Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  Although modern Bar students receive rather more training than their seventeenth-century counterparts, their attendance at dinner is still taken very seriously indeed. Tickets must be handed in to the head porter on arrival, and once the Benchers have arrived in Hall, nobody may leave without written permission from ‘Master Treasurer’ until after Second Grace (people of a nervous disposition thinking of entering the legal profession might like to think again). As an extract from the current Middle Temple rule book suggests, breaches of etiquette are taken equally seriously:

  … if any irregularity has been detected in either Grace, it is the custom for the senior Ancient to send a note, preferably in Latin, in to Master Treasurer, while the Benchers are taking dessert, ‘humbly’ drawing attention to the omission and requesting a ‘solatium’ [recompense]. This usually takes the form of a bottle of port presented thereupon by the offender to the Ancients.7

  Reproofs in Latin and 40 per cent proof apologies notwithstanding, dining rituals at the Inns of Court serve a practical purpose. Successful barristers need to be quick-witted, confident, persuasive and courteous – skills that no textbook can teach them. With their moots, debates and challenges, dinners in Hall give students a chance to test their mettle against whatever life in court will throw at them, as well as keeping senior members of the Inn on their toes. Even the seemingly draconian rule forbidding communication between messes serves a purpose, forcing students to learn how to get on with whomsoever they happen to find themselves sitting next to. Above all, the legal profession is a social network, and, as the Inns have recognised for centuries, there is no better way of socialising – or networking – than by sharing meals regularly with other people.

  An Ancient Feast

  Needless to say, most meals in Britain today are far removed from the sort of rarefied dining practised by the Inns of Court. More than half the meals we eat are eaten alone; the majority of those consumed on the hoof, in front of the telly, or sitting at a desk.8 Our lifestyles are increasingly fuelled by food, not structured around it; not least because of the enormous social changes that have taken place over the past century or so. In 1871, there were six children in the average British household; by the 1930s that figure had shrunk to two; by 2003 it was less than one.9 Thirty-six per cent of households now consist of couples and 27 per cent people living on their own. Our splintering domestic arrangements mean that we are relying increasingly on restaurants for our social dining. Over a third of the food we consume in Britain is now eaten outside the home; a figure that by 2025 is expected to rise to half, close to the current level in the USA.10 The trend has even got the supermarkets worried: with a ‘share of stomach’ worth £34.5 billion in 2003 and rising fast, the catering industry is closing the gap on their dominance of the convenience-foods market.11 The supermarkets have responded by stocking takeaway brands such as Pizza Express in their stores, and ready meals claiming to be ‘restaurant-quality food to eat at home’.

  Whether we eat out or in, there is no doubt that formal dining in Britain is on the wane. A quarter of households no longer even have a dining table large enough for everyone to sit around.12 But although most of our meals (or ‘meal occasions’, as the food industry insists on calling them) consist either of fast food or ready meals (‘meal solutions’), there is one kind of occasion for which only one sort of meal will do. Whenever we have a really significant event to celebrate, a feast is still overwhelmingly the way we choose to do it. Tables may be shrinking and lifestyles speeding up, but nothing has yet replaced feasting as a celebratory mechanism. Dinner parties may no longer be quite the make-or-break social events of a century ago, but even they retain a certain potency. Being asked to dine at someone’s house remains something of an honour, and an unmistakable token of friendship.

  A couple of years ago, my friend Karen invited me to join her for Seder, a meal traditionally eaten by Jewish families on Passover eve. With origins stretching back more than 3,000 years to the original night of Passover, Seder is a ritual devoted to the retelling of the Haggadah, the story of the Israelites’ delivery from slavery in Egypt.13 Traditionally narrated by the male head of the household, the story is accompanied by prayers, blessings, songs – and food; although as I took my place beside Karen at her mother Susan’s table, all I could see of the latter was a puzzling array of dishes, including large flat matzo biscuits, sprigs of parsley, some grated horseradish, a burnt egg, a greyish-brown paste which I later discovered was called charoset, and, strangest of all, some sort of animal bone. Even the edible offerings looked decidedly unappetising, which, as I soon found out, they were supposed to be.

  Bracing myself for a voyage into the gustatory unknown, my main concern was to avoid offending anyone at table by doing something wrong. However, I need not have worried. As well as a sacred ritual, Seder is a sort of edible history lesson aimed at children; and as I listened to Karen’s Uncle Harold reciting the Haggadah (in Hebrew, with whispered translations from his niece), I was gently guided through the meal and its various meanings. Parsley, I discovered, is dipped in salt-water at Seder to represent the tears of the Israelites, matzo symbolises their hurried departure from Egypt without time to raise dough to make bread, horseradish is eaten to represent the bitterness of slavery, and the burnt egg is a symbol of mourning and of new life. But the food that appealed to me most was charoset: made of finely chopped apples, walnuts and sweet wine, it is supposed to represent the mortar with which Jewish slaves were forced to construct the buildings of their Egyptian oppressors.

  As I tasted each of these foods in turn, the Haggadah came alive for me – increasingly so as the evening advanced, since by the time we came to the bitter herbs a second time, I was getting mightily hungry. That, of course, was the whole point: unlike most celebratory meals, Seder is not simply about filling oneself up in the pleasantest way possible. The food has a symbolic, rather than a nutritional purpose; indeed the most significant ‘food’ on the table – the animal bone, which turned out to be a lamb shank – is not even edible. It is there to recall a defining moment in Jewish history: the night when God told the Israelites to sacrifice a lamb so that they would be spared the planned slaughter of the firstborn. This sacrifice (Pesach) is what gives Passover its Hebrew name, and its annual celebration provides a link back to a time when all major feasts were preceded by ritual slaughter: when the giving of life in order to receive it was fundamental to the order of the meal. Today that sacrifice is celebrated only in memory, but I am happy to report that the other part of Seder – the feast that follows the ceremony – is still very much alive, and that Karen’s mother Susan is a very fine cook.

  The Sacrificial Meal

  The pleasure of eating requires, if not hunger, at least appetite …

  Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin14

  Meals like Seder remind us of the ancient origins of table rituals. Whenever we sit down together to eat, we repeat the actions of our distant ancestors, whose beliefs and customs structured civilisation itself. Our forebears had no choice but to follow the rhythm of the seasons, but their festivals did more than merely echo the natural world; they attempted to reconcile the everyday rhythm of human life with the divine. Sacrifice was used to appease the deities, while fasting and feasting – the two extremes of ritualised eating – responded to the eternal seasonal cycle of want and plenty.

  The Muslim festival of Eid-al-Adha gives some idea of the transformational power that harvest festivals must once have had in ancient cities. The feast (whose Arabic name means ‘festival of sacrifice’) is a joyous celebration of spiritual renewal that comes at the end of the Hajj, the ritual pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca. The meal itself is usually a large family lunch at which special foods are eaten, mainly dishes of meat, traditionally from an animal ritually slaughtered by the male head of the household. In Cairo, the sense of anticipation intensifies with the arrival of the many sheep and goats brought in from the countryside for the festival. Crammed into every available space, such
as makeshift pens, balconies and rooftops, the animals fill the air with their plaintive bleating as they await the knife. The scale of the bucolic invasion ensures that Eid affects more than just its celebrants. On the day of slaughter itself, the city is transformed into a spontaneous outdoor slaughterhouse, with animals running amok in the streets and gutters coursing with blood. To those of us brought up in the sanitised West, such scenes can be shocking, but there is no denying their power to bring the dilemmas of human existence to the very heart of the city.15

  Although ritual slaughter is not practised by Christians, the idea that sacrifice is both necessary and redemptive remains embedded in the religion. Christ’s ultimate sacrifice is remembered through the Eucharist, a re-enactment of the Last Supper, when Christ bade his disciples eat bread and wine as symbols of his body and blood. Of course, the sacrifice is also celebrated at Easter, a feast preceded by the ritual fasting of Lent. Although modern observance of Lent often consists of only modest acts of self-denial (such as the giving up of chocolate or alcohol), Easter nevertheless derives much of its spiritual power from the period of abstinence that precedes it.

  Although Easter is the most spiritually significant festival in the Christian calendar, the feast itself has long been outstripped in secular popularity by its rumbustious counterpart, Christmas. A joyous feast that embraces the pagan spirit of the winter solstice, Christmas has always been an excuse for a jolly good knees-up: the sort of revelling and abandon capable of banishing the dark and cold of a deep, black winter’s night. Although early Church fathers called for fasting during Advent, the practice was less rigorously observed than during Lent, and was never common in the Protestant north, where the natural privations of winter ensured Christmas would have plenty of festive impact. Those of us for whom those privations no longer exist can find the obligation to make merry during the ‘festive season’ something of a trial, even oppressive. Christmas for many in modern Britain has dissolved into a non-stop noshathon devoid of spiritual significance – and, as many of us discover each year, roast turkey with all the trimmings rather loses its appeal when one has spent the previous month stuffing oneself with sausage rolls and devils-on-horseback at various Christmas parties. Even in the secular world, abstinence has a part to play in the enjoyment of a feast.

  As Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin observed almost two centuries ago, if one is not properly hungry, one can’t properly eat. Yet hunger, even of the mildest sort, is something most of us rarely experience in the West. The nearest many of us come to fasting is when we go on a diet; an act that, whatever it might do for our waistlines, does little for our positive mental outlook. Nothing is more calculated to reduce us to a state of miserable, food-obsessed isolation: very different to the cathartic experience of ritualised communal fasting.16 For most people in history, fasting has been a spiritual act; not a desperate attempt to rectify overindulgence. The preciousness of food made eating a highly conscious process; every meal an occasion to give thanks. Yet few of the meals we eat today recognise the provenance of our food, let alone its importance. Most of the time we eat distractedly, even grumpily; either while doing something else, or wishing that we were. We graze, we nibble, we bolt our food – even when it does manage to claim our attention, few of us are truly grateful for what we are about to receive. The only time most of us think before we eat is when we find ourselves confronted by table rituals derived from the past; from a time when famine reigned more often than plenty.

  Life, death, sacrifice, rebirth – the eternal subjects of every religion – lie at the heart of all ritual feasting, and whether or not we believe in a god or gods, they are implicit in every meal we eat. Every culture has its own table rituals, yet their great diversity pales in comparison with their far more striking affinity. The rituals of food transcend doctrine, myth or belief: they carry deeper messages, about life itself. Nothing could speak more eloquently of our basic commonality: of what it means, in the end, to be human.

  Companionship

  There is no preparation so sweet to me, no sauce so appetising, as that which is derived from society …

  Montaigne17

  We are omnivores, which means that the ritual sharing of food goes deep into our past. Our hunter-gatherer forebears had to find ways of distributing the spoils of the hunt equably among themselves, and the fellowship of those far-distant meals resonates with us still. Although modern lifestyles have made solitary meals increasingly common, we generally prefer to eat in company.

  Few acts are more expressive of companionship than the shared meal. As the Latin derivation of ‘companion’ indicates (from cum ‘together’ + panis ‘bread’), someone with whom we share food is likely to be our friend, or well on the way to becoming one. Eating among friends instils a powerful sense of well-being in us, arousing primitive emotions of which we are barely aware. In the final scene of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit and family sit poised to tuck into an enormous turkey, sent round unexpectedly by Bob’s miserly, but now repentant, employer Scrooge. As we contemplate this heart-warming scene, we cannot help but feel the future happiness of the Cratchits is assured, and that, by extension, all is well with the world. Splendid dinners such as this, fictional or otherwise, exert a powerful influence over us, creating a paradigm against which all other meals are judged.

  Sharing food with those to whom we are closest is a primal act, but as people who grew up in a large family can testify, the rules of engagement still have to be learnt. Restraint at table is a cultural, not a natural skill, and when we are young, we can be tempted to deprive our siblings of the juiciest slice of beef, the largest piece of cake. Watch a pride of lions eat, and you get some idea of what table manners are covering up. The default state of wild animals is hunger; the satisfaction of that hunger a basic instinct. When hunting animals share a kill, they eat warily but fast, with the more powerful animals getting the ‘lion’s share’. That is not to say that animals do not have elaborate strategies for sharing food (they do), or that animal parents do not regularly deprive themselves of food in order to feed their young (ditto). But in the animal world, the right to eat, like the right to mate, usually depends on the display of individual power. While good for speeding up the effects of Darwinian evolution, this approach to food-sharing could scarcely be called civilised. Yet its principles lie under the surface whenever people share food too.

  In his 1910 essay ‘Sociology of the Meal’, the sociologist Georg Simmel touched on the primitive underpinnings of shared meals.18 Hunger, he argued, brings people together by necessity at certain times and in certain configurations, making the common meal the most potent ordering device in society. Inclusion or exclusion at such gatherings is socially defining; yet the civility of the table is just a veneer to mask the real motive of the meal: the satisfaction of individual selfishness. Whether or not one signs up to Simmel’s somewhat misanthropic view, there is no doubt that in human society, power and status have a large part to play in determining what, when, how much and with whom one gets to eat. Merely to sit at table confers a certain status: in order to eat, someone has to cook; in order to be seated at table, somebody must serve. All meals, however humble, have an implicit hierarchy, in which diners enjoy a higher status than those who cook and serve their food. Since cooking and eating occupy complementary positions in the social order, that means that the social and gender divisions of the kitchen translate – in reverse – to the table. Everyone has to eat; but the history of dining has been dominated, like society itself, by men, and powerful ones at that.

  Long before Brillat-Savarin made his most famous observation – that you are what you eat – the essential tribalism of the table was well understood.19 We are hard-wired to feel close to those with whom we share food, and to define as alien those who eat differently from us. The tribal nature of food is clear from the frequency with which it has been used by one nation as a term of abuse for another, as in ‘Frog’, ‘Kraut’, ‘Rosbif’ and ‘Limey’. T
he latter reference, from the British practice of carrying lime juice aboard ship to avoid scurvy, is pertinent. Food rituals have always been integral to life at sea, as a way both of boosting morale, and of ordering the social and fighting hierarchy of warships. Nineteenth-century gun crews ate together at tables slung between their weapons, taking turns to serve each other from the ship’s galley. The natural camaraderie of the table was thus transferred directly to the fighting effectiveness of the ship: men who ate their meals together worked better as a team and would more readily die together.

  The power of shared meals to forge human bonds makes their context particularly significant. Beyond the table, a series of questions arises. Does the meal have a ‘purpose’ other than the mere feeding of those present? Who is allowed to attend? Whose table is it anyway? The answers to these questions, and to others like them, hold the key to food’s influence in society. In ancient Greece, Zeus himself was the god of hospitality, and no crime was considered more heinous than the betrayal of trust at table. Participation in a xenia, a friendship meal, bound host and guest together in a bond of loyalty close to that of kinship – even the diners’ descendants were forbidden to fight one another in battle.20 All of which would have made Homer’s description of Agamemnon’s return from the Trojan Wars doubly horrific to the audience of his day. The hero was murdered at his own table, slain by his wife’s cowardly lover Aegisthus, who had plotted to murder his superior opponent by laying on a feast for him and attacking him as he ate.21