by Lewis H. Lapham
Jesus answered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live
on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
—The Gospel According to Matthew
It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears.
—Cato the Elder
In both the periodical and tabloid press these days, the discussion tends to dwell on the bread alone—its scarcity or abundance, its price, provenance, authenticity, presentation, calorie count, social status, political agenda, and carbon footprint. The celebrity guest on camera with Rachael Ray or an Iron Chef, the missing ingredient in the recipes for five-star environmental collapse. Either way, sous vide or sans tout, the preoccupation with food is front-page news, and in line with the current set of talking points, this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly offers various proofs of the proposition that the belly has no ears.
No ears but many friends and admirers, who spread out on the following pages a cornucopia of concerns about which I knew little or nothing before setting the table of contents. My ignorance I attribute to a coming of age in the America of the late 1940s, its cows grazing on grass, the citizenry fed by farmers growing unpatented crops. Accustomed to the restrictions imposed on the country’s appetite by the Second World War’s ration books, and raised in a Protestant household that didn’t give much thought to fine dining (one ate to live, one didn’t live to eat), I acquired a laissez-faire attitude toward food that I learn from Michael Pollan resembles that of the Australian koala. The koala contents itself with the eating of eucalyptus leaves, choosing to ignore whatever else shows up in or around its tree. Similarly, the few primitive tastes met with before my tenth birthday—peanut butter and jelly, creamed chicken and rice, the Fig Newton—have remained securely in place for the last sixty-six years, faith-based and conservative, apt to be viewed with suspicion at trendsetting New York restaurants, in one of which last winter my asking about the chance of seeing a baked or mashed potato prompted the waiter to remove the menu from my hand, gently but firmly retrieving the pearl from a swine. The judgment was served à la haute bourgeoisie, with a sprig of disdain and a drizzle of disgust. Thirty years ago I would have been surprised, but thirty years ago trendsetting restaurants hadn’t yet become art galleries, obesity wasn’t a crime, and at the airports there weren’t any Homeland Security agents confiscating Coca-Cola.
Times change, and with them what, where, and how people eat. In fifteenth-century London a man could be hanged for eating meat on Friday. An ancient Roman was expected to wear a wreath to a banquet. The potato in sixteenth-century Europe was believed to cause leprosy and syphilis. As of two years ago, 19 percent of America’s meals were being eaten in cars.
Prior to the twentieth century, the changes were relatively slow in coming. The text and illustration in this issue of the Quarterly reach across a span of four thousand years, during most of which time the global economy is agrarian. Man is the tenant of nature, food the measure of both his wealth and well-being. The earliest metal currencies (the shekel, the talent, the mina) represent weights and units of grain. Allowing for cultural difference and regional availability, the human family sits down to meals made of what it finds in the forest or grows in the field, the tables set from one generation to the next in accordance with the changing of the seasons and the benevolence of Ashnan or Ceres. To Achilles and Priam circa the twelfth century bc, Homer brings the meat “pierced…with spits,” the bread “in ample wicker baskets” with the same meaning and intent that Alexandre Dumas in nineteenth-century France imparts to the ripe fruit and the rare fish presented by the Count of Monte Cristo to Monsieur Danglars.
It is the sharing of the spoils of the hunt and the harvest, a public as opposed to a private good, that sustains the existence of the earliest human societies, sows the seeds of moral value, social contract, distributive justice, and holy ground. The communal sacrifice entitles all present to a portion of the bullock or the goat and therefore to a presence in the assembly and a finger in the pie. Table manners are the teaching of both politics and philosophy, for Roman emperors as for the Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus and the Confucian Chinese.
The contract between man and nature remains in force for as long as it is understood which one is the tenant and which one the landlord. Over the course of millennia men discover numerous ways of upgrading their lot—cooking with fire, domesticating animals and plants, bringing the tomato from Mexico to Spain, pepper from Sumatra to Salem, constructing the chopstick, the seine net, and the salad fork—but the world’s population stays more or less in balance with the world’s agriculture because the landlord is careful about matching supply and demand. The sum of the world’s economic enterprise is how much or how little anybody gets to eat, the number of those present above and below the salt accounting for the margin of difference between a bull and a bear market. For thousands of years the four horsemen of the apocalypse, war and famine prominent among them, attend to the culling of the human herd. Europe in the fourteenth century doesn’t produce enough food to serve the increasingly large crowd of expectant guests. The Black Death reduces by a third the number of mouths to feed.
The contract between landlord and tenant doesn’t come up for review until the seventeenth-century plantings of capitalist finance give rise to the Industrial Revolution. Man comes to imagine that he holds the deed to nature, persuaded that if soundly managed as a commercial real estate venture, the property can be made to recruit larger armies, gather more votes, yield more cash. Add to the mechanical staples (John Deere’s cast-steel plow, Cyrus McCormick’s reaper) the twentieth century’s flavorings of laboratory science (chemical pesticides, synthetic gene sequences), and food becomes an industrial product subsumed into the body of a corporation.
So at least is my understanding from what I’m told by the news media and learn from the labels at the supermarket, which isn’t much because the message wrapped in cellophane holds with the Pentagon’s policy of don’t ask, don’t tell. I rely instead on Aristotle, who draws the distinction between wealth as food and wealth as money by pointing out that the stomach, although earless, is open to instruction and subject to restraint. A man can only eat so much (1,500 pounds of food per year according to current estimates), but the craving for money is boundless—the purse, not the belly, is the void that is never filled. Paul Roberts fits Aristotle’s observation to the modern circumstance: “Food production may follow general economic principles of supply and demand; it may indeed create employment, earn trade revenues, and generate profits, sometimes considerable profits; but the underlying product—the thing we eat—has never quite conformed to the rigors of the modern industrial model.”
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