Near a Thousand Tables (45 page)

The victims have chronicled and endured this revolution with spine-chilling sangfroid. During the Second World War, the columnist Eleanor Early promised her readers, “The day is coming when a woman can buy a boiled dinner and carry it home in her purse … when you'll serve the girls a bridge luncheon with dehydrated meat and potatoes … and custard made with powdered eggs and powdered milk
for dessert
.” In 1937 Dick and Mac McDonald opened their drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino: this was the closest thing to conveyor-belt eating the Industrial Revolution had yet produced. From 1948, they began to eliminate plates and cutlery at mealtimes—the reversal of one of the long-sought, hard-won achievements of civilization, which customers have accepted unprotestingly. Their fifteen-cent hamburger was the enfleshment of food-Fordism. In 1953 a “research lunch” served to President Eisenhower in Beltsville, Maryland, featured powdered orange juice, “potato chip bars,” whey cheese spread, “dehydrofrozen peas,” hormone- and antibiotic-fed beef and pork and
lowfat milk
.

This was the era when the novelty value of foreign food was beginning to have an impact in the American market. Its first triumphs were modest, for the McCarthy era was no time to risk outrageously un-American eating: spaghetti with meatballs was admissible, and chop suey or chow mein—a wartime concoction, for which Heinz advertised a recipe using their
cream of mushroom soup
. Nor did foreign forces halt the advance of fast food. According to a magazine which appeared in 1978,

Foreign and ethnic foods are all the rage these days…. To make something German don't hire a German cook, just give your roast beef a topping of German-style sauerkraut, that is, canned sauerkraut with some caraway seeds added. Mix oregano, basil and garlic with canned tomatoes, add chicken, and you have an unusual Italian hero sandwich. For Chinese add one or more of: ginger, anise seed, garlic, onions, red pepper, fennel seed,
cloves or cinnamon
.

Today Burger King has managed to keep up a challenge to McDonald's by promising and delivering a “complete meal in fifteen seconds”: to be fair to them, one should add that in 2000, Burger King launched a new publicity campaign with the slogan “It just tastes better”—implicitly, than McDonald's product. This is not a claim I feel I want
to test
. Nor do I take comfort from the rise of “fusion food,” which is widely regarded as evidence that the food market today is animated by a taste for the inventive and exotic. On the contrary, this new style of cuisine seems to me drearily representative of the trends of our times. Fusion food is Lego cookery. Only the revolution in availability makes it possible to mix and match elements delivered—often in processed form—to a kitchen which resembles an assembly point. Analogy with the automobile and computer “factories” where nothing is really made but parts are assembled after delivery from wherever in the world they can be most cheaply produced. More people can get more variety than ever before; yet they seem willing to forgo the privilege in favor of cheap, standard products.

For people who think cooking was the foundation of civilization, the microwave, as suggested in Chapter 1, is the last enemy. Tad's restaurant in the 1960s served complete frozen dinners in plastic skins, which customers defrosted at
tableside microwaves
. That was a gimmick which, happily, failed to catch on, perhaps because the microwave is best suited to that public enemy, the solitary eater. The communion of eating together is easily broken by a device that liberates household denizens from waiting for mealtimes. In alliance with pret-a-porter meals the microwave makes possible the end of cooking and eating as social acts. The first great revolution in the history of food is in danger of being undone. The companionship of the campfire, cooking pot and common table, which have helped to bond humans in collaborative living for at least 150,000 years, could be shattered.

Nevertheless, despite all the minatory signs that have accompanied the industrial era of Western history, there are good reasons to be optimistic about the future of food. The industrial era is over or ending. Between them, the innovations in production, processing and supply have encouraged the gradual emergence of a globalized marketplace, dominated by gigantic corporations and multinationals. This has been a new phenomenon in the history of food, but not, so far, one which really shows signs of engrossing the whole world of food: that is a fantasy of the biggest capitalists and the fiercest anticapitalists. An artisanal reaction is already under way. Local revulsion from pressure to accept the products of standardized taste has stimulated revivals of traditional cuisines. Even McDonald's and Coca-Cola make adjustments to regional tastes and cultural
prejudices, modifying their recipes, adjusting their presentation. Identity is reasserting itself as a big element in consumers' prejudices: foods are what marketers call “necktie” products—striped with the insignia of the eater's self-perception, his community or country or class. In prosperous markets, the emphasis is shifting from cheapness to quality, rarity and esteem for artisanal methods. As we have seen, food industries made money by lowering prices in an era of demographic buoyancy: that era is over in the developed West. As the currently industrializing parts of the world catch up, the same shift will become characteristic there, too. The fantasy of a world fed from toothpaste tubes and packets of powder will be like all the other modernist fantasies which have been falsified by history: the socialist utopias, the cyberocracies, the nuclear-powered society, the Corbusier cities, the world of the Jetsons. The future will be much more like the past than the pundits of futurology have foretold. The priorities of fast food already seem as outmoded as Futurism or Vorticism: they belong to an already bygone era, which was exhilarated by the novelties of speed. The fifteen-second hamburger will join the fifteen-cent hamburger: consigned to the dustbin of history. American palates, which have swallowed so much trash in the interests of efficiency, have largely rejected instant coffee. This fastidiousness may be a sign for the future as much as a survival from the past.

Despite the conquests of the standard products, food remains an art and some contemporary food culture in the developed world shares features associated with postmodernism in other arts. The internationalization of the palate and the rise of fusion cookery reflect multiculturalism. “Noneating”—forms of behavior in the twilight of the table, such as fad dieting and fashionable anorexia—is to food what, say, the silence of John Cage is to music or
The Blair Witch Project
is to cinema. Bulimia is ironic eating, where excess and obsession meet: the sufferer gorges in secret and induces vomiting. The Campbell's soup can has become a postmodernist icon. This is a double irony, because canned foods no longer seem to be the fists of the food giants: they have lost any sense of mechanist menace they might once have had in competition with fresh foods. They have become part of an old-fashioned, comforting repertoire of home cooking, defying the quick-frozen, irradiated or instantly infused alternatives. Indeed, that is exactly how Campbell's advertises them. The fashionable cult of the raw is not a reversion to savagery, but a rebellion against processing, a rejection of the industrial idea of “freshness.”

Postmodern persnicketiness is a healthy reaction against greed and ecological arrogance. In the overnourished West, to eat well is to eat less. Rational exploitation of nature has to stop short of despoliation. We have been turning too much of the planet into too much food: wasting resources, endangering species. Fussiness
and “foodism” are methods of self-protection for society against the deleterious effects of the industrial era: the glut of the cheap, the degradation of the environment, the wreckage of taste. The organic farming movement, which abjures battery breeding and chemical fertilizers and pesticides, is making a surprising impact on the market, when one considers that its products are, from the consumers' point of view, differentiated chiefly by extra cost. The Prince of Wales, who is one of the movement's most eloquent spokesmen and most exemplary practitioners, feels defensive about conventional farmer's dismissal of “muck and magic eccentrics” and “well-meaning … doom-mongers hankering after a pre-industrial,
Arcadian past
.” But the excesses of industrialism need to be reversed. Reason and instinct are combining irresistibly to reverse them. The role of the next revolution in food history will be to subvert the last.

PREFACE

xi
neglect it:
Anne Sebba, “No Sex, Please, We're Peckish,”
Times Higher Education Supplement,
February 4, 2000.

2
“some sorcery”:
E. Clark,
The Oysters of Locmariaquer
(Chicago, 1964), p. 6.

2
“like candy”:
K. Donner,
Among the Samoyed in Siberia
(New Haven, 1954), p. 129.

2
“fancy cannot grasp”:
W. S. Maugham,
Altogether
(London, 1934), p. 1122.

3
harnessing flame:
W. C. McGrew, “Chimpanzee Material Culture: What Are Its Limits and Why?”, in R. Foley, ed.,
The Origins of Animal Behaviour
(London, 1991), pp. 13-22; J. Goudsblom,
Fire and Civilisation
(Harmondsworth, 1994), pp. 21-25.

4
oven for seeds:
Vergil,
Georgics
II, v. 260; C. Lévi-Strauss,
From Honey to Ashes: Introduction to a Science of Mythology
, ii (London, 1973), 303.

5
“in the preparations”:
B. Malinowski,
Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays
(London, 1974), p. 175.

5
hot stones:
C. Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked
(London, 1970), p. 336.

5
“nature and society”:
Ibid., p. 65.

5
“honorable cooked rice”:
E. Ohnuki-Tierney,
Rice As Self: Japanese Identities Through Time
(Princeton, 1993), p. 30.

5
and their anniversaries:
J. Hendry, “Food As Social Nutrition: The Japanese Case,” in M. Chapman and H. Macbeth, eds.,
Food for Humanity: Cross-Disciplinary Readings
(Oxford, 1990), pp. 57-62.

6
“eating of beef”:
C. E. McDonaugh, “Tharu Evaluations of Food,” in Chapman and Macbeth,
Food for Humanity
, pp. 45-48, at p. 46.

6
to the warriors:
A. A. J. Jansen et al., eds.,
Food and Nutrition in Fiji
, 2 vols. (Suva, 1990), ii, 632-34.

6
demonize these enemies:
G. A. Bezzola,
Die Mongolen in abendländische Sicht
(Berne, 1974), pp. 134-34.

7
“for all that”:
J. A. Brillat-Savarin,
The Philosopher in the Kitchen,
tr. A. Drayton (Harmondsworth,
1970), p. 244. (I generally prefer this translation to the more commonly cited
The Physiology of Taste,
tr. M. F. K. Fisher (New York, 1972).

7
“off his nose”:
L. van der Post,
First Catch Your Eland: A Taste of Africa
(London, 1977), p. 28.

7
“makes the ears bleed”:
Ibid., p. 29; L. van der Post,
African Cooking
(New York, 1970), p. 38.

8
inside their vulvae:
J. G. Frazer,
Myths of the Origins of Fire
(London, 1930), pp. 22-23.

8
almost every culture:
G. Bachelard,
Fragments d'un poétique du feu
(Paris, 1988), pp. 106, 129.

8
fire are unknown:
See the symposium on the subject in
Current Anthropology,
xxx (1989); Goudsblom,
Fire and Civilisation,
pp. 16-23.

8
“use of fire”:
A. Marshak,
Roots of Civilisation
(London, 1972), pp. 111-12; A. H. Brodrick,
The Abbé Breuil, Historian
(London, 1963), p. 11.

8
“wild boar”:
H. Breuil,
Beyond the Bounds of History: Scenes from the Old Stone Age
(London, 1949), p. 36.

9
“crackling”:
C. Lamb,
A Dissertation upon Roast Pig
(London, n.d.[1896]), pp. 16-18.

9
“to dress it”:
Ibid., pp. 34-35.

9
hominid foragers:
Goudsblom,
Fire and Civilisation,
p. 34.

10
“or knives and forks”:
Ibid., p. 36.

11
insoluble problem:
D. L. Jennings, “Cassava,” in N. W. Simmonds, ed.,
Evolution of Crop Plants
(London, 1976), pp. 81-84.

12
“under the ashes”:
Quoted in P. Camporesi,
The Magic Harvest: Food, Folklore and Society
(Cambridge, 1989), pp. 3-4; variant version in G. Bachelard,
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
(London, 1964), p. 15.

12
apply it to cooking:
C. Perlès, “Les origines de la cuisine: l'acte alimentaire dans l'histoire de l'homme,”
Communications,
xxxi (1979), pp. 1-14.

12
blacken and smoke:
P. Pray Bober,
Art, Culture and Cuisine: Ancient and Medieval Gastronomy
(Chicago, 1999), p. 78.

13
“all was roasted”:
Trans. E. V. Rieu (Harmondsworth, 1991), p. 43.

13
on tree trunks:
F. J. Remedi,
Los secretos de la olla: entre el gusto y la necesidad: la alimentación en la Cordoba de principios del siglo XX
(Cordoba, 1998), p. 208.

13
cook food on:
C. Perlès: “Hearth and Home in the Old Stone Age,”
Natural History,
xc (1981), pp. 38-41.