Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  For the homeland, the migrant food culture had ripple effects, too. Demand for tomatoes and pasta in New York City boosted the tinning and food industry in Italy. As the price of voyages on steamships fell, half the migrants returned home, bringing their newly acquired eating cultures with them. All this helped elevate pasta and sauce into a national dish, notwithstanding Mussolini’s attempt to make everyone eat local rice. Without the earlier mass migration from the mezzogiorno, pizza and pasta would be neither the national staple nor the global success story they are today.

  The Irish experience was the polar opposite of the Italian. The Irish diaspora made do without Irish food. There were no Irish delicatessens or Irish meals on St Patrick’s Day. Identity was defined by dance and drink. When it came to eating, Irish-Americans preferred a fusion cuisine that mixed Anglo-Saxon and European influences. In 1912, the Ancient Order of Hibernians held their annual Irish picnic in Milwaukee. On the menu were roast beef (the food of the English enemy since the eighteenth century); sliced tomatoes (a Mediterranean fruit that had been transplanted from Mexico); and hot coffee and pie. Even the potatoes – the closest to an Irish staple – were dressed up as a Wiener potato salad from Austria. Like their Italian neighbours, a lot of Irish immigrants were poor and from the countryside. Italian peasants, too, had been visited by hunger. Unlike them, however, the Irish arrived with the national trauma of the potato famine (1845–50) imprinted on their minds. Irish identity was defined by the lack of food, not its pleasures.91

  Jewish migrants reached their own compromise between culinary traditionalism and selective innovation, defending regional dishes and elements of kosher while at the same time developing a taste for foreign foods. Gefilte fish and borscht kept their symbolic centrality for Eastern European Jews but were increasingly reserved for the Sabbath and other special days. Regular meals incorporated meatloaf and meat soups. From German Jews, they discovered Frankfurters and pastrami. In reverse, German Jews picked up gefilte fish. Such gastronomic exchanges were not self-contained Jewish affairs but open to cuisines from further afield. By the 1920s, Yiddish cookbooks featured French soup and dishes with Parmesan. Gradually, kosher lost its rigour and accepted selected American products, including Wrigley’s gum. In New York, a Chinese meal became a ritual that marked the end of Sabbath for many Jewish families. Chinese restaurants started putting kosher chow mein on their menu, a tradition that lives on on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.92

  Migration might appear as a wonderful harbinger of multiculturalism, a constant injection of new tastes, but the arrival of some ethnic food cultures is always accompanied by the decline and disappearance of others. In London, little remains of the culinary footprint of Jewish and German communities from Victorian and Edwardian times. Gone are the many kosher outlets and German beer halls. Chinese and Indian restaurants have taken their place; the latter increased ten-fold in the 1980s. Such transitions are rarely smooth and easy, and we must resist the temptation to see in every ethnic restaurant a shining example of multicultural tolerance. At times, ethnic food was a lightning rod for racial prejudice. In the 1960s and ’70s, just as Indian restaurants made their first appearance in provincial towns, British landlords complained of South Asians ‘stinking’ of curry. Some British tenants asked their council either to give them a rent rebate because of the ‘smell’ or to be moved away from their Asian neighbours; in Germany, citizens complained about ‘noisy’ Italians who left restaurants singing and shouting, without respect for German privacy and night rest (Nachtruhe).93 Before the craze for al fresco dining on cold, wet Northern streets, ethnic restaurants could appear a threat to indigenous cultures of public space.

  Exotic influences had to be massaged to make them safe, as in the famous case of ‘chicken tikka masala’, a meal that had to be invented before it could be devoured as a quintessential national dish by British politicians and customers. Other influences had to be disguised. Indian restaurants in Britain rarely shout about their Islamic roots, even though the vast majority are run by Muslims from the Punjab and Kashmir. For understandable reasons, most enterprising restaurateurs played it safe and opted for a generic standardized menu where India is everywhere and nowhere. Regional and religious authenticity were sacrificed. British authorities played their role in marketing an airbrushed ‘India’ that fitted their local interests. De-industrializing old industrial towns began to reinvent themselves as regional curry capitals. In the 1980s, Bradford promoted a ‘curry trail’ for visitors. Birmingham pushed wok-style balti cooking as its civic trademark.94 The effects of these invented hybrids must not be exaggerated. Eating in an ethnic restaurant may give locals a sense of difference, however inauthentic the dish or decor might be, but it is little more than multiculturalism at a distance. There is a big difference between living with strangers and occasionally ordering food from them. The millions of curries served in Britain every year have not extinguished racial discrimination and conflict.

  Continuity and change are mirrored within migrant families. On the one hand, people are extraordinarily stubborn when it comes to food. Taste, after all, is one of the most intimate aspects of our lives, a powerful sense that reaches back all the way to early childhood, perhaps the womb. On the other, people are also extraordinarily flexible, suddenly falling in love with foods that carried age-old stigmas, such as raw fish and sushi. These tensions are particularly acute for migrants, who have to navigate their way in a host society with a strange food culture. How are they resolved?

  It is worth recalling that eating is about more than the food on the plate. It concerns the format of the meal and the habits and spaces of eating as well. Migrants have managed to preserve their identity by adapting some elements and conserving others. An ethnography of Bengali-American households in the Chicago area, conducted a decade ago, gives the following meal plan for a family: on Sunday, omelette and toast for breakfast, with lamb curry for dinner; fish and rice on three days during the working week; Thursday dinner: roast chicken leg with an American-style salad and French dressing. On Friday, the family went to Red Lobster, the steak and seafood chain. These families continued to eat a lot of fish and rice, like their cousins back in Bengal and unlike their American neighbours. The meal that had changed most dramatically was the one with the lowest symbolic value: breakfast. What had shifted, too, was the space and format of the family meal. In Calcutta, the weekend meal had been a private affair, eaten at home. In Chicago, families went out and ate in public.95 Such selective rearrangements can continue for generations without leading necessarily to a loss of ethnic identity. Italian-Americans in the 1990s ate less macaroni than their great-grandparents. During the week, they alternated between stews and American platters. Come Sunday, however, Italian-style dishes would multiply in a great family feast that celebrated eating together.

  Status is as important as tastebuds for the survival of an ethnic food culture in exile. It determines whether migrant communities have the power and interest to hold on to inherited customs. The Bengali households in Chicago were distinguished by high status – there was little insecurity or perceived need among them to stop eating fish and copy all things American. A study of Japanese workers on a sugar plantation in Hawaii, conducted in the 1930s, affords a case in contrast. In Japan itself, working families with rising incomes moved to higher-quality, polished rice. Among similar Japanese families on Hawaii, the reverse happened. Only the elderly were clinging to a diet of rice. The rest progressively switched to American crackers, white bread, butter, jam and coffee. In American Hawaii, unlike in Japan, polished rice signalled poverty. Plantation workers were eager to leave it behind as they tried to climb up the social ladder. For the new generation, traditional food was losing its taste fast. ‘I don’t like Japanese foods,’ a female graduate from an American high school said. ‘Fish smells bad and the rice takes too long to cook.’96

  Migrants are not the only carriers of foreign tastes. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, travellers played a cr
itical role in spreading the craze for coffee, cocoa and other exotic novelties. Since the 1950s, mass tourism has raised the exposure to foreign culinary influences to unprecedented levels, although the two world wars were already stepping stones along the way. Tourism has certainly played its part in the popularization of foreign cuisines. The German holiday exodus to Italy in the 1950s and ’60s epitomized a new hedonism. Food and wine, beach and sun took the place of ancient ruins and Goethe’s Italienische Reise. Back home, the neighbourhood Italian restaurant, with fishing nets on the wall and straw-bottles of Chianti on the table, offered everyone, for a couple of hours, a holiday feeling and a carefully packaged taste of Mediterranean romance, complete with the seductive ‘Mario’; padroni and waiters were invariably men and addressed by their first name, even if the ‘authentic’ food that emerged from the kitchen was often prepared by their German wives or by Turkish cooks. In the Canale Grande in Munich, customers enjoyed a life-size replica of Venice’s Bridge of Sighs, although the city authorities put a stop to their plan of mooring a real gondola outside on the Nymphenburg canal.97

  Some historians have detected in the global advance of Mediterranean cuisine the birth of a new ‘style generation’.98 What is more debatable is the general influence of tourism on taste, at least when it comes to food. With the partial exception of ‘Italian’ and ‘Greek’ food, the orders taken in ethnic restaurants have not followed the popular tourist trail; even in the Italian case, many establishments had their roots in the gelaterie of the inter-war years, well before the German masses reached Rimini. Chinese and Indian restaurants abound in Western Europe but, until recently, very few Europeans travelled there. Millions of Britons, meanwhile, have returned from Spain without an appetite for bacalao (salted cod). Instead, charter holidays brought mushy peas to Torremolinos. The limited and highly selective effect of travel for taste deserves greater attention than it has received. England is a popular tourist destination for Italians and Arabs, but we do not find Yorkshire puddings served on the Arno or the Nile.

  The reason for this uneven appropriation is two-fold. Tourism may make people more receptive to strange foods overall, but it also needs migrants to open and run the places to serve them. Where ethnic restaurants have been successful, they have been able to draw on prior labour migrations, be they of Turks and Greeks to Germany or Indians and Hong Kong Chinese to Britain. Secondly, the ethnic shape of the culinary landscape has been dependent on state regulation as well as consumer choice. On the European continent, unlike in the United Kingdom or the United States, non-European migrants who wished to set up a restaurant faced often insuperable obstacles. Prior to reforms in 1978, German law discriminated against Turkish guest workers in favour of Italians and other immigrants from the European economic community, who needed no special permission to stay in order to open a restaurant; it gave Italian pizzerias a formidable head start. In Switzerland, Turks and migrants from Yugoslavia were allowed to work in Swiss kitchens but prevented from starting their own. The strength and variety of ethnic cuisines, then, is not only about the diversification of consumer taste in a post-industrial leisure society. It is also a comment about a host society’s self-understanding vis-à-vis immigrants and the power of the state to enforce it. Where migrants were treated as temporary ‘guest workers’, it was natural to keep a cap on ethnic restaurants. After all, they were expected to return after a few years. Neither the people nor their food were seen as valuable, permanent additions to the host culture.

  The ethnic restaurant may tell a story of advancing diversity in the affluent world since the 1960s. Yet there are equally important countervailing trends. We need to look at diversity from a global and social perspective as well as that of the individual. From the perspective of the prairies and oceans, the twentieth century saw a sharp decline in biodiversity, reversing 10,000 years of history in which humans had added to the gene pool of plants and animals. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, over three quarters of all crop varieties in Europe and the Middle East had vanished. In the United States, according to one survey, the figure is as high as 97 per cent. A quarter of the world’s fish stock is facing extinction today.99 Everyone wants a piece of tuna. Convergence has been accelerated by a near-universal, growing appetite for meat, the global integration of food systems and retailing, and the mono-cultures of agro-business. Put differently, while most individuals are enjoying a richer and more varied diet, the varied spices and sauces of their meals increasingly flavour the same kind of wheat, rice and chicken.

  A similar contradiction exists when it comes to eating as a social practice. On the one hand, the rise in the standard of living and the decline in the price of food – first in the late nineteenth century, then with a second, major drop in the late twentieth – have narrowed the previously vast dietary gulf between rich and poor. The stark contrast between the feasts of the elite and monotony for the rest is gone.100 All social classes eat meat and snack on processed foods, although some princes may prefer the organic variety from their own certified farm. Supermarkets have weakened (though not eliminated) regional food cultures. Together, TV, leisure and relative affluence have popularized cooking and baking as serious hobbies and a sign of distinction, where hosts play chef and perform in the kitchen. In the process, elite haute cuisine lost its dominant status.

  At the same time, there is evidence that food cultures may be as diverse today as they were half a century ago, before TV and eating out took off; the inter-war years, probably, marked a bigger change, as the middle classes lost their cooks and suddenly had to cook for themselves. Eating in affluent societies may simply have articulated fresh differences. The most nuanced study we have – on British society – has found ongoing differentiation. Regional differences declined, but what food people bought and cooked continued to diverge by class, gender and age in the late 1980s as much as a generation earlier. Professionals were more receptive to state recommendations on healthy eating than manual workers. Yes, everyone was eating out more. But for educated elites, a restaurant meal with a good bottle of French wine was a way to express their taste and knowledge, affirming their status in their peer group, and that, culturally, they were miles apart from young working-class men going for a curry. Much has been made of individualization and the reign of private choice. But as the sociologist Alan Warde has noted, if this were true we would expect far greater interpersonal variation in diet than the evidence supports.101 Personal taste remains socially structured. The imagined worlds that people enter when they eat, as well as the company they eat with, continue to be shaped by class, community and the state.

  14

  Matters of the Spirit

  Affluence challenged old hierarchies of class and taste and forged new ones. So far, we have looked at secular dimensions, but we should also ask about matters of the spirit. Did goods kill God?

  The idea that greater consumption must be the enemy of religious life has come in a variety of guises. When affluence arrived in Western Europe in the 1960s, people stopped going to Church and went shopping instead, some commentators said. In the 1980s and ’90s, Pope John Paul II attacked ‘consumerism’ for making people ‘slaves of “possession” and immediate gratification’, promoting ‘having’ over ‘being’, and damaging people’s ‘physical and spiritual health’. Some writers go so far as to say that materialism is the new religion: people want goods, not gods.1

  Lurking behind these verdicts is an instinctive way of looking at religion in opposition to the material world. The life of the spirit and that of things here appear locked in rivalry – more of the latter must mean less of the former. This idea has been pronounced in strands of Christian thought but reaches back to Plato. It received fresh impetus from Enlightenment philosophers and, in the early twentieth century, from thinkers such as Max Weber who were pondering the transformative effects of modern capitalism. The advance of reason, money and modernity, in this view, naturally led to secularization, be it by exposing the irrationality
of religious beliefs or by undermining the institutional power of churches. The shift from tradition to modernity shattered people’s solid sense of themselves and their world and unleashed so many different life projects that the space for a unified belief system vanished. The death of religion was just a matter of time.

  To what degree are these views borne out by history? What exactly have products and possessions done to religious life? To answer these questions, we need to look at what has happened in affluent societies in the Christian West but we should also cast our inquiry wider and consider the advance of goods in earlier periods as well as in developing societies and other religions since.

  The case of Western Europe is the most straightforward. Nowhere has secularization made greater strides than in what was once the centre of Christendom. In 1910, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, 98 per cent of people belonged to a Christian Church or chapel. A century later, less than two thirds identified themselves as Christian and only a small fraction of those regularly attended a religious service.2 Still, the loss of faith did not suddenly happen in the affluent 1960s. As we have seen earlier, in England, church-going had already begun to collapse in the inter-war years, and concerned contemporaries were pointing their finger at a selfish culture of instant gratification in the late 1940s, in the midst of austerity and rationing. In Britain, the best-documented case, every generation born after the First World War has been less religious than the one before.3

  Outside this rich little corner of the world, however, the trend since the 1970s has all been in the opposite direction. Eastern and central Europe today is not only richer in things than under communism; it also has more Christian believers; the revival of the Orthodox Church has been especially pronounced. In the Arab world, new oil wealth aided the Islamic revival, not secularism. In China, similarly, rapid growth and urbanization coincided with a growth in Buddhism – up from 13 per cent in 1970 to 19 per cent of the population in 2010 – as well as mass conversions to Protestantism, many from the educated and enterprising middle classes. No movement, however, has multiplied as fast as Pentecostalism, which stresses a believer’s personal experience of God through baptism with the Holy Spirit and the power of spiritual gifts, including speaking in tongues. In 1970, 5 per cent of all Christians in the world were Pentecostalists. By 2010, every fourth Christian was a Pentecostalist, or 500 million in total. Revivalism has taken off not only in poor countries such as Jamaica and North Korea but also in Brazil and other developing countries. In sum, the last three decades have thrown up plenty of counter-examples to the supposedly unstoppable forward march of secularization – and all at a time when an unprecedented number of people on the planet were lifted out of poverty. Even in rich Western Europe, it is worth remembering that, after half a century of self-service supermarkets, charter holidays and TV game shows, Christians still outnumber agnostics and atheists by two to one.4