Wide-ranging table talk
Digby Anderson
FOOD: A HISTORY by Felipe Fern6ndez-Armesto Macmillan, .C20. pp. 288, ISBN 0333901746
For chow mein with pigeon blood I go to Johnny Cann's Cathay House in San Francisco ...The best fried chicken in the world is in Louisville, Kentucky. I get myself half a dozen chickens and a gallon of potato salad so I can feed the seagulls. You know, the guys who reach over your shoulder. In New Orleans there's gumbo file. I like it so well that I always take a pail of it out with me when I leave. In New York I send over to the Turf Restaurant ... to get their broiled lamb chops. I prefer to eat them in the dressingroom where I have plenty of room and can really let myself go ... [Mrs Wagner's] hot dogs have two dogs to a bun. I ate 32 one night. She has very fine baked beans.
Ihave always admired Duke Ellington's music but my estimate of the man as a 'heroic eater' has risen enormously. Thank you, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, for this snippet. There are lots of others. I did not know that the Tupinamba consumed their enemies 'down to the last fingernail' or quite how widespread cannibalism was. I did know about the Grahams, Kelloggs and other 19th-century American vegetarians and food-loonies who anticipated our current faddists. I did not know about Sarah Rorer, though, and her wish to ban mustard and pickles lest they erode 'the delicate mucous lining of the stomach'. Most of the author's comments on the snippets are good too. He is surely right on Miss Rorer: 'like so many dieticians, she did not really like food'. And it's splendid to see him weigh in and dispute the Red Indians' — he calls them 'Native Americans' — talent for conservationism. It is 'belied by the evidence of the scale of their slaughters ... their methods were outrageously wasteful [with] hundreds of carcasses left to rot.'
He is sometimes pretentious: 'An unfailing tradition unites the suburban barbecue or the comforts of fireside toasting with ... the banquet with which Nestor the charioteer honoured Athene in the Odyssey,' Not the barbecues I have suffered, it doesn't. Sometimes he is plain wrong. The oyster is not uniquely eaten uncooked and unkilled in modern culture. What about the razor clam nipped from its shell and wriggling
down the throat or the mussel, much better raw than mariniere? Nor are oysters ruined by cooking. He is right that the fancy recipes are dull, but an oyster soup can be heaven. Huge snail consumption is not restricted to France. Catalonia and some regions of Italy. The Andalusians cat more and do them better.
These quibbles apart. Food is an unquestionable success as, to use his own word, a sampler. Anyone who enjoys food and, even more, talk about food, and, most of all, talk about food while eating food, will want this book.
It is a pity it is presented as more than this. It claims to be a history and, implicitly, an anthropology of food. It makes sociological claims that, like so many sociological claims, are not substantiated in any but the most generalised way. We don't need to be told that diet and eating habits are inseparable from the rest of culture unless we learn precisely and analytically how they are related, and we don't. He points out that many countries sacralise their staples and in others it is rarely eaten foods which acquire the mystique of sacred status. Got it both ways, that is, no ways. To so many observations one murmurs, 'So what?'
He has a thesis going about organising the history of food into eight revolutions, such as ritualisation, herding and livestockbreeding, transport, and that is fine though far from conclusive. But he can't resist claims to reveal the unseen connections among food practices. And these are simply selective. Most contemporary food writing is trite and vulgar. There is, however, a growing minority of food theorists writing pseudo-academic texts on food. It is difficult to know which is worse, the trite or the pretentious. What Mr Fernandez-Armesto is really good at is using his formidable knowledge of snippets to debunk other theoreticians' claims about unseen connections. He is a highly talented gatherer of snippets and a natural debunker. We need both of these much more than any fancy theories about food. He is called to a higher place than the seminar room, the dinner table.
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