Food’s troubling connection with pleasure questions the primacy of the spiritual over matter, of intellect over emotions and sensations, of soul over body that has informed most of Western Culture.
I have just finished reading Leonard Barkan’s new book The Hungry Eye: Eating, Drinking, and European Culture from Rome to the Renaissance. Full disclaimer: I have known Leonard Barkan from the early 1990s, when we were both collaborating with the Italian food and wine magazine Gambero Rosso. As a matter of fact, it was him who invited me to the NYU Feast and Famine seminar in the Nutrition and Food Studies department, where I met those who would later become my colleagues.
That said, The Hungry Eye is quite an extraordinary book not only in its content (more about that later) but for its collection of art images (more than 200) spanning from ancient Rome to the Dutch still lives of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Our eyes can feast on mosaics, frescos, paintings, architectural details, cups, and all kinds of dining accoutrements. I don’t think I have ever seen so many Last Suppers next to each other…
The main theme of the book is the ambivalence in Western high culture towards food. Although references to drinking and eating abound in it, they are used to make arguments relating to other, loftier fields of human creativity, from literature to theology. Considered “unworthy and frivolous,” without system or order, “consumption, nourishment, taste and commensality are either expunged often metaphoricalized beyond recognition” (4). Barkan’s argument is that, nevertheless, drinking and eating stubbornly make their way to the forefront, reminding us of their unruly materiality, what he calls food’s foodness or thingness (I happened to have shared some reflections about that theme in reading Heidegger). Food’s troubling connection with pleasure questions the primacy of the spiritual over matter, of intellect over emotion and sensation, of soul over body that has often informed Western Culture, at least since Christianity became the prevalent religion but also before (see Plato).
Food and drink are often used as symbols and metaphor, but the frequency of their appearance in high culture points to their centrality in the human experience, which cannot be denied. Their material aspects keeps on resurfacing: “these culinary gestures refuse to tolerate their banishment and they exert pressure on the center” (24). Barkan describes these dynamics as the return of the repressed. As much as high culture tries to impose order on food, disorder tends to come back. Food and drink pop up in expressions of human culture that are not primarily about eating and drinking. Barkan invites us to reading Western high culture for food, observing where it would appear only casually showed or mentioned, all while being described with an attention to detail and verisimilitude that betrays true appreciation and consideration.
This is a crucial point for food studies as an intellectual endeavor and as a field of research and practice. As part of academia and trying to make a career, food scholars are enticed (at times pushed) to embrace methods and models of inquiry and expression that reflect the supposed rigor of other disciplines. At the same time, we constantly deal with the inherent messiness and chaos of food, which is inevitably reflected in the messiness and chaos of the food system: a network, or rather a mesh, of materials, infrastructures, technologies, environments, living beings, and human stakeholders. As much as we try to theorize and impose discipline, there is always something that escapes our efforts. Barkan’s book is an invitation to rethink our attempts to force food into the trappings of high culture, learning to embrace – and enjoy – its bedlam for what it is.
These reflections extend to taste, a faculty of aesthetic and sensory judgement that is considered both as the result of universal rules valid for everyone and the expression of the personal, subjective appreciation of the world around us. As abstract as it may try to present itself, Barkan argues, taste originates from the actual act of eating and savoring, from the mouth. In Latin, sapientia, wisdom, is connected with sapor, flavor (sapere and sapore in Italian). “Food is the real,” Barkan muses; “food-as-the-real, at least among certain philosophers, may be an object of suspicion, owing to the fact that is insists on kinds of pleasure that resist rational systems of control; and, by contrast, for other philosophers it is precisely this waywardness, with all its implications of sensuality, that offers the most alluring challenge to the project of discourse, albeit of a kind that may lose its way, energetically and without shame, among the phenomena of lived experience” (149).
The ambivalence between the intellectual and the material can be detected also in art. Barkan observes that “all the materials used in the making of art are humble products of the earth and the creation of masterpieces is equally miraculous whether the constituent parts are rocks from Carrara of cheese from Parma” (17). What makes art art is the process, regardless of the durability of the final result. However, the duration of food, limited in time and condemned to decay and rot, tends to place cuisine in a different realm from art, which is somehow supposed to last. However, contemporary forms of performance art thrive on the ephemerality of what artists do, often without any actual durable products left afterwards. Moreover, artists have been playing with meals and food as a medium. I use the verb “to play” on purpose, as their creations are often perceived as transgressive or, in other cases, enjoyable in a silly, light manner. This brings us to a perduring debate: are chefs artists? Is their work – commercial, transitory, entangled in the trappings of fashions and trends – an expression of human creativity at par with other forms of arts?
Barkan begins his tour de force in ancient Roman culture, where food was definitely not at the margins. “When Romans write about words, books, or literature, verbs of consumption are rarely far from their mind.” (58) Quintilian used terminology that compares intellectual processes to digestive processes. Eating was central to politics, conspicuous consumption was used as propaganda, dinner was theater. Food found itself at the center of a well-organized, well-oiled food production and trade system that held the empire together, stretching from Spain to the Middle East, from North Africa to Southern England. Sensuality is evident in Roman paintings and in texts, often with sexual overtones. In that cultural production, culinary productivity “can be seen as evidence of creativity, generosity, and progress beyond the primitive condition of mankind, or it can be seen as exploitation, inequality, and wretched excess.” (71) There are voices that lament the loss of the simplicity of the food of the ancients and criticize the current self-indulgent debauchery and abundance, which supposedly weakens the Roman spirit (De Jaucourt will repeat the same argument in his entry on cuisine in the Encyclopédie). There were those who ridiculed the excesses of the nouveau riche as uncouth and ignorant, expressing anxieties about social order and leveraging food to mark distinction: culinary capital was based on taste rather than wealth.
The books continues by examining food in the Bible and in the religious cultures based on it, where “eating and drinking, while no less central (indeed they will prove to be nearly as ubiquitous as they are in Rome), are more likely to exist as a problem, a question mark, an exile, even an enemy” (94). Although food appears as a sign of something else, an allegory, material used to teach in the parables, its “foodness” cannot be avoided: its flavors are addressed, its making and its pattern of consumption are relevant. The following chapter moves to the Renaissance in philosophy, literature, and visual arts. It explores Shakespeare, Milton, Erasmus, but also Platina, the Renaissance writer who in mid-fifteenth century Rome wrote De Honesta Voluptate (about honest pleasure), while being accused of what Barkan refers to as the three Hs: humanism, heresy, and homosexuality. The last chapter goes back to the central thesis of the book, exploring the connection between mimesis, metaphor, and embodiment. this is where we find the discussion about the Last Supper, all the way to the troubles that artist Paolo Veronese incurred with the Inquisition about his detailed approach to the famous scene.
I’d like to end these reflections with an observation that really struck me, also because it points to something in plain sight that I had never thought about. In sacred art, food can be used to connect our world with the events (and the truth) in the visual representation. In his Presentation of the Virgin, Titian painted an old lady selling eggs in the foreground, well visible: she and her products belong to the world of the viewer, yet they are part of the sacred scene. Barkan also notices how many paintings of the Holy Mother and Child include fruit. They are symbols, but at the same time they are almost placed on a windowsill, “allowing us to look upon the sacred scene as though across an optical threshold” (133). At times the fruit is being held or eaten by Christ Child. Like the eggs in Titian, they are there as part of our world “summoned up by a familiar, tactile, and often highly appetizing experience” (134): “the Bible, together with all its textual and visual traditions, gets perpetually viewed by hungry eyes” (135).