefined flour products and vitamin additives. The result was a new nutritionists' craze—which endures to this day—for a wartime diet and, in particular, the elevation of coarse flour to the ranks of a panacea. Yet there may have been other explanations for the paradox of a war which was good for public health. Rationing redistributed food to the less well off, while mothers got more contact with health agencies. Children were evacuated out of heavily bombed slums to healthy, rural areas. Conditions in heavily bombed parts of post-war
Germany were more extreme and therefore, perhaps, better fields for research. Nutritionists' experiments in Wuppertal established that the degree of refinement of flour made no difference: all children who got extra bread of any kind gained height and
weight equally
.

The game has now changed. Though distribution problems still cause famines, scientific agronomy has given us the means of conquering starvation and deprivation. In partial consequence, people in the prosperous West, at least, seem to have undergone a strange historical reversion, scouring the world for magic like the cannibals'—food that will build character or deflect adversity. You can live “disease-free with the Tao,”
according to John Chang
, on “cooked raw rice, fresh fruits and vegetables.” “Civilization diseases” can be eliminated by a selective diet and the “harmony of natural
forces” restored
. “Food is Brahman,” declare Ayurvedic cooks. “When you look at a banana or a glass of orange juice, you may not fully grasp that there is prana, or universal energy there, or that the same spirit that animates everything that lives, moves or breathes exists in food, but it's there
all the same
.”