Excerpts

"Tell Me How Much You Eat and I'll Tell You Who You Are" Jacques Le Goff has written that in the Middle Ages food was the first opportunity for the ruling strata of society to show off their superiority. Through luxury and gastronomic ostentation they expressed what he termed "class-oriented behavior." There was an obvious justification for this behavior: the availability of food resources was then everyone's primary preoccupation (one could say obsession). In this context, an abundance of food indicated a situation of social privilege and power. Incidentally, this was not a reality exclusive to the Middle Ages. All traditional societies and cultures are marked by hunger, or to state it better, by the fear of hunger. That fear could indeed become true hunger after years of famine, epidemics, and war -- the three scourges against which one implores divine protection. More often it remained simply a fear, understood both as the psychological attitude of individuals and also, above all, as a culturally shared reality, a collective preoccupation reflected in actions, choices, and behavior. This necessity for food to function as a guarantor of daily survival is a very simple idea that in the current society of abundance risks being shunted into the background. Need for food expresses itself as well and first of all in a desire for quantity, the desire, that is, for a full belly and the well-lined purse that provides for it. Quality matters greatly, of course, but comes afterward. The ruler therefore defined himself initially as a big eater. According to the report of Liutprando da Cremona in 888, Duke Guido di Spoleto was rejected as king of the Franks because it came to be known that he ate too little. "He cannot rule us if he is satisfied with a modest meal," his electors asserted at the time. This verdict amounted to stating that the very fact of eating a lot, and managing to consume more food than others, was not just a simple consequence of one's privileged situation (a can do), but rather tended to represent a kind of social obligation (a should do). That imperative thus became a norm for "class behavior" in which the lord could not come in as lacking heft, at the risk of questioning the established order. Voracious appetite was also linked to a physical and muscular concept of power, which above all saw in the chief a warrior-like bravery. As the strongest, most vigorous of all, and the most able, he must ingest enormous quantities of food. This became the sign (and at the same time the means of assertion) of a typically animal-like, even bestial superiority over his fellow men. In fact, the onomastic associations of the warrior were often borrowed from the animal kingdom: In the ranks of medieval nobility one could scarcely count the numbers of "Wolves," "Bears," "Lions," and "Leopards." Note that these are all carnivorous animals, since it is above all to meat that the noble warrior owes his force and courage. According to a cultural image (but at the same time a "scientific" one), meat is endowed with the power to nourish the body, to harden its muscles, and to confer upon the warrior both strength and the legitimacy of his power to lead. Cultural images these, because to eat means to kill animals, and, for the noble classes especially, wild game slain at the end of exhausting hunts and in veritable duels simulate war in strategy and the use of arms. The hunt trains one for military activity and at the same time provides the very foods that give one the strength to fight. The circle is closed and perfect, both on a technical and on a symbolic level. Dietetic science in turn confirms this, identifying in meat the manly food par excellence, the perfect food for increasing robustness and body strength. We find this assessment in medical treatises from the medieval period, which differ, in this matter at least, from the Greco-Roman tradition. The latter was a farming culture, which did not hesitate to place bread at the center of its food system and to designate bread as the ideal food for man, for the city-dweller as well as for the soldier. This ancient image was later elevated into the myth of the Farmer General, namely Cincinnatus. Now the relevant medieval myth became that of the Sovereign-Hunter. With the passing of centuries the recurring theme of food quantity as a function of power and social prestige gradually decreased. Power itself was conceived of in a different way, no longer as a manifestation of physical force, to be reaf´rmed each time and reconquered on the field of combat, but rather as an acquired right, a legitimate exercise of a function lying within an ordained hereditary path. This transition from a nobility through deed to a nobility of entitlement, expressions coined by Marc Bloch to indicate two differing social models characterizing the high and low Middle Ages, respectively, found an immediate counterpart in systemic food models. To eat in quantity was at first a capacity, then became, as we have said, the demonstration of a physical superiority over one's fellow men. With time this was transformed into a right or privilege that one could (but not necessarily should) exercise. From then on, what did matter was no longer consuming more food than one's fellow diners, but having at one's disposal more food on the table (so as to distribute it to companions, guests, servants, and dogs). In this fashion the "language of food" developed a content ever more markedly ostentatious, stagy, and theatrical. Between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even in succeeding centuries, lasting until the threshold of the contemporary, showy display became the distinctive characteristic of aristocratic food privilege, one rigidly formulated by court ceremonials in a precise, even arithmetical way. Peter III of Aragon wanted differences in rank to be marked at the table with numerical precision, "since at meals it is only just and fair that some be honored more than others, depending on their rank in the social hierarchy." Thus reads the Ordinacions of 1344. "We want our own platters to be filled with the food needed for eight diners; food for six will be placed in the dishes of the royal princes, archbishops, and bishops; food for four in the dishes of the other prelates and knights seated at the king's table." Rules inspired by the same logic were still valid in the nineteenth century, at the Neapolitan court of the Bourbons. Formalization of quantities, moreover, did not exclude heavy eating as an attribute of the ruling classes. Gout, which spread among the aristocracy of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, is a kind of professional disease, linked to the modalities of food consumption (too much food, too much meat) that depended more on social conformity than on personal taste. From this resulted, as an esthetic ideal, a general appreciation of a robust body. To be fat, a sign of wealth and well-being, is to be beautiful. As the heroine of a Goldoni comedy proclaims: "If you want to be mine, I want you beautiful, fat and hearty." But even in our own time, who has not heard a grandmother say, "What a beautiful, chubby baby!" In this way one can explain linguistic usage that, weighed against today's culture, would have sounded paradoxical. The prosperous Florentine bourgeoisie, which celebrated its own economic and political triumph, labeled itself popolo grasso -- fat populace. A rich city, Bologna, for centuries entrusted the promotion of its own image to its "fatness." Indices of different attitudes are not lacking. Thinness and svelteness can be positive attributes. So we read of slimming diets undertaken not for reasons of health (about which the physician Galienus had already spoken in Roman times in a treatise devoted to the subject), but instead for aesthetic reasons. In premodern cultures, however, these are marginal and culturally condemned phenomena (unless the fasting be to attain sainthood, as was practiced by the ascetics of the desert and forest). The rounded shapes of the nudes in Greek, Roman, renaissance, and baroque paintings and sculptures suggest, even proclaim, the most appreciated aesthetic ideal. It is surely not obesity that is the goal to be pursued; nonetheless, the thin body does not arouse desire. "One must beware of thin people," Shakepeare writes somewhere. The positive values of thinness, linked to those of speed, productivity, and efficiency seem to have been put forth as a new cultural and aesthetic model in the works of eighteenth-century bourgeois intellectuals who opposed the old order in the name of new ideologies and political hypotheses. For example, a hugely provocative social tsunami was generated by a new food product, coffee. Touted as the beverage of bourgeois intelligence and efficiency, coffee was expected to undo the laziness and obtuseness of the traditional aristocracy. Running parallel with that idea was the opposition of the thin to the fat, and it is certainly not coincidental that this subversive drink was categorized by doctors as "dry" (with reference to Galienus's classification), and therefore "dehydrating." As a replacement for wine and beer ("warm" drinks and rich, we would say, in calories), use of coffee also implied an overturning of the most widely held aesthetic canons. Nineteenth-century Puritanism, harking back to certain aspects of penitential medieval Christianity, also contributed to the reaffirmation of this image of a thin, lithe, productive, and bourgeois body that sacrifices itself, or its heft, to produce wealth and worldly goods. Little by little, as early as in the nineteenth century, and then especially in the twentieth, consuming large amounts of food and being fat ceased being a privilege or a representation of social superiority. Faced with the increasing democratization of consumer goods brought about by the inexorable logic of industrial food production, new social classes were allowed access to the groaning board. And since, as Fernand Braudel has taught us, pleasures too widely shared quickly lose their attractiveness, it is hardly surprising that the revolution in consumer goods suggested new models of behavior to the elite classes. The custom of eating heartily and ostentatiously, meanwhile, traditionally ascribed to the upper classes, became redefined downward to become a "popular" practice of the middle and lower bourgeoisie, and ultimately also of the urban proletariat and rural peasantry. In the middle nineteenth century the Milanese author Giovanni Rajberti, published a manual of good manners, the first in Italy destined not for the nobility but for the middle classes: The Art of Hospitality Explained to the People. It was important to address these instructions to the people, the author insisted, since the aristocrats already knew how to behave, thanks to long-standing familiarity with banquets. The people, on the other hand, needed to be instructed, especially in matters of moderation and balance. At the table of the popular classes, in point of fact, "there reigned a real fear of never paying sufficient tribute to one's host and his food. The result was that these lower classes moved into a kind of virtual food orgasm, making them go way beyond the deliberation, restraint and know-how that are those first necessary components of the beautiful in all the arts. The result: overly generous heaped dishes, too heavily seasoned and flavored, and a preponderance of foods characteristically and oppressively spicy and stimulating." Above all, there remained the popularity (shared for a time with the elite classes) of epic narrations of the great eaters and insatiable gluttons. The newly powerful meanwhile had developed other forms of distinctiveness: to eat little, and to eat mostly vegetables. The food model and the aesthetic of thinness, enriched with hygienic health implications, spread considerably in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. After the devastating experience of the world war had brought back hunger, however, traditional food models temporarily regained the upper hand. In the 1950s, the female figures on advertising posters were characterized preferably by images of a generously endowed bodily shape glowing with health. It was only beginning in the 1970s and 1980s that the cult of thinness truly triumphed. What happened was that on the cultural plane there was a reversal of the food dynamic: the danger and fear of excess had replaced the danger and fear of hunger. The abundance of food typical of the postmodern industrial age poses new problems, whose possible solutions remain difficult for a culture historically marked by the fear of hunger and by a desire to consume food in quantity. Attitudes and behaviors have remained conditioned by this. The irresistible attraction of excess, which a thousand years' history of hunger had imprinted on bodies and minds, now began to take its toll. In prosperous countries, diseases caused by food excesses, formerly the privilege of the few, became the afflictions of the many, a mass phenomenon of illness due to unhealthy overeating replacing the traditional diseases formerly due to malnutrition and famine. This phenomenon paved the way for a hitherto unknown form of fear ( fear of obesity, as Americans have baptized it). It overturned the atavistic fear of hunger, and like the latter, acted most particularly on individual psyches regardless of objective circumstances. Investigations have shown that more than half the people who, thinking themselves overweight, dealt with the problem by giving up various foods were not in fact so. The core of the problem seems to be the gap between economic development and cultural processing. We have moved into an age of abundance with the mental equipment constructed for a world of hunger. An icon of this contradiction would be the archipelago of Tonga in the Pacific, the country with the highest rate of obesity in the world, and whose King Tuafa'ahau Tupuo IV entered the Guinness Book of Records as the "fattest ruler in the world." Here we have the expression and model of a traditional society overwhelmed by an abundance of food after thousands of years of difficulty and yearning. Noblesse oblige: Tupuo IV must have yielded to the need to face up to his own growing health problems as well as to those of his subjects. So he forced himself onto a strict diet that in several months brought him from 200 to 130 kilos. Moreover, in a country where being fat had always been a sign of nobility and social prestige, Tupuo IV launched, and had his government sponsor, a slimming competition. This royal saga could be the symbol of a balance needing to be restored, of a cultural challenge aimed at re´building and reshaping attitudes on food issues, possibly with reciprocal cordiality. ... COPYRIGHT NOTICE : Translation copyright © 2006, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. For more information, please send an e-mail or visit the permissions page on our Web site. Excerpted from Food Is Culture by Massimo Montanari All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.