Near a Thousand Tables (3 page)

The first revolution is the invention of cooking, which I see as an episode of human self-differentiation from the rest of nature, and an inaugural event in the history of social change. I deal next with the discovery that food is more than sustenance—that its production, distribution, preparation and consumption generate rites and magic, as eating becomes ritualized and irrational or suprarational. My third revolution is the “herding revolution”—the domestication and selective breeding of edible animal species: I deal with this before plant-based agriculture, which is the subject of my fourth revolution, partly for convenience and partly to draw attention to my argument that at least one kind of animal husbandry—snail farming—was an earlier innovation than is generally admitted. The fifth revolution is the use of food as a means and index of social differentiation: under this heading, I try to trace a line of continuity from the probably Paleolithic origins of privileged entitlement in competition for food, down to the courtly and bourgeois cuisines of modern times. The sixth revolution is that of long-range trade and the role of food in cultural exchanges of transforming effect. The seventh is the ecological revolution of the last five hundred years, which is now usually called the “Columbian Exchange,” and the place of foodstuffs in it. Finally, I turn to industrialization in the “developing” world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: what food contributed to it and what were its effects on food.

The book has been written mainly as a
devoir de vacances
in the course of the calendar year 2000. Most of the work was a sort of spin-off from preparation for my previous book,
Civilizations,
a study of the relationship between civilization and environment, which appeared in the U.K. in 2000 and in the United States in 2001. A Fellowship of the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences and a Union Pacific Visiting Professorship at the University of Minnesota helped me to get some thoughts straight and to harry some problems. I am profoundly grateful to both institutions, which provided wonderfully exciting and rewarding environments for work.

—F.F.-A., QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, IST JANUARY, 2OOI

ONE
 
The Invention of Cooking

“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said,
“Is chiefly what we need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed—
Now if you're ready, oysters dear,
We can begin to feed.”

—LEWIS CARROLL,
THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

Thus you can see everything, the food in the raw and the chemistry of fire—which not only stills the howl of the hygiener but adds vivacity to the room.

—WILLIAM SANSOM,
BLUE SKIES, BROWN STUDIES

I
t is no way to eat oysters. You see the fastidious eater fiddling with them in restaurants, coating them with lemon juice strained through muslin napkins, or dosing them with bizarrely flavored vinegars, or sprinkling them with glowing stains of vermilion Tabasco or some other blindingly, chokingly hot sauce. This is deliberate provocation, designed to refresh the bivalves before death, a little mild torture under which you can sometimes feel that you see the victims wriggle or flinch. Then the diner manipulates spoon and scoop, prising and sliding the oyster out of its bed onto a curl of cold silver. The sheen of the creature clashes with the shine of the cutlery as he raises the slick, slippery mollusk to his lips.

Most people like to eat them that way, but it means they forfeit the full, true oyster moment. Unless you discard the utensils, raise the half-shell to your mouth,
throw back your head, scrape the creature from its lair with your teeth, taste its briny juice and squelch it slightly against the palate before swallowing it alive, you deprive yourself of a historic experience. For most of history, oyster eaters enjoyed the slightly fetid, tangy smell of the inside of the shell, undoused with the disguising dressing of aromatic acids. This was the way fourth-century poet and traveler Ausonius liked them, in “their sweet juice, mingled with a sensation of the sea.” Or in the words of a modern oyster expert, your aim is to receive “some piercing intuition of the sea, and all its weeds and breezes…. You are eating the sea, that's it, only the sensation of a gulp of sea water has been wafted out of it by
some sorcery
.”

For almost uniquely, in the repertoire of modern Western cuisine, the oyster is eaten uncooked and unkilled. It is the nearest thing we have to “natural” food—the only dish which deserves to be called “au naturel” without irony. Of course, when you eat it in a restaurant, its shell has been barbed and unclamped with all the panoply of civilization by a trained professional, wielding appropriate technology, an inviolable ritual and a stylish flourish. Before that, the oyster was reared underwater on a stone tile or wooden trellis, herded in an oyster bed, grown for years under expert eyes and harvested by practiced hands—not plucked from a rock pool as a prize seized from nature. Still, it is the food that unites us with all our ancestors—the dish you consume in what is recognizably the way people have encountered their nourishment since the first emergence of our species.

Even if you are one of those people who think they hear the scream of the pear or peanut as they seize it and munch it raw, you will still find virtually no food in modern Western cuisine as convincingly “natural” as the oyster, for, with very few exceptions, such as some fungi and seaweeds, the fruits and vegetables we eat—even the “wild” berry picked from the bramble—are the result of generations or eons of selective breeding by man; the oyster remains a product of little modified natural selection and varies markedly from sea to sea. Furthermore, we eat it while it is still alive. Other cultures have more foods of this kind. Australian aboriginals guzzle witjuti grubs, seized from gum trees, plump with half-digested wood pulp in their guts. Nenets chomp the living lice lifted from their own bodies “
like candy
.” Nuer lovers are said to show mutual affection by feeding each other lice freshly plucked from their heads. Masai drink blood squeezed from wounds in live cattle. Ethiopians like honeycombs with the young larvae still alive in the chambers. And we have oysters. “There is a dreadful solemnity” in eating them, as Somerset Maugham observed, which “a sluggish
fancy cannot grasp
,” and which would surely make the Walrus weep without hypocrisy. What is more, oysters are fairly unusual among raw foods because they are usually ruined by cooking. To put them in steak-and-kidney puddings or skewer them wrapped in bacon, as the
English do, or smother them in various kinds of cheese sauce, as in the dishes called oysters Rockefeller and oysters Musgrave, or to stuff them in an omelette, as in the signature dish of the regional cuisine of the Chinese province of Xiamen, or to chop them for stuffing Thanksgiving turkey, is to smother their taste. Inventive recipes can occasionally be more successful: I once had an impressive dish of oysters at the Athenaeum, lightly poached in wine vinegar and pasted with spinach-flavored béchamel Such experiments are justified for fun but rarely advance the frontiers of gastronomy.

The oyster is an extreme case, but all raw food is fascinating because it is anomalous—an apparent throwback to a precivilized world and even to a prehuman phase of evolution. Cooking is one of relatively few odd practices which are peculiarly human—odd, that is, in the scales of nature, judged by the standards of common approaches to nourishment. One of history's longest and most luckless quests has been the search for the essence of humanity, the defining characteristic which makes human beings human and distinguishes them collectively from other animals. The effort has led nowhere. The only objectively verifiable fact which sets our species apart from others is that we cannot successfully mate with them. Most of the other features commonly alleged are inadmissible or unconvincing. Some are plausible but partial. We arrogate “consciousness” to ourselves without knowing quite what it is or whether other creatures have it. We claim unique powers of language—but other animals, were we able to communicate with them, might dispute this. We are relatively inventive in problem solving, relatively adaptable in our ability to inhabit varied environments, relatively dexterous in our use of tools—especially of missiles. We are relatively ambitious in our works of art and in making embodiments of our imaginations. In some respects, in these connections, the gaps between human behavior and that of other species are so enormous as to qualify, perhaps, as differences of quality. We are genuinely unique in exploiting fire: though some other primates—chimpanzees, for example—can be taught to use it, too, for limited applications like lighting a cigarette or releasing the odor of incense, or even keeping a fire alight, this only happens under human instruction and only people have ever taken the initiative in
harnessing flame
. Cooking is at least as good as all the other candidates as an index of the humanity of humankind—except for one serious qualification: in the vast span of human history, cooking is a late innovation. There is no possible evidence more than half a million years old, no absolutely convincing evidence from more than about 150,000 years ago.

Of course, it all depends what one means by cooking. Cultivation, in some eyes, is a form of cookery—
“terram excoquere,” as
Vergil called it—exposing clods
to the baking sun, turning the earth into an
oven for seeds
. Animals with suitably robust stomachs prepare their food by chewing the cud: why should this not be classed as cooking? In hunting cultures, the men who make the kill often reward themselves with a meal of the partially digested contents of the stomach of their prey: instant replacement for the energy expended in the hunt. This is a kind of natural protocookery—the earliest known instance of eating processed food. Many species, including ours, make food edible for infants or the infirm by chewing and spitting it out. Warmed in the mouth, attacked by gastric juices, pounded by mastication, it acquires some of the properties of food processed by the application of heat. The moment you rinse your food in water—as some monkeys do with some nuts—you start to process it, and indeed some real raw food freaks like to leave on the dirt. Like Farmer Oak in
Far from the Madding Crowd,
they would “never fuss about dirt in its pure state.”

As soon as you squirt lemon juice at your oyster you are beginning to alter it, to change texture and taste: a generous definition might call this cooking. A marinade, applied for a long time, can be as transforming in its effects as the application of heat or smoke. Hanging meat to make it gamey, or just leaving it around to rot a little, is a way of processing for texture and digestibility: it is obviously an older technique than cooking by means of fire. Wind drying, which is a specialized form of hanging, works a profound biochemical change on some foods. So does burying—a technique, once common to induce fermentation, familiar to anyone who has eaten kimchee in a Korean restaurant but rarely used in modern Western cuisine. It is, however, commemorated in the name of gravlax: literally, “grave-salmon.” Burial as quasi-cookery is also recalled in the dark tint now chemically applied to cheeses of kinds which were traditionally preserved in earth. Among some horse-borne nomads, cuts of meat are rendered edible by being warmed and pressed in the horse's sweat under the saddle on a long ride (below, p. 77). Churning milk is a process of almost alchemical magic: a liquid becomes a solid, white becomes gold. Fermentation is even more magical, because it can turn a boring, staple grain into a potion that can change behavior, suppress inhibitions, conjure visions and unlock imaginary realms. Why should cooking with kindled flame be privileged among all these startling ways of transforming food?

The answer, if there is one, lies in the social effects of fire-cooked food. Cooking deserves its place as one of the great revolutionary innovations of history, not because of the way it transforms food—there are plenty of other ways of doing that—but because of the way it transformed society. Culture begins when the raw gets cooked. The campfire becomes a place of communion when people eat around it. Cooking is not just a way of preparing food but of organizing society
around communal meals and predictable mealtimes. It introduces new specialized functions and shared pleasures and responsibilities. It is more creative, more constructive of social ties than mere eating together. It can even replace eating together as a ritual of social adhesion. When Bronislaw Malinowski, the pioneer of Pacific island anthropology, was at work in the Trobriand Islands, one of the ceremonies that most impressed him was the annual yam harvest festival in Kiriwina, where most ceremonies took the form of food distribution. To the accompaniment of drums and dancing, food was arranged in heaps, then carried off to the various households to be eaten in private. The climax of what most cultures think of as a feast—the actual eating—“is never reached communally…. But the festive element lies
in the preparations
.”