Near a Thousand Tables: a History of Food 1 Felipe Fernindez-Armesto

BY THE SAME AUTHOR Civilizations Truth: A History Religion The Times Illustrated History of Europe Millennium The Spanish Armada Columbus Barcelona Columbus on HimseIf Edward Gibbon's Atlas of the World Before Columbus The Canary Islands After the Conquest WITH DEREK WILSON Reformation WITH ANTONIO BETHENCOURT MASSIEU AND OTHERS Canarias e Inglaterra a Travis de la Historia WITH MARK ALMOND, ]EREMY BLACK, ROSAMOND MCKITTERICK AND CHRIS SCARRE The Times Atlas of European History EDITOR, The Times Guide to the Peoples ofEurope EDITOR, The Folio Society History ofEngland EDITOR, The Global Opportunity EDITOR, The European Opportunity EDITOR, Tbe Times Atlas of World Exploration EDITOR, Armchair Athenians: Essaysfrom Athenaum Life Near a Thousand Tables THE FREE PRESS NEW YORK + LONDON + TORONTO + SYDNEY SINGAPORE THE FREEPRESS A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 Copyright O zoo2 by Felipe Fernindez-Armesto All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. THEFREE PRESS andcolophonare registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc. For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales: 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected] DESIGNED BY KEVIN HANEK SET IN ADOBE JENSON Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fernindez-Armesto, Felipe Near a thousand tables: a history of food 1 Felipe Fernindez-Armesto. P. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. I. Food-History. I. Title. TX353.F437 2002 641.<oog-dc21 2002023318 ISBN 0-7432-2644-5 Contents Preface xi {ONE) The Invention of Cooking The prst 'Qvolution I {TWO) The Meaning of Eating yoodas Rte andJiagic 21 {THREE) Breeding to Eat The &rding 'Qvolution: yrom "Co((ecting"~oodto "Traducing" ?t 55 {FOUR) The Edible Earth Aanaging TfantLifefor yood 76 (FIVE) ' Food and Rank Tnequa[ityand the nseofdaute Cuisine IOI (SIX) The Edible Horizon 7006and the Long-%nge Exchange of Culture I 3 I (SEVEN) Challenging Evolution 3ood and Ecological Exchange I 63 Feeding the Giants 3ood andTndustriafization in the Xineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 187 Notes 225 Index 247 Ilfaut vivre pour manger et ne pas manger pour vivre. - MOLIERE, LE MALADE IMAGINAIRE What shall I tell you, my lady, of the secrets of nature I bave learned while cooking? . One can philosophize quite well while preparing supper. I often say, when I have these little thoughts, "Had Aristotle cooked, be would bave written a great deal more." -JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ, EP~STOLAA FILOTEA And oft I thought (myfancy was so strong) That I, at last, a resting-place hadfound; "Here will I dwell," said I, "my whole life long, Roaming the illimitable waters round; Here will I live, ofall but heaven disowned, And end my days upon the peacefulflood."- To break my dream the vessel reached its bound; And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, And near a thousand tables pined and wantedfood. -WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, GUILT & SORROW, OR INCIDENTS ON SALISBURY PLAIN Preface he great press baron Lord Northcliffe used to tell his journalists that four Tsubjects could be relied on for abiding public interest: crime, love, money and food. Only the last of these is fundamental and universal. Crime is a minor- ity interest, even in the worst-regulated societies. It is possible to imagine an econ- omy without money and reproduction without love but not life without food. Food, moreover, has a good claim to be considered the world's most important subject. It is what matters most to most people for most of the time. Yet food history remains relatively underappreciated. Most academic institu- tions still neglect it. Many of the best contributions to its study are made by ama- teurs and antiquarians. There is no consensus about how to approach it. For some people, it is all about nutrition and malnutrition, sustenance and sickness; for others, less anxious to avoid condemnation for frivolity, it is essentially about cuisine. Economic historians see food as a commodity to be produced and traded. When it gets to the stage of being eaten, they lose interest. For social historians, diet is an index of differentiation and changing class relations. Cultural historians are increasingly interested in how food nourishes societies as well as individual bodies-how it feeds identities, defines groups. In political history, food is the stuff of tributary relationships and its distribution and management are at the heart of power. The small but gallant and growing band of environmental historians sees food as linkage in the chain of being: the substance of the ecosystems which human beings strive to dominate. Our most intimate contact with the nat- ural environment occurs when we eat it. Food is a subject of pleasure and peril. Increasingly, in recent years-indeed, in some ways since before the Second World War, when the Annales school of French historical geography began to teach historians to take food seriously-the diversity of approaches has multi- plied the scholarly output and made it harder to synthesize. Today, the materials available to a writer attempting a general conspectus are wonderful but intractable. Following the example of Annals, many historical periodicals carry PREFACE frequent relevant articles. A specialist periodical, Petits propos culinaires, has appeared for more than twenty years. The Oxford Symposium on Food History, established by Alan Davidson and Theodore Zeldin, provided a focus for interested students and a steady output of published transactions. Excellent general histories include Reay Tannahill's Food in History, first published in 1973 and still deservedly popular, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat's Histoire naturelle et morale de la nourriture, which first appeared in 1987, and the compilation edited by J.-L. Flan- dre and M. Montanari in 1996, Histoire de l'alimentation. Yet the rate at which new material appears makes it increasingly hard even for the best works of previous decades to be satisfactorily updated by periodic revision. Tannahill's book, despite its title, is determinedly in the"how-we-got-to-where-we- are" tradition and is not much concerned with an aspect of particular interest to many readers: the relationship between food history and history in general. Tous- saint-Samat's work is a wonderful quarry but a sprawling and indisciplined work, chiefly composed as a series of essays on the histories of various foodstuffs. Flandre and Montanari, who launched the most scholarly and professionally ambitious attempt up to their time, only aimed to cover the history of food in Western civi- lization and its ancient predecessors. Like most volumes by multiple contributors, theirs is endlessly interesting but lacks the coherence of some of its rivals. The Cam- bridge World History ofFood appeared late in the year 2000, when the present book was almost finished; together with Alan Davidson's The Oxford Companion to Food, which preceded it by about a year, it is invaluable for reference and unbeatable for browsing. But its massive dimensions make it a work sui generis; and its greatest strengths are on the study of food as a source of nutrition, rather than culture. In this book, I aim not to replace other histories of food but to offer readers a useful alternative: to take a genuinely global perspective; to treat food history as a theme of world history, inseparable from all the other interactions of human beings with one another and with the rest of nature; to treat evenhandedly the ecological, cultural and culinary concepts of the subject; to combine a broad conspectus with selectively detailed excursions into particular cases; to trace connections, at every stage, between the food of the past and the way we eat today; and to do all this briefly. The method I have adopted is to classify the material under the headings of eight great"revo1utions"-as I call them-which seem to me, between them, to pro- vide an overview of the entire history of food. This method should have enabled me to be more concise than is possible in traditional approaches which categorize the subject product by product or place by place or period by period. By calling my divi- sions revolutions I do not mean to suggest they were rapid episodes, narrowly con- fined in time. On the contrary, though I think it is fair to say that they all began at PREFACE particular moments, they all had stuttering starts, long unfoldings and enduring reverberations. The origins of some are truly lost in the vast expanses of prehistory. Some of them started at different times in different places. Some of them began long ago and are still going on. Though I have tried to give my account of them a very broad chronological structure, it should be obvious to readers that my revolutions did not happen in sequence, but overlapped in unpatterned complexity. All of them are in a special sense part of the history of food but have obvious repercus- sions beyond it, in other aspects of world history. To emphasize these continuities, I try to keep up a program of shifts between past and present, place and place. The first revolution is the invention of cooking, which I see as an episode of human self-differentiation from the rest of nature, and an inaugural event in the history of social change. I deal next with the discovery that food is more than sustenance-that its production, distribution, preparation and consumption gener- ate rites and magic, as eating becomes ritualized and irrational or suprarational. My third revolution is thed'herdingrevolution"-the domestication and selective breeding of edible animal species: I deal with this before plant-based agriculture, which is the subject of my fourth revolution, partly for convenience and partly to draw attention to my argument that at least one kind of animal husbandry-snail farming-was an earlier innovation than is generally admitted.

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