By Dave Riley
Hunger is a craving that demands gratification. For the infant, what we call hunger begins with diffuse discomfort which slowly, through the nurture of others, attains some meaning as a circuit of pain gratified by food.
However, this process is saturated with cultural meaning. Each society configures it differently. Someone once wrote that hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a very different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with hand, nail and tooth.
The world over, the belly may come first, but each morsel is as much congealed history as it is sustenance. We humans had to discover our diet by wrenching it from the natural world and elevating it to the menu. It was this activity that created society in the first place. As a fish is born to swim, so too must we labour for our supper.
While affluent sophisticates may change their culinary taste to coincide with the latest gourmet trends, the reality for most of us is very different. The potentials of our biology are quite variable and go way beyond personal fancy. Our teeth and digestive system make possible an enormous variety of plant and animal materials as food.
Compared to most other creatures, we are wonderfully opportunistic eaters. We will eat almost anything. The natives of Tierra del Fuego survived on fungus. The most characteristic food of nomad herders — such as the Masai of East Africa — is the blood of living animals. Eskimos specialise in flesh. The Irish doubled their population on a diet of milk and potatoes. Mayan peasants ate almost nothing but beans and corn. Several insects were considered delicacies in classical times in Europe, and a number are still eaten with relish in China, Africa and among the indigenous population of Australia.
What people eat varies with history, geography, class,
gender, ethnic identity, age, religion, social occasion and a multitude of other factors. There is not one particularly human diet, but many. Unlike koalas, whose nourishment is restricted to a few eucalypts, we have turned the whole world into a larder.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the eating of other humans was once a universal practice. Evidence of a hearty indulgence in "two legged mutton", as the ancient Chinese called it, has been found at the very beginning of human evolution.
But primitive humanity was not consciously cannibalistic. The easy distinction we make between ourselves and other animals was not self-evident to our forebears. Food was seized upon whether it rooted or fruited, scampered or walked.
Without the prohibition of cannibalism, the budding of human society would have been impossible. Until the members of the early hordes could be free of the fear of being killed and eaten by each other, there could be no advance in the collective product of the whole group.
The checking of cannibalism was the earliest social institution. Once introduced, it encouraged broader taboos which tended to protect animal and plant life in general. What could and could not be eaten defined who was kin, and kinsfolk alone were human.
While cannibalism persisted as an occasional ritual in some cultures, food taboos have been a feature of many societies since. It has often been said that the prohibition on eating pork — in the Jewish and Muslim religions, for example — had its origins in medical doctrine.
While the flesh of swine can be a dangerous meat in hot climates, no taboos appear to have been placed on it until about 1800 BC. This was the time at which tribes of Indo-Aryan nomads were ranging widely in areas of eastern Europe and western Asia. With their livestock of sheep, goats and cattle, they appear to have disliked the pig because of its resistance to being herded, its low stamina and its omnivorous diet, which challenged their own. Such disrepute converted a
general wariness of pork into a full-scale prohibition.
A similar logic generated the pervasive food taboos of the Indian subcontinent. As the Aryan tribes invaded India during the second millennium BC, they found it advisable to guard their cows with the fullest protection of religious law. A milk cow can feed many more people than its carcass can.
But as time passed, these proscriptions slackened. It became accepted that cattle could be killed in sacrifice to the gods. The demand by the priestly caste of Brahmans for more and more sacrificial beasts placed an intolerable burden on local communities. Partly in revolt against these impositions, the doctrine of Buddhism arose.
Buddhists were opposed to animal slaughter. But as Reay Tannihil writes in her review of the history of food, "This was a product neither of fastidiousness nor of a sentimental belief in kindness to animals, but of an opposition to ritual sacrifice and to caste (with its pre-ordained social exclusiveness) ..."
Buddhism gave religious sanction to a vegetarian diet and turned abstinence from the flesh of animals into an ideal of human behaviour. Variously this has been a rationale of vegetarianism ever since.
Traditionally, advocates of a vegetarian diet believe that the eating of meat arouses and stimulates animal passions and that it is, therefore, antagonistic to the development of spiritual and philosophical thought. This was certainly one of the motives that activated the wave of vegetarianism that swept Britain and the United States in the 19th century. Another factor was the reaction against the gross overeating of the well-to-do while others went malnourished.
A leader of this movement and believer in the dogma was Sylvester Graham, who was a fierce advocate of wholemeal wheaten bread. "The enormous wickedness and atrocious violence and outrages of mankind", he insisted, "strongly indicate, if they do not prove, an excessive indulgence in animal food".
This quest for health and holiness still dominates the vegetarian legacy today. Many of today's vegetarians are keen to redefine what it means to be human by what they don't put in their mouths.
[This is the first in a series on the politics of eating.]