Near a Thousand Tables (9 page)

In other societies, it is rarely eaten foods which acquire the mystique of sacred status. Not all ceremonial meats are necessarily sacred: the fact that goose and turkey are popular at Christmas in Europe and America invests neither bird with holiness. Paschal lamb makes a metaphorical allusion to the self-sacrifice of God,
but is never confused with the sacramental body of Christ. At the Passover Seder, the annual meal at which Jews retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt, the central plate is filled with ritually significant foods that are, in other circumstances, rarely eaten: matzoh, the unleavened bread, commemorating the departure of the Israelites under conditions that did not permit allowing bread to rise; bitter greens, in acknowledgment of the acrimony of slavery; the nut, apple and wine paste called haroset, intended to resemble the bricks, in tradition if not fact, of Egyptian buildings. When the Ogallala of the North American prairie eat puppies, the meal is considered as essentially spiritual food. The dog feast is an enactment of divine order, the slaughter preceded by a lament for the loss of a friend. Anointed with a line of red paint to symbolize “the red road … which … represents all that is beneficent in the world,” the dog is made to face west, to be garroted by women who stand on either side of him, pulling a rope around his neck, while the medicine man administers a blow from behind, “The act of killing the dog is likened to being struck by lightning and guarantees that the spirit of the dog will be released in order to go to the west where it will join the thunder people, those spirits who have power over life and death, and who themselves are symbolized by lightning.” The meat is boiled without seasonings: this is a cross-cultural feature of sacred food, which is not eaten for savor
but for salvation
.

Though foods of high repute are commonly sacred, and food hallowed by sacrifice is eaten in almost every known culture, there is no connection between sacrality and comestibility. Hindus above the lowest caste respect the sacredness of cows by abstaining from their flesh. This exemption puts sacred meat in the same class as impure meat, which is also forbidden: that of carnivores, insects and rodents. Rational or scientific explanations have always been sought to explain why certain foods are proscribed. Cicero was first in a long line of theorists who have explained prohibitions as economically motivated—bovines, for instance, are too valuable to eat and the societies which sacralize them are practicing a
conservation measure
. Yet this must be false, as beef is eaten in many places where bovines are vital for plowing, transport and dairying; and in communities where they are sacralized, as among Hindus, their practical value is much diminished in consequence. Alternatively, revulsion from some creatures is explained on grounds of their intimacy with man; yet dogs and cats are treated as foodstuffs in some societies. Another popular claim is made on behalf of hygiene as the basis of at least some taboos, especially in connection with the puzzlingly selective prohibitions enjoined on the Jews in Leviticus. “I maintain that the food which is forbidden by the Law is unwholesome,” wrote Maimonides. “Pork contains more moisture than necessary and too
much superfluous matter…. [The swine's] habits and its food are
very dirty and loathsome
.” This is good-intentioned nonsense, on a par with Maimonides's contention that women had two wombs, corresponding to their number of breasts, because there is little or no difference in cleanliness to distinguish most of the forbidden meats of Moses from most of those allowed. The nearest thing available to a convincing version of a rational explanation is the view of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, who argued that the prohibited creatures are anomalous in their own classes and that integrity, necessary for holiness, is offended by terrestrial creatures that wriggle, or airborne ones with four feet, or those that are cloven-hoofed but nonruminant, like the
pig and camel
.

It is pointless to seek rational and material explanations for dietary restrictions, because they are essentially suprarational and metaphysical. Meanings ascribed to foods are, like all meanings, agreed conventions about usage: ultimately, they are arbitrary. This does not mean that food taboos are not socially functional. They are, because all of them are totemic: they bind those who respect them and brand those who do not. Permitted foods feed identity, excluded foods help to define it. The taboos are usually related to, and supportive of, the collective beliefs which help a society keep going. It is common for dietary restrictions to outlaw foods which are thought to impede access to the sacred world by conveying “impurities.” There are even devil's foods, like the apple of Eden, which are seemingly wholesome but which degrade men or alienate deities, and dishes which can be polluted by association, or which can be either good to eat or fatal, depending on the circumstances. In Fiji, no one may eat the plant or creature which is his totem—though a neighbor may eat of it freely—or plants which grow near a shrine—though the same plant may be eaten if harvested elsewhere—or fruit which grows in graveyards: these will cause mouth ulcers. Taboos imposed on pregnant women are given medical justifications: crab and octopus would cause rashes and warts. Coconut liquids, if consumed by mother, might give the
infant a cough
. Bemba women must be alert to protect their cooking hearths from anyone who may have had sex without ritual purification—otherwise a child who eats the
food will die
. Aztecs said that if meat stuck to the side of the stewpot, the diner's spear thrust would be skewed or, if the eater was a woman, that her baby would
cling to the womb
. The supposed effects are magical, in the sense that they are expected in ignorance or defiance of evidence; and many of them are bound up with the most widespread belief in food's magical properties—which occurs in societies of every level of sophistication: the belief in the interdependence of food and sex.

Although eating and sex seem to be complementary, mutually lubricating
forms of sensuality, every particular aphrodisiac is a kiss in the dark. None has anything that could remotely be called scientific endorsement. Truffles are widely fancied as having erotic properties. One of Brillat—Savarin's anecdotes was of his inquiries into the validity of their reputation. “An investigation of this sort is no doubt somewhat indelicate and likely to provoke cynical laughter. But
honi soit qui mal y pense:
the pursuit of truth is always praiseworthy.” One of his interviewees confessed that a supper of “superb truffled fowl from Perigord” had been followed by uncharacteristic importunities from her guest. “What can I say Monsieur? I put it all down to the truffles.” His informal committee of inquiry found however, that “the truffle is not a true aphrodisiac; but in certain circumstances it can make women more affectionate and
men more attentive
.” Yet faith in aphrodisiacs has been maintained by food magicians in every society. It has been invoked to explain the enormous quantity of threshed borax seeds found in a
Paleolithic cave
. Every seducer needs a larder of

… manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd
From Fez, and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarkand to cedar'd Lebanon,

or something of the sort. Pythagoras, mythicized in Western tradition as a mathematician and protoscientist, was really a magus whose followers believed he had divine parents and golden body parts: one of his cries was, “Thou wretch, abstain from beans!”—a recipe for food magic which suggests that he shared the convictions of the sandwich man who used to roam London's main shopping street, distributing leaflets against “passion proteins.” Most dietary prescriptions blame beans for no malady except flatulence. Foods which are supposed to be suggestive—asparagus tips or mussels, say, because they resemble, in suitably fervid eyes, the male and female sexual parts, or viscous tidbits, which recall squelching organs and sexual fluids to a suitably disposed mind—are no more than that. They are most unlikely to initiate arousal. Just as there are foods credited with inducing lust, others have been adopted as promoters of chastity. Again, it is usually only by a doctrine of sympathetic magic that such recommendations can be justified. On a visit to Canterbury in the late twelfth century Giraldus Cambrensis vindicated barnacle geese as Lenten food for clergymen on the false assumption that they reproduced without sex and therefore might be expected to nourish without exciting inappropriate lusts. As we shall see in a moment, modern dietetics were founded, in part, in the early nineteenth century, as a result of an attempt to create a diet conducive to chastity.

The fact that many food taboos are enforced by the threat of sickness or deformity puts them, considered from one aspect, in the same category as the health regimens which are found in almost every society but which are particularly characteristic of the modern West. The only surviving recipes from ancient Egypt are for invalid food and come from medical treatises. Chicory was added for liver trouble, iris for bad blood,
fennel for colitis
. The theory of humors dominated Greek and Roman medical dietetics: indeed, it has been the most enduring and thoroughgoing influence on dietary tradition in the Western world. Menu planners for the sick in classical antiquity tried to correct an excess of cold and moist “humor” by providing hot, dry foods and vice versa. Galen recommended instances of food combining which seem as unscientific as anything in the Beverly Hills Diet: pastries made with flour and butter would be injurious unless served with plenty of honey. Fruit was unsuitable for children and even for nursing mothers.

The notion that foods have a range of properties which must be balanced for perfect health has appealed to many other cultures. Humoral dietary theory is a traditional framework for the pharmacopoeia of many societies, but the details always differ and often contradict each other. In Iran all foods except salt, water, tea and some fungi are classified as “hot” or “cold.” The terminology is reminiscent of Galen but, as with all such schemes, there seems to be no coherence in the categories and no relationship to the way foods are classified in other parts of the world. Beef is cold, as are cucumbers, starchy vegetables and cereals, including rice; mutton and sugar, however, are hot, as are dry vegetables and chestnuts, hemp seed, chick peas,
melon and millet
. In a system traditional in India, sugar is cold, rice hot. In Malaya, rice is neutral. Chinese cuisine, even in circles where Taoism is mistrusted as magical, remains influenced by the ideal of achieving balance between yin and yang: most food is classed as one or the other. Additionally, traditional Chinese medicine had a theory of humors, now fallen into disuse, which was, perhaps, of Western origin. There was an ineluctable common sense about the way foods were assigned to the classes: ginger, pepper, meat and blood were hot; Chinese cabbage, watercress and other green vegetables were cold. Sometimes the results of the theory were disastrous for patients: diarrhea sufferers, for instance, would be denied vegetables on the grounds that their sickness was “cold” and could best be treated with meats and
strong spices
. In the Malay system, constipation is treated by the avoidance of cold foods, including okra, eggplant,
pumpkin and papaya
.

Traditional dietetics depends, in most cultures, on arbitrary categories. It is
therefore unscientific or, at least, not scientific in the usual sense of the word. It is more readily understood as a kind of transformative magic similar to the magic of cannibalism: you acquire the qualities of what you eat. You, too, can have a figure like Jack Spratt's, a “hot” temper, a “cool” disposition. On the other hand, a commonsense assumption links food and health. What is cooking, “if not medicine?” asked a pseudo-Hippocratic
treatise of antiquity
. Indeed, food is medicine in a sense, despite the efforts governments make to distinguish between them for purposes of taxation and regulation. Damien Hirst, who founded a restaurant unappetizingly called Pharmacy, painted canny satires, in which foodstuffs appeared packaged as drugstore merchandise. In a similar sense, food is also poison. Universal observation reveals that too much food or too little is injurious and sometimes fatal. Some other correspondences are too obvious to be called scientific but too well justified to be called superstitious. Galen proscribed fish
from sewer water
and indigestible substances, like cartilaginous meat,
for the elderly
. Much of the history both of food and of medicine could be written in terms of the search for a more exact tabulation of the correspondences between particular foods and particular physical conditions.

The connection between food and health is at its most obvious in cases where specific diseases are caused by dietary deficiencies and, therefore, can be remedied by dietary adjustments. Beriberi occurs in eaters who overrely on polished rice, which lacks thiamin; vitamin A deficiency—which in rare cases can arise from strangely selective diets—causes dry eye and even blindness. Shortage of vitamin D causes rickets. Lack of niacin leads to pellagra. Among mineral components of food, iodine is needed to keep goiter at bay, calcium against osteoporosis and iron against anemia. The most conspicuous case in history is that of scurvy, which is a deficiency disease pure and simple, caused by lack of the vitamin C in ascorbic acid. In most societies, for most of the time, it has been a very marginal phenomenon, but it acquired unaccustomed significance in world history in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it debilitated and killed large numbers of European seamen engaged in unprecedentedly long voyages of ocean-spanning exploration and trade.

Most animals can synthesize ascorbic acid readily enough from glucose. Like monkeys and guinea pigs, however, humans cannot do this and must get vitamin C supplies directly from diet. The body's natural reserves generally get depleted to dangerous levels after six to twelve weeks without replenishment. Though ascorbic acid is active in many biological processes, its most important function is maintaining the body's supply of collagen, a cement that binds cells together. Lack of vitamin C affects the amount of two amino acids in collagen, resulting in a
lower melting temperature of the collagen. This, in turn, causes the capillary walls to break down and cells to hemorrhage throughout the body; when capillaries lose the “glue” that holds them together, symptoms of scurvy appear. They begin with fatigue and depression and continue with pustules, bleeding and swollen joints. The worst suffering tends to be concentrated around the mouth. Gingivitis sets in, and the gums swell, blacken, soften and engulf the teeth and become so painful that mastication is impossible. The description of the sufferings of Samuel de Champlain's men, icebound on the St. Lawrence in 1535-36 after their Atlantic crossing, is typical: legs bloated and inflamed, “sinews contracted and black as coal,” and “mouths so tainted that the gums
rotted to the roots
.” After ninety days, the disease can be fatal.