Near a Thousand Tables (22 page)

Most roots and tubers, indeed, seem incapable of challenging the world's favorite grains as staple foods; the exception is the potato, which now ranks fourth by weight consumed among the world's foodstuffs, behind wheat, rice and maize—but with a significant share of the market and a remarkable record of cross-cultural appeal. Its ascent to this eminence is surely one of the most remarkable stories in the world, since, to an objective scrutineer, it must seem incredible that it should ever have been domesticated in the first place—let alone taken up beyond the peculiar environment, in the high Andes, where it first grew wild. Some wild varieties are carnivorous; all are more or less poisonous. The idea of selecting them for eating by man may have arisen by way of an analogy with sweet potatoes, which were almost certainly cultivated first. Sweet potato tubers of a kind very similar to modern cultivated varieties were eaten in the central coastal region of what is now Peru at sites dated to around 8,000
B.C.
If these were indeed produced by agriculture, the sweet potato would have to be counted as the New World's earliest farmed food crop—perhaps the
earliest anywhere
. As with maize, the wild ancestor of the farmed plant has disappeared. The domesticated potato may have developed in the course of an effort to find a plant with some of the
advantages of the sweet potato, but exploitable at higher altitudes. The earliest known experiments took place in central Peru or the environs of Lake Titicaca about seven thousand years ago. Once tried with success, the potato gave mountain dwellers parity of power with peoples of valleys and plains.

Thirty thousand tons of potatoes were produced annually at the high-Andean imperial city of Tiahuanaco before its collapse over a thousand years ago. One hundred fifty cultivated varieties were known in the Andes by the time of the Spanish invasion. The relative distribution of maize and potatoes at that time showed how the political ecology of the region worked. Maize was a sacred crop, sedulously cultivated, by disproportionately painstaking means, in priestly gardens, at altitudes where it could never be viable, where the aridity was deadly and the frost destructive, so that small amounts were available for religious rites. European observers noticed nothing of the kind in connection with the potato, which was the workaday basis of the universal diet. “Half the Indians,” it was said, “had nothing
else to eat
.” This is believable: two peculiar features gave the potato the unique power of the potato to sustain civilization in the Andes: tolerance of extreme altitudes, for some varieties can grow at thirteen thousand feet; and unrivaled nutritional merit. The potato, if eaten in sufficient quantities, provides all the nutrients the human body needs.

Yet, as we shall see when we turn to trace the global migrations of the potato (below, p. 179), at every stage of its progress the tuber has suffered contempt. In the eighteenth century Count Rumford had to disguise potatoes to get workhouse inmates to accept them, while Parmentier had to trick peasants into growing them by pretending that their cultivation was a state secret. One of the reasons for this resistance, which may also help to explain the failure of taro and cassava to find worldwide acceptance, may be the fact that taro, cassava and potatoes all have the same mysterious property: unprocessed, they are poisonous—or, at least, wild potato varieties are poisonous and even cultivated varieties of taro and cassava contain toxic crystals which can only be eliminated by careful techniques. To rid cassava, for instance, of its prussic acid content, you have to peel it, grate it, squeeze it, sieve it and then boil the pulp or toast the flour. “The juice of it,” reported a French observer of Native American customs in the early eighteenth century, “so dangerous, so deadly, becomes, after boiling well, a sweet, honeyed licquor, very
good to drink
.” The discovery that these naturally toxic plants could be worth cultivating and transforming into food is another of the miracles of “primitive” agronomy, and another of the unsolved mysteries of the early history of farming.

FIVE
 
Food and Rank

Where is the food-hall foyer of feasts?
Where the pleasures of the place?
The goblet's glint, the gleaming guests?
The palgraves' grandeur, great ones' grace?

—THE WANDERER, 93-95

I sit at my table en grand seigneur,
And when I have done, throw a crust to the poor;
Not only the pleasure itself of good living,
But also the pleasure of now and then giving:
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho!

—ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH,
SPECTATOR AB EXTRA

F
ood became a social differentiator—a signifier of class, a measure of rank—at a remote, undocumented moment when some people started to command more food resources than others. It happened early. There was never a golden age of equality in the history of humankind. Inequality is implicit in evolution by natural selection. Wherever hominid remains survive in sufficient quantities and in states of preservation good enough to permit conclusions to be drawn, there are differences in nutrition levels among members of what seem to be the same communities. Paleolithic burials show, in many cases, correlations between levels of nutrition and signs of honor. In the earliest human class systems we know about, food played a differentiating role.

At that stage, as far as we know, it was quantity that mattered, rather than the dishes selected or the way they were prepared. No doubt cooking increased the prejudice in favor of big meals: an insidious, or, at least, equivocal effect of cooking is that it makes eating pleasurable. It becomes a temptation to gluttony; a primrose road to obesity, and therefore a fount of social inequality. Differences followed, of course, in the way food was dressed and served. These, in as far as they matched gradations of rank, were not among the causes of inequality, but its results, whereas differences in the amount of food available to people of differing status were discernible at the very inception of inequality and can be numbered, if not among its causes, at least among its defining characteristics.

Certainty is impossible, given the imperfect state of most of the early evidence, but socially differentiating cuisines probably occurred relatively late in history and, until remarkably recently, were found only in some parts of the world. Quantity mattered more than quality. The gigantic appetite has normally commanded prestige in almost every society, partly as a sign of prowess and partly, perhaps, as an indulgence accessible only to wealth. Except where it is commonplace, as in the modern West, fat is admirable and greatness goes with greatness of girth. Gluttony may be a sin but it is no crime: on the contrary, up to a point it can be socially functional. Big appetites stimulate production and generate surplus—leftovers on which lesser eaters can feed. So, in normal circumstances, as long as the food supply is unthreatened, eating a lot is an act of heroism and justice, similar in effect to other such acts, such as fighting off enemies and propitiating the gods: it is usual to find the same sort of people engaged in all three tasks. Legendary feats of digestion were chronicled in antiquity, like heroes' tallies of battle victims, wanderers' odysseys or tyrants' laws. Every day, Maximinus the Thracian drank an amphora of wine and ate forty or sixty pounds of meat. Clodius Albinus was celebrated because he could eat five hundred figs, a basket of peaches, ten melons, twenty pounds of grapes, one hundred garden warblers and
four hundred oysters at a sitting
. Guido of Spoleto was refused the French throne because he was a frugal eater. Charlemagne could not manage dietary temperance and refused his physicians' advice to mitigate his digestive problems by eating boiled instead of roasted food: this was the gustatory equivalent of Roland's refusal to summon reinforcements in battle—recklessness
hallowed by risk
. To comply would have been an act of self-derogation.

Abundant food is part of the panoply of every earthly paradise, and of some heavenly ones, too, like the reward of Muslim martyrs or the feasting halls of the Viking Valhalla. Big meals were a feature of the good life in the land of the Sirens, according to a fragment of Epicharmus:

“In the morning, just at dawn, we used to barbecue plump little anchovies, some baked pork, and octopus and drink down some sweet wine with them,”

“Oh you poor fellows.”

“Hardly a bite, you see.”

“What a shame!”

“Then all we would have was one fat red mullet and a couple of bonitos split down the middle and wood pigeons to match and
scorpion-fish
.”

Conspicuous consumption works as a generator of prestige, in part simply because it is conspicuous, but also because it is useful. The rich man's table is part of the machinery of wealth distribution. His demand attracts supply. His waste feeds the poor. Food sharing is a fundamental form of gift exchange, cement of societies; chains of food distribution are social shackles. They create relationships of dependence, suppress revolutions and keep client classes in their place. The story is told of how Consuelo Vanderbilt, when she became chatelaine of Blenheim Palace, reformed the method by which leftovers were distributed among the poor neighbors of the estate: the broken meats were still slopped into jerry cans and wheeled out to the beneficiaries, but Consuelo was fastidious enough to insist that, for the first time in the history of the house, the courses be separated—meat from fish, sweets from savories,
and so on
. Consuelo's generosity belongs in a long tradition of noblesse oblige, scattered with crumbs from the rich man's table, haunted by the ghosts of guests from the highways and byways.

This tradition goes back to the redistributive palace storehouses operated by the elites of early agrarian societies: the labyrinth of Knossos contained no minotaurs but it was filled with oil jars and bins of grain. Egypt was a food engine and the pharaonic economy was dedicated to a cult of the abundance of the everyday: not individual abundance, for most people lived on bread and beer in amounts only modestly
above subsistence level
, but a surplus garnered and guarded against hard times, at the disposal of the state and the priests. In an environment of scorching aridity, periodically doused by promiscuous floods, defiance of nature meant not only refashioning the landscape and punching pyramids into the sky: above all, it was a matter of stockpiling against disaster, to make mankind indestructible, even by the invisible forces that controlled the floods. The temple built to house the body of Rameses II had storehouses big enough to feed twenty thousand people for a year. The taxation yields painted proudly on the walls of a viziers tomb are an illustrated menu for the feeding of an empire: sacks of barley, piles of cakes and nuts, hundreds of head of livestock. The state was a stockpiler it seems, not for the permanent purposes of redistribution—the market took care of that—but for famine relief. When “the starvation-year” was over, according to an
old tradition collected in a late text—of about the late second century
B.C.—
people's “borrowing from their granaries
will have departed
”

The royal banquets of Mesopotamia originally functioned as means of distributing food according to a hierarchy of privilege determined by the kings. Like everything else in the Assyrian world, they became inflated to gigantic proportions when an imperial system replaced the city-states» When Ashurnishabal (883-59
B.C.)
completed the palace of Kalhu, he had 69,574 guests at a banquet that lasted ten days. One thousand fat oxen, 14,000 sheep, 1,000 lambs, hundreds of deer, 20,000 pigeons, 10,000 fish, 10,000 desert rats and 10,000 eggs
were served
. In the
Edda,
the heroes Loki and Logi engaged in an eating contest: the latter won by eating “all the meat and bones and
the platter itself
.” This triumph of heroic eating was not considered selfish. In a more equivocal instance, Nero's banquets, according to his enemies, lasted from noon till midnight. Rules composed two thousand years ago in India specified rice, pulses, salt, butter and ghee for everyone; but menials should have only a sixth of a gentleman's allowance of rice and only half his mede of ghee. Some differentiation on grounds of quality was also made: laborers, who needed plenty of nutrition, got the rice husks and slaves
the broken bits
. Although the excluded may evince resentment, rulers' feasts bind political alliances and create affinities, retinues, patronage networks and household aristocracies. The “baronial” banqueting halls of the medieval West were designed for meals of allegiance, at which lordly largesse was cooked and served in stunning quantities. At the enthronement of an archbishop of York in 1466, the bill covered 300 quarters of wheat, 300 tuns of ale and 1,000 of wine, 104 oxen, 6 wild bulls, 1,000 sheep, 304 calves, 304 swine, 400 swans, 2,000 geese, 1,000 capons, 2,000 pigs, 400 plovers, 100 dozen quail, 200 dozen female sandpipers, 104 peacocks, 4,000 mallards and teals, 204 cranes, 204 kid, 2,000 chickens, 4,000 pigeons, 4,000 crays, 204 bitterns, 400 heron, 200 pheasants, 5,000 partridge, 400 woodcock, 100 curlew, 1,000 egrets, more than 500 deer, 4,000 cold venison pasties, 2,000 hot custards, 608 pikes and bream, 12 porpoises and seals and unspecified amounts of spices, sugared delicacies,
wafers and cakes
.