Food for thought
PERSONAL COLUMN J. H. PLUMB
Last summer the northern seas which wash the Hebrides and the wild coast of Scotland, that stretches east from Cape Wrath, were as blue as the Mediterranean. The great wide moors stretched between the cliffs of the most ancient mountains in the world. Uninhabited, lonely mile followed lonely mile, the stillness broken only by the plaintive cries of curlew and the raucous notes of the gulls wheeling backwards and forwards across the cliffs. With slow majestic flight the golden eagle hunted up and down a line of sand-dunes. This great empty landscape softened the sensibilities, bringing a sense of peace, of well-being, of almost Words- worthian harmony—so long as one did not look too closely or listen too keenly : for it was peace based on murder, on ravenous, ruthless hunger.
The living rabbits were torn apart to feed the young eaglets : the hooked beaks of the gulls savaged the darting fish : everywhere there was blood and death, reminding one of those hor- rifying films of wild life in Africa—the herd of zebra grazing peacefully within a hundred yards of a lion eating one of their living young. And yet, every night one turned to the hotel in eager expectation—to those thick slices of veni- son, the huge claws of boiled lobster or the thin slices of smoked salmon—appetite as keen as the hunting gull's. In all indulgence in food there is not only a touch of the macabre but also an almost deliberate insensitivity—not merely to the birds and beasts and fishes that we prey upon, but to our fellow-men.
The too sharp contrast between caviar at a pound a spoonful or Château Lafite '47 at £5 lOs a bottle and the starving eyes and pot bellies of Biafran children is almost enough to make one hate food. Surely such insensitivity implies decadence? In New York, London, Paris, all the great cities including Moscow and, I suspect, Peking, gargantuan guzzling at extravagant ex- pense is a commonplace: even whilst half the world goes hungry. Food and sex, as the moralists gloomily point out, were the two major preoccupations of the Roman oligarchy before the collapse of their empire. Are the riot of cookbooks, the proliferating restaurants, the extravagant expense accounts along with the multitude of call girls, blue films and hard core pornography an indication of a similar decay?
Curiously enough, in the light of history, this age of ours is far far better than ages past. One simple fact: far, far more of the world's popu- lation is adequately fed, a greater proportion well fed than for millennia, perhaps since the beginning of recorded history. Major famines causing the deaths of millions, not infrequent earlier in this century, have almost ceased. The plight of mankind as a whole is better- foodwise—than it has ever been. Endeavour is still needed, generosity of rich nations is still not enough; so long as children starve, the caviar should stab our consciences. But it should not fill us with guilt or give rise to gloomy pro- phesying. The momentum of agricultural growth and development, already several centuries old, cannot now be stopped. No matter how des- perate for individuals, or for certain communi- ties and nations, the problem of food may be, the prospect for mankind is bright.
And, apart from the deeper problems, we can
be assured that we are less gluttonous than our ancestors and far more aware. of, and sensitive to, the needs of others. It should be remem- bered that until the great Irish famine of the 1840s no large-scale attempt had ever been made by any government to alleviate widespread and killing hunger by the distribution of free or subsidised food, and even then the British government had doubts about its policy, which in any case was slow and incompetent. But the distance which we have covered since that first faltering attempt in a mere hundred years, is quite astonishing.
And again, when one compares the extra- vagance of our ancestors with our own, how modest it seems. We are far less gross or greedy. In 1552 Sir William Petrie and his family went down to Ingatestone Hall in Essex for the Christmas holidays : apart from the family party, there were, of course, the servants, prob- ably between twenty and thirty of them. Fifty to sixty people at the most had to be fed. They polished off, according to the household accounts, a ton of cheese, seventeen oxen, four- teen steers, four cows, twenty-nine calves, 129 sheep, fifty-four lambs, two boars, nine `porIcs; five bacon hogs, three goats, seven kids, thir- teen bucks, five does and one stag—bread, butter, eggs, milk, etc in like quantities. True the animals were small and 'lean, doubtless vast quantities of scraps and offal were thrown out to the poor; but even so the Petries must have stuffed themselves into insensibility day after day. And this was not uncommon amongst the rich in Europe in any recent century. Lord Palmerston, England's Prime Minister, aged eighty-one; wolfed down nine meat courses, in- cluding a whole pheasant, for his dinner, with- out thinking that he had in any way exceeded himself. Edward VII usually ate his way through a vast breakfast, two huge meals of nine to ten courses each, a large tea and a con- siderable supper, but always had a solid cold buffet beside his bed in case he woke up hungry.
The middle class everywhere gorged as de- terminedly as any aristocrat. Parson Wood- forde, a modest Norfolk clergyman of the eight- eenth century, kept a diary for decades that dealt in great detail with his meals. Even for a greedy gourmet it makes nauseating reading. And during these centuries the Biafran children were one's own neighbours. As Parson Wood- forde reeled home stuffed tight with food and sozzled with drink, they stood and watched him go—the ill-clad, shoeless, scrawny, starving children of England's broken peasantry.
We eat less and we remain more sensitive to others' needs than previous generations. But we not only eat less, we also eat better and more varied food. And what was once the privilege of the extravagant aristocrat is now available to anyone with a few pounds. Parson Wood- forde's food was extremely dull—great quanti- ties, constantly repeated, of meat, game and fish, cooked in the same fashion with endless repetitions. A modern middle-class family now has the culinary delights of the world to choose from and that goes for the Japanese who can savour their hottu doggus as well as the Ameri- cans who savour Unit- abalone: in all great cities food of every variety is available, bringing diversity and delight to millions. This form of
exoticism has, until the second half of this Century, been the prerogative of the very rich. The Chinese mandarins of the Tang dynasty delighted in strange exotic foods as much as any Roman senator or English aristocrat. But now one needs to be neither prince nor man- darin, just a wise shopper.
There is hardly any field in which human curiosity is so intense as food and now in the western world one can eat as a Chinaman would for luncheon and go Armenian or Greek for dinner. Modern eating is both more modest and more varied and, I strongly suspect, better cooked. We may not have Vatels, Caremes or Escoffiers: but the culinary arts have never been more widely appreciated or practised. May it spread with affluence until no belly is empty, no thirst unslaked! But even so, whenever I see a gull's beak or a fox's mouth I shall be re- minded of that touch of horror, of pain, of death that lies behind all food.
Previous page
