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Near a Thousand Tables
A History of Food
By Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Free Press
Copyright © 2002 Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-7432-2740-9
Chapter One
Dietetic Sorcery Success in the treatment of scurvy reinforced the notion that food could be elevated, above its commonplace role as a nourisher, to the ranks of a healer. Food health became a quest in which rising science met abiding religion. It was both a pseudo-science and a mystic vocation: pseudo-scientific because of the new prestige of science in the nineteenth-century West; mystical because it was developed beyond evidence by visionaries who, in many cases, were religiously inspired: if food was the key to physical health, why not moral health, too? The ancient sages, who formulated character-forming taboos of abstinence and restraint, had nineteenth- and twentieth-century successors.
Traditionally, to command prestige, medicinal foods had to be rare and costly. Readily available remedies tend to work poorly, because patients are disinclined to believe in them; part of every affliction is mental and cures have to be psychologically convincing to register mental effects. The great Jesuit traveler of the seventeenth century, Jeronimo Lobo, admitted that he had no medical knowledge outside the handbook he carried with him; but he found that he was much valued for consultations wherever he went: this was the common experience of deracinated "holy men." On one occasion, during a spell when Catholics were persecuted, he was in hiding in Ethiopia, "surrounding ourselves with brambles in order to avoid attacks by thieves and wild animals, since the land had an abundance of both." It was Lent and he wanted little food, but to get wheat for mass and lamb for Easter he treated a farmer's asthma in exchange. With difficulty, he persuaded his patient that an emetic would do no good. "Although there was a dearth of many of the things that could be of use to him, there was one item in abundance and very much available, namely, syrup of goat's urine taken in the morning on an empty stomach ... which could not fail to bring him the desired result." Lobo never found out whether the remedy worked: "I only know the payments did not continue." Modern Western practice in healthy eating is in Lobo's tradition, because, instead of privileging rarities, it ranks commonplace foods and entire diets and "styles" of eating in order of healthiness.
Among all such schemes, vegetarianism has the longest-standing claims and the most prestigious adherents to back it. All-vegetable diets have received endorsements, since antiquity, among sages convinced of the improving effects of all kinds of austerity, and among critics of human arrogance which claims dominion over beasts. These two strands came together in the plea Plutarch attributed to a potential dish, "Kill to eat if you must or will, but do not slay me that you may feed luxuriously." In the past, however, outside utopian fiction, despite persuasive advocates, vegetarianism captured whole societies or whole religious traditions only as part of a system of taboos, recommended by religious sanctions. Pythagoras and the Buddha were credited by early followers with vegetarian messages, but they were also believers in the transmigration of souls: all meat-eating might be cannibalism and parricide in a world where "the soul of my grandam might haply inhabit a bird." Now, in the modern, secular West, vegetarianism is recommended by a different kind of magic as a means to health (though never entirely without concomitant appeals to morality and, increasingly, to ecological anxiety).
The contemporary vegetarian movement can be traced back to specific origins in the late eighteenth century. Its sources of inspiration were, in part, traditional: the cumulative effect of classical and medieval vegetarian tracts, disseminated by an increasingly active press, and reflected in the gradually accelerating output by vegetarian writers in Europe in the previous two centuries. But it thrived because of new contexts which sustained it. Its beginnings are inseparable from the context of early Romanticism and the new sensibility toward the natural world evinced in the arts and letters of Europe and the New World at the time. It may not be fanciful, too, to locate it in the context of the rapid growth of Europe's population, which alerted economists to a genuine advantage of vegetable foods: they are cheaper to produce than edible livestock, which consumes disproportionate amounts of cereals. Adam Smith, who was a canny capitalist modestly susceptible to romanticism, omitted meat from his description of "the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most invigorating diet."
Most other advocates of the new vegetarianism were more softhearted or less hardheaded. John Oswald was a sucker for bizarre and radical causes: a self-converted, self-proclaimed Hindu, who died fighting counterrevolutionaries in Jacobin France. His vegetarian tract, The Cry of Nature (1791), demanded inviolability for animal life. Critics were not slow to denounce "a wretch who would not kill a tiger but died unsated in his thirst for human blood!" The radical printer George Nicholson appealed to a classical topos: meatless "feasts of primeval innocence" in the presumed "golden age" which preceded competition between species. Flesh was "matter for corruption." Vegetarians who felt uneasy about the paganism or secularism of this classical imagery could turn to the Bible and find that God had summoned his chosen to lands of manna, milk and honey. The fact that the original manna was probably an insect secretion rather than a vegetable food was not yet known.
The early apostles of vegetarianism believed - or claimed they did - that food forms character. (A lot of food magic is sympathetic: in some cultures, women who tread rice grains must be bare-breasted because of the "ancient belief that the less they wear, the thinner the rice husks will be.") For early vegetarians, more than bodily health was at stake. Carnivores, insisted Joseph Ritson, in one of English vegetarianism's first sacred texts, An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty (1802), were cruel, choleric and bad-tempered. Meat eating led to robbery, sycophancy and tyranny. It encouraged the predatory instinct. Shelley became one of the most vociferous converts to this creed. "The slave trade," he claimed, "that abominable violation of the rights of nature, is, most probably, owing to the same cause; as well as a variety of violent acts, both national and personal, which are usually attributed to other motives." Meat food was the "root of all evil," and animal diet "the original and mortal sin," as if flesh grew on the tree of Eden. When man took to meat, "his vitals were devoured by the vulture of disease." If Napoleon had descended from "a race of vegetable-eaters" he would never have had "the inclination or the power to ascend the throne of the Bourbons." Shelley's friends were inclined to mock his vegetable appetite. Scythrop - the satirical shadow Thomas Love Peacock invented for him - was saved from suicide by the restorative effects of a boiled fowl and some madeira. Shelley's sister, however, shared the vegetarian creed. Frankenstein's monster refused the food of man and declined to "destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment."
Vegetarianism could never attain mass popularity on moral grounds - certainly not, in the nineteenth century, in competition with conventional religion. Good health, however, was salable in a way that good conduct could never be. Morality joined marketability in the whole wheat flour cult founded by a revivalist clergyman, Sylvester Graham, in the 1830s: his was the first American doctrine of global appeal since the Declaration of Independence. Graham was not just the "prophet of bran bread and pumpkins"; he was part of the bourgeois revolution in prudery, the revulsion the nineteenth century felt from the louche sexual habits of the preceding age. He believed that sex was not only immoral: it was unhealthy. Moreover, it was immoral most of the time but it was unhealthy all of the time, because sexual emissions were debilitating. Society was threatened by the indiscipline of an unrestrained sex drive. Consciousness of one's sexual organs was a sign of disease. Sex was paroxysm and orgasm resembled an attack of diarrhea. Graham agreed with the vegetarian warriors of the previous generation that flesh eaters were "despotic, vehement and impatient." An abstemious, vegetable diet would naturally cause and complement the minimal expenditure of semen, contributing to what Graham called a "physiology of subsistence."
At the same time he contrived to appeal to many wisps in the zeitgeist: anti-industrial rural romanticism; the idealism that called for the "return to the plough" and the reembodiment of Cincinnatus in American life. These blended in Graham's work with the rhetoric of "manifest destiny" and the economics of American imperialism, which looked to the settlement of the prairie and the conversion of the grasslands to wheatlands - an ambition that could only be fulfilled if there were a massive increase in cereal consumption. Sylvester Graham wanted it to happen in unfertilized, undebauched, virgin soil. His kind of bread, made from the whole wheat flour he formulated, would be baked lovingly at home by mothers. The unsuccessful part of his campaign was his effort to make Americans eat less: "Every individual," he declared, "should, as a general rule, restrain himself to the smallest quantity, which he finds from careful investigation and enlightened experience and observation, will fully meet the alimentary wants of the vital economy of his system - knowing that whatsoever is more than this is evil." That message was ignored. America was and remained a land of overeaters. Graham's flour, however, found a huge niche in the booming food market. James Caleb Jackson (1814-95) made a fortune from marketing Graham products, including the first cold breakfast cereal, which he called Granula.
Graham inspired imitators: a sequence of low-protein fanatics whose homespun philosophy came to displace science and to dominate mainstream thinking on nutrition for a century. By the 1890s, idealists and charlatans were competing for the huge profits generated by the markup on patent cereal products. The result was the start of the "Corn Flake Crusades," which soon became a civil war, as writs flew to protect the copyright in rival products which were all suspiciously similar. J. H. Kellogg's first cereal pirated the name Granula. He was a typical mixture of moralism and materialism, capitalism and Christianity. He came from an Adventist background: his sect had long espoused low-protein principles similar to Graham's. Unlike most of the food gurus of the time, he had studied medicine and supplemented his religious impulse with scientific ambitions: he wanted to eliminate the hundreds of millions of bacteria which, he believed, meat introduced to the colon - exterminating them with yogurt or expelling them with roughage. Eventually, the adrenaline of the arena seemed to take him over and his main ambition became to outdo all the other breakfast cereals on the market.
In part, the likes of Kellogg communicated successfully with the public because they were great showmen, with evangelists' instincts for playing an audience, creating a congregation. In part, too, they relied on mediation by ill-educated, self-styled "experts" in the science of nutrition, which still lacked a professional structure and standards. Sallie Rorer was highly typical and highly influential. She had no qualifications for her job - indeed, no educational qualifications of any kind. She was suddenly elevated to the administration of the Philadelphia School of Cooking because she was the star pupil when the first principal unexpectedly resigned. "Two-thirds of all the intemperance in the land," she believed, was due to "unscientific feeding." As a teacher she was charismatic, as a lecturer, magnetic, and she rose to be the acknowledged "Queen of the Kitchen" in the 1890s. Her demonstrations impressed audiences, if not with her food, with the radiance of the silks she wore to show that cooking could be clean. She was also a robust emotional bully. She tyrannized her biddable husband into the role of amanuensis for her cookbooks. She made her rich pupils clean their own utensils. Like many kitchen apostles she claimed to be a self-cured dyspeptic. Her claim to promote a "science" of-"educated cooking" was sustained despite her collusion with advertisers and her endorsements of indifferent products, including proprietary cottonseed oil and corn flour. But she promoted good culinary causes: modest rates of consumption, salad every day, diets individually tailored to the needs of the sick.
Like all self-made nutritionists she had her bêtes noires: mustard and pickles should be banned, puddings avoided and the use of vinegar minimized: "If salt and vinegar will eat away copper, what must it do to the delicate mucus lining of the stomach?" She eschewed pork and veal on the grounds that they "took five hours to digest" and was proud of never eating fried food. "Banish the frying pan and there will not be much sickness either in city or country." Her early prescriptions for breakfasts were heartily in the American tradition but she later developed the theory that "stomach mucus" accumulated overnight and should not be disturbed by more than a little fruit, milky coffee or patent cereal. This was the only matter on which she ever admitted changing her mind. All but contagious disease could be eliminated by a healthy regimen.
Above all, one should eat to live, not live to eat. "Every pound of flesh more than necessary," she wrote, "is a pound of disease." To eat three meals a day was "unrefined." Rorer advocated smaller, simple, dainty meals for the urban age. She disguised meanness as "daintiness." Like so many dietitians, she did not really like food. She excoriated waste, recycled leftovers. The day's routine should begin, she said, by salvaging the leftovers the maid might throw away. A sortie into the larder might produce some strips of suet, the tough trimmings from the breakfast steak, stale cheese, stale bread, cream gone sour, a boiled potato, some celery leaves and a cupful each of leftover fish and peas. She pureed the peas and celery for soup, combined the cheese and bread in a savory rarebit, minced the beef, rendered the suet, put the sour cream into gingerbread, creamed the fish and piped the potato around it.
Rorer and Kellogg both fell under the spell of the most showmanlike of all the health food crusaders of the fin de siècle. Horace Fletcher was an obsessive in the tradition of Sylvester Graham. He advocated low protein intake with the same passion but in a more secular vein, stressing always his scientific claims, which were bogus, and the priority of bodily health - the one good about which everyone agreed in America's contentious and plural society. He took one of the shibboleths of the Victorian nursery - food should be chewed - and turned it into a creed. From his palazzo in Venice he urged eaters to masticate until food loses its taste. Liquids should be swished around in one's mouth for at least thirty seconds before swallowing. Most of what he represented as "pure" laboratory science was opinionated nonsense. He insisted, for instance, that "digestion took place in the rear of the mouth." By adopting Fletcher's methods, his doctor claimed to have cured his own "gout, incapacitating headaches, frequent colds, boils on the neck and acne, chronic eczema of the toes ... frequent acid dyspepsia" and loss of interest "in my life and work": the typical testimonial of a barker at a medicine show. But despite what he claimed was his stunningly low protein intake of forty-five grams a day, Fletcher astonished all observers by his extraordinary physical prowess, which, when he was fifty-five years old, rivaled that of Yale University oarsmen and West Point cadets in trials of strength. It should be said that Fletcher left out of account the copious amounts of chocolate he ate between meals.
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Excerpted from Near a Thousand Tables by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Copyright © 2002 by Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto. Excerpted by permission.
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