Taste, Culture and History - Stephen Mennell

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immediate environment. They may have rejected some of whatthey could have eaten, but the range of comestibles would alwayshave been far smaller than in the modern world, where foods ofdiverse ecological and economic provenance are traded across thewhole globe, so that everything is available all the time in thegreat world cities for those who can afford it. A book like AlanDavidson’s North Atlantic Seafood (1979) is symptomatic of ourglobalizing world, and would have been inconceivable only a fewdecades ago. The diet of most pre-industrial groups was rathermonotonous and – by the standards of today – boring. There isa story, probably apocryphal, about an African tribe whose staplediet was millet porridge; an anthropologist is supposed to haveintroduced them to grilled fillet steak to see what they thought ofit. They are supposed to have replied, ‘Well, it’s very good – butit’s not as nice as millet porridge.’INTERDEPENDENCE, STRATIfiCATION AND CUISINEMy good friend Jack Goody, in his book Cooking, Cuisine and Class(1982), compared West African and Western European cuisines,arguing that refined and elaborate cookery or hautes cuisines onlyemerged in highly unequal and markedly stratified societies. Thepeople he had studied as an anthropologist in West Africa livedin smaller-scale and much more egalitarian societies, whereeveryone ate much the same, the range of dishes was relativelylimited, and eating played little part, if any, in status competition.Jack mildly criticized me, when my book All Manners of Food waspublished three years after his, for being sidetracked, as he sawit, into the relatively smaller problem of explaining how Frenchand English tastes came to develop differently. In a way he wasright, but I didn’t want to write the same book as he had! But, inreturn, and after many years’ delay, I’d like to offer a mildcriticism of Jack’s argument, and a modification to it as well.I’d like to argue that a high degree of social inequality andelaborate social stratification are perhaps necessary, but notsufficient, conditions for the emergence of elaborate cuisine andfor culinary tastes to be increasingly in flux. For that, it is also25
necessary to have long – and lengthening – chains of socialinterdependence. Stratification and large-scale webs of interdependencemay indeed be interconnected with each other, butthey are not the same things.It isn’t just elaborate social stratification that is necessary forrefined and changing taste. For instance, in the European MiddleAges, before the Black Death, nutrition was very unequally distributedbetween members of the various estates – and that wasespecially true of meat, with the peasantry’s diet dominated byvegetable and dairy products. The upper strata may have beenless likely actually to go hungry in times of dearth, but it wouldappear that even the warrior aristocracy ate essentially theseasonal produce of their own land, and did not cook it by meansmuch more elaborate than roasting and boiling. Now it is true, ofcourse, that the manuscript recipes from a very few major courtstowards the end of the Middle Ages – the Forme of Cury andTaillevent, for instance – show something more complicated,characterized by the use of spices and flavourings that could havereached these courts only via very long trade routes. But,significantly, there is an old debate about whether this latemedieval haute cuisine for the very few represents a debased form,a remote echo, of the cuisine of ancient Rome, when the chainsof social and economic interdependence were indeed longer anddenser than they were for many centuries afterwards.To put the point more generally, when the social divisionsbetween strata are very deep and the interdependence betweenthem is very unequal – when the power that they have over eachother is very unequal – then the power and status of the upperstrata is more likely to find expression in quantity than quality, inperiodical displays of indiscriminate heaps of food at ceremonialbanquets for instance, rather than through the quality andlabour-intensiveness of the cookery.Social competition becomes more intense, and the rate ofchange in ‘taste’ accelerates, when the strata of society becomemore closely and more equally interdependent. Thus, as far as wecan tell, courtly cuisine did not change very quickly when an even26
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Page 8 and 9: sociological evidence should not ho

Taste, Culture and History - Stephen Mennell

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