Near a Thousand Tables (13 page)

Eating can acquire associations with other forms of sensuality, and food can be sexually suggestive: phallic asparagus felt between fingers, the squelch and softness of the vulva-shaped mussel. Still, it is hard to know whether to take seriously people who claim to believe in aphrodisiacs. “Truffles contain the male pheromones,” claims a writer who is surely teasing us, “and sexologists attribute their aphrodisiac virtues to these hormones which are identical to those contained in the male boar's saliva at the time of mating.” The same source recommends lecithin, sprouts, kelp and cider vinegar as “miracle beauty foods.” Celery, it is said, contains the same hormones and is best as an infusion: boil for thirty minutes and “
the effects are amazing
.” It is hard to reconcile this recommendation with the claim that “celery has been proven to be effective for reducing blood pressure among the Chinese
for many centuries
.”

Except by being adequately nourished there is no way to “eat to think.” Yet “brain food” is seriously recommended, for instance, by a French expert in nutrition, who advises “two grams of alphalinolenic acid and ten grams of linolenic acid every day. Get to your oils and fats! … For apes to become humans, nature may have helped the Creator by bringing the first humans—or the last apes—close to the sea, where the alphalinolenic family is very abundant” and “for the brain you should
eat brain
.” These nostrums are reminiscent of Bertie Wooster's conviction that phosphorus was brain food and could be found in sardines.

Abundance, perhaps because it liberates us from dependence on food for
nourishment, seems to have brought about a new age of food magic. Kava—the source of the favorite ceremonial libation of the South Pacific—has a proven record as a soporific, analgesic and diuretic. Its effectiveness in these respects is consistent with its pharmacological composition. Claims that it can treat chills, promote lactation, aid convalescence, relieve gonorrhea and help with a score of other complaints have no basis except in ethnobotany. It might be thought a fair assumption that islanders who recommend it medicinally in Hawaii and Fiji know what they are talking about; yet their views are contradictory and authorize no reason to suppose that kava is generally effective or superior to other prophylactics. On the contrary, it has had a health-wrecking effect on Australian aboriginal communities where its introduction has been recent and its effects monitored, apparently contributing to short breath, weight loss, scaly complexions and
increased cholesterol
. Yet this substance has become one of the ingredients of the cosmetic magic kit of contemporary Western women.

Can one take seriously the nostrums of Chinese dietetics, such as celery, peanuts, garlic, jellyfish and seaweed for hypertension or, for hepatitis, malt, pork gall bladder, tea and common
button mushrooms
? The same source on “foods to stay young with” recommends soya to cure water retention and treat “common colds, skin diseases, beriberi, diarrhea, toxemia of pregnancy, habitual constipation, anemia and leg ulcers.” The author explains that sweet potatoes can cure both constipation and diarrhea “because they are full of yin energy, which can lubricate the intestine,” while figs cure dysentery and hemorrhoids and, in a recommendation baffling to scientific medicine, “
tea prevents scurvy
.” The notion that diet should serve to preserve a balance between yin and yang is, essentially, a humoral theory: we have rejected humoral theories of Western origin, but those which come clouded with emanations of the “mystic East” manage to retain their Western adherents.

It is hard to say where quack nostrums end and science begins. Ultimately, a scientific remedy is surely only one which works, and because food is produced naturally, so that its composition and properties vary from moment to moment and place to place, scientific conditions for testing its qualities can never be guaranteed, except by a level of technical intervention repugnant to anyone who wants food from the soil rather than from the lab. Bizarre and unbalanced diets can cause disease. But most societies have eons of experience behind them and except in circumstances of convulsive social change, when traditional wisdom is forgotten or abandoned, it is most unlikely that diet causes disease. The scourge of mainstream dietetics, Dr. James LeFanu, derides a World Health Organization report of 1982: by stoking the fat scare, it actually defied the experimental results of tests which showed no link between fat consumption and heart disease. LeFanu
amusingly targeted consequences in busybody dietetics: “at the Christmas buffet dance for hospital staff at Hove Town Hall in 1985, Christmas puddings, pastries, gateaux, cheese crisps and meat pies were all banned. Instead, guests could choose from a variety of pulses, salads and low-fat crisps washed down with a
non-alcoholic punch
.” A classic study of gluttony in 1967 showed that feeding eight student volunteers more than the recommended daily intake of calories only fattened them by less than one kilogram each; and after a few days, when they had adjusted to their new diet, there was
no weight gain at all
. The long-term Framingham study shows that there is no difference in the fat consumption of Americans who get heart disease and those who do not. Cholesterol clogs the arteries, but two individuals will eat the same amount of cholesterol-rich food with contrasting effects. Experiments, especially the Oslo trials of 1981-84 and the Lipid Research Clinics trials, the results of which were announced in 1984, did show that a low-fat diet could lower high cholesterol levels and reduce the risk of heart disease—but most people do not have a high cholesterol level, regardless of their diet, and more than 50 percent of those with afflicted hearts do not have
high cholesterol counts
.

It is true that most high fat-consuming cultures, especially those where saturated fats are popular, register high levels of heart disease, whereas low consumers do not. But the exceptions are sufficient to suggest that we should be doing more work, rather than shotgunning fat. Eskimos get one hundred percent of their diet from meat and fish, most of it fat. Bushmen and pygmies get about one third of theirs from meat. Yet they have blood pressure and cholesterol levels similar to those of other
foraging cultures
. It is hard to resist the impression that research has slowed or stopped prematurely, because a cheap culprit has been found. The prejudices induced by the modern health cult are social as well as—perhaps, rather than—scientific: they profile an identity and constitute a common creed. To anyone independent-minded, these are grounds to question, rather than to conform.

The revolution which began with the discovery that food is for more than eating is still going on. We continually devise ways to feed for social effect: to bond with the like-minded, who eat alike; to differentiate ourselves from the outsiders who ignore our food taboos; to recraft ourselves, reshape our bodies, recast our relations with people, nature, gods. Dietitians like to cultivate a “scientific” self-image, stripped of any cultural context. But they are children of their times and legatees of long tradition: dietary obsession is a fluctuation of cultural history, a modern disease, of which no health food can cure us.

THREE
 
Breeding to Eat

Mexican Armadillo (for 4) .....$100.00

Beaver and Beaver Tail .....$27.00

South American Boar .....$18.00

Caribou .....$75.00

Australian Kangaroo .....$50.00

Muskrat .....$62.00

Porcupine .....$55.00

Ostrich Eggs .....$35.00

Water Buffalo
.....$13.00

—MENU OF THE SPORTS AFIELD CLUB, NEW YORK, C. 1953

S
nails have an established place in contemporary haute cuisine “alongside
lobster and foie gras
”; but their reputation with gastronomes has been checkered and their rise to their present eminence is relatively recent. It was probably only in the last century, as a result of promotion of the delights of certain rustic “regional cuisines” by Parisian restaurateurs of provincial provenance, that snails began to be rehabilitated as a delicacy after centuries of marginalisation and contempt. Until the era of short rations in the Second World War, it was said that no top chef would have served them. Even now, they are underappreciated in the modern West outside France, Catalonia and some regions of Italy. Yet, together with a few
other similar mollusks, they have—or ought to have—an honored place in the history of food. For they represent the key and perhaps the solution to one of the greatest mysteries of our story: why and how did the human animal begin to herd and breed other animals for food?

Snails are relatively easy to cultivate. The escargots de Bourgogne, the variety most esteemed in recent times, are bred in escargotières and carefully fed on choice herbs and milky porridge. They are an efficient food, self-packaged in a shell which serves at table as a receptacle for the garlic butter with which the dish is usually sauced. The waste is small, the nutrition excellent. Compared with the large and intractable quadrupeds who are usually claimed as the first domesticated animal food sources, snails are readily managed. Marine varieties can be gathered in a natural rock pool. Land varieties can be isolated in a designated breeding ground by enclosing a snail-rich spot with a ditch. By culling small or unfavored types by hand the primitive snail farmer would soon enjoy the benefits of selective breeding. Snails are grazers and do not need to be fed with foods which would otherwise be wanted for human consumption. They can be raised in abundance and herded without the use of fire, without any special equipment, without personal danger and without the need to select and train lead animals or dogs to help. They are close to being a complete food, useful as rations for traders'journeys, pilgrimages and campaigns. Some varieties, such as eremina, contain water for several days' travel as well as
plenty of meat
.

In some cultures of antiquity, snail cultivation was certainly a big business. The ancestors of our escargots de Bourgogne were packed into breeding cages in ancient Rome and stuffed with milk until they were too big for their shells. The result was a luxury specialty, available in limited quantities for gourmets and—according to the medical treatise which goes under the name of Celsus—
for invalids
. Snail shells are so abundant at some Mesopotamian sites that it is evident that the cultivated snail was a common item on the tables of ancient Sumer. What look like the remains of a mollusk farm about three thousand years old have been unearthed under the
heart of Boston
.

How much earlier can we imagine this history starting? Paleolithic shell mounds contain snail varieties bigger on average than
today's equivalents
. It therefore looks as though the snail eaters of the late ice age were already selecting for size. Mounds of this age and kind are so common and in some cases so large that only scholarly inhibitions stop us from assuming that they are evidence of systematic food production. It is hard to break out of the confines of a developmental, progressive model of food history which makes it unthinkable that any kind of food was farmed so early; but snail farming is so simple, so technically undemanding
and so close conceptually to the habitual food-garnering methods of gatherers that it seems pigheadedly doctrinaire to exclude the possibility. The practice may be some millennia older than traditionally thought. In places where shell middens form part of a stratigraphic sequence, it is apparent that societies of snail eaters preceded settlers who relied on the more complex technologies of the hunt. At Frankhthi Cave, a precious site in the southern Argolid, a huge dump of snail shells dating from about 10,700
B.C.
is overlaid by others in which the bones first of red deer predominate, then, nearly four thousand years later,
tuna bones
.