Rumbles, page 11
By the eighteenth century it was possible to not only have good taste, but also to be a ‘Man of Taste’ devoted to the exercise of careful discernment regarding everything from what to eat for dinner to what novels to read and what ethical ideals to cleave to. Several of these men of taste also wrote weighty treatises in which they attempted to understand the basis and meaning of aesthetic pleasure. Books like Francis Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) and Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) treated the issue of taste – what is beauty? What is the relationship between beauty and morality? How is the beauty of nature related to art? – as integral to comprehending the fundamental human condition. Taking these questions seriously meant rethinking a hierarchy of the senses that usually placed vision and hearing well above smell, taste and touch. One result of the Enlightenment obsession with taste was, according to literary historian Denise Gigante, its transformation from an ‘abstract intellectual pleasure’ into a ‘gustatory phenomenon’ that ‘connoted a totality of aesthetic experience’.143 To appreciate the subtle craft of a piece of prose or peculiar vibrance of a painting, then, one had to engage not only the eyes and the mind, but also the feelings of the gut. In an era occupied by the idea of the nervous body, a state of being defined by intense receptivity to the world and sensitivity to its effects, appetitive acts like tasting, assimilation and digestion became essential processes in the construction of the self.
The connection between reading and eating was not, then, always imagined in negative terms, rather they were often figured as metaphorically and physiologically related operations. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne considered education and digestion to be parallel functions, while in 1597 Francis Bacon claimed that ‘Some Bookes are to be Tasted, Others to be Swallowed, and Some Few to be Chewed and Digested’.144 Writing in the whirl of innovation and artistic experimentation that characterised Renaissance Europe, the great scholar Erasmus described reading as a matter of ingesting and incorporating:
The speech which moves the listener must arise from the most intimate fabric of the body […] you must digest what you have consumed in varied and prolonged reading and transfer it by reflection into the veins of your mind rather than into your memory or your notebook. Thus, your natural talent, gorged on all kinds of food will itself beget a discourse.145
Advising his reader not to simply commit their reading to memory, Erasmus defined true scholarship as a kind of digestive process by which knowledge is imbibed into the system. This model of active reading was essential to the humanist vision of education that had begun to emerge throughout the closing years of the fourteenth century, which sought to bring into being a new kind of citizen, eloquent, well versed in the studia humanitatis and ready to contribute to a wider public culture. Broad study in the humanities – in subjects like moral philosophy, poetry, history and rhetoric – was key, but most emphasis was placed on the act of reading itself and on the need to develop a discerning literary appetite. This pedagogical philosophy was grounded in classical antiquity, as Renaissance scholars looked back to the work of great thinkers like Aristotle and Plato for guidance on how to foster civic life and nurture intellectual endeavour. With these lofty goals in mind, many turned to the Roman philosopher Seneca who advised that we ‘follow the example of bees’. Taking up the topic of creativity in one of his Epistles, Seneca observed that the lively human mind was alike to the bee moving from flower to flower gathering pollen to turn into honey. Having sifted through ‘whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading’, he explained, we should then ‘so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came’.146 In other words, only by carefully digesting the written words of others does it become possible, somewhat counterintuitively, to create something new and truly unique. At the heart of the loftiest humanistic ideals lay the gut, grinding, dissolving and assimilating the world around it.
In his pamphlet Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England (1644), published at the height of the English Civil War, the radical poet John Milton made an impassioned plea for the right to freedom of speech and expression. Arguing against the practice of censoring books before publication, he urged that it was only by consuming unwise or unhealthy materials that the ‘discreet and judicious reader’ could cultivate better judgement. ‘Books are’, he wrote, ‘as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evil substance’, but while rancid meat ‘will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction’, ‘bad books’ encourage us to formulate counter arguments, to ‘discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate’.147 For Milton, censorship deprived the reader of the chance to employ reason and form their own view. Acknowledging such restriction as an attempt to remove the temptation of dangerous ideas and scandalous philosophies, he asked what ‘wisdome can there be to choose […] without the knowledge of evill?’148 Drawing on the story of the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve sinned by tasting the forbidden fruit, the poet insisted that God had made such a transgression possible so that humanity might have ‘freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing’.149 Traced back to its biblical beginnings, knowledge has always been driven by appetite.
With this in mind, it is not surprising that the stomach has so often been imagined as a better route to spiritual knowledge than the eyes or the ears. As historian Helen Smith has uncovered, women’s reading in the early modern period was figured as a distinctly embodied process, descriptions of which tended to draw heavily on digestive metaphors. In the margins of her copy of the Epistles of St Paul, for instance, Queen Elizabeth I scribbled a passage from Augustine on the alimentary pleasures of reading that reflected how: ‘I walke manie times into the pleasant fields of the Holy Scripture, where I pluke up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning, eate them by reading, chawe them by musing, and laie them up at length in the hie seate of memorie by gathering them together.’150 To imagine oneself consuming the word of God as if it were a ‘goodlie’ herb growing in a garden was, for the reigning monarch, to bring oneself into greater intimacy with His teachings. Having rejected the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, in which the bread and wine of communion are consumed as the literal body and blood of Christ, England’s first Protestant queen insisted that true devotion involved a more active form of readerly gustation that required that the individual choose what or what not to eat.
While for Elizabeth I and Milton, to ‘eat from the tree of knowledge’ was part of what it meant to be a true and inquiring Christian, other religious thinkers were less enamoured with the idea of the virtuous stomach. In fact, many early modern writers positioned the demands of the gut in direct opposition to those of the spirit and condemned gluttonous appetites as not only intemperate, but also potentially sacrilegious. Overeaters were accused of having made a god of their belly, of having indulged in corporeal pleasures at the expense of religious devotion. Writing in 1640, the Bishop of Norwich Edward Reynolds sermonised against the ‘intemperate excesse’ that might lead us to make ‘our belly the grave of our Soule, and the dungeon of our Reason, and let[ting] our Intestina as well morally as naturally farre exceed the length of the whole Man besides’.151 Preached from the pulpit, the remarkable image of the stomach as a deathly corrupter of the soul must have severely disquieted the epicures in the congregation.
Though it is perhaps not surprising to find a minister like Reynolds denouncing bodily appetites as the enemies of reason – his Presbyterian theology would have left him especially attuned to the danger of earthly pleasures – a similar antagonism also emerged in less expected places. According to historian Anne C. Vila, even in Enlightenment France, where ‘social pleasures like fine dining were central to the effort to redefine the modern intellectual as a public-spirited, convivial fellow eager to partake of worldly life’, anxieties over the consequences of such ‘belly-centred’ excesses remained.152 Alongside the image of the scholar as a gourmand, whose refined culinary tastes were rightly bound up with their intellectual endeavours, sat the less attractive figure of the sickly writer we encountered in Chapter Two, who was beset by digestive troubles and creatively constipated. Success in the literary world of cities like Paris meant treading a fine line between gustatory enjoyment – attending the right parties, securing a spot next to a wealthy patron at the dinner table and so on – and the kind of gluttonous overconsumption likely to impede the higher functioning of the mind. Danger also lay in too readily conflating the pleasures of the gut with the work of the mind. As Coleridge protested in his Philosophical Lectures (1819), the analogy between literary and gustatory taste had been taken so far that now ‘one man may say I delight in Milton and Shakespeare more than Turtle or Venison’ and another that a dish of ‘turtle and a good bottle of port’ is preferable to any poetry, but ‘you must not dispute about tastes’.153 Bind creativity too closely to the work of the body and risk turning great literature into little more than another dish on the table to be sampled or passed on in favour of another.
Coleridge’s fretting at the denigration of poetry as consumable like ‘Venison’ reveals the underlying tension between the work of the gut and the work of the mind to which this chapter has addressed itself. Digestion and thinking have often been set in opposition to one another – the suffering of the scholar whose excessive study brings on bouts of indigestion or the bibliophile warned against reading at the dinner table – but the perception of some connection between the two has allowed the gut to occupy a surprisingly prominent place in the history of Western culture. Following the movement of meaning from victuals to vitals, writers, philosophers and poets explored the physiological and aesthetic dimensions of taste in a way that transformed the alimentary canal into an arbiter of beauty, morality and truth. Taken up as popular metaphors for learning, from the Renaissance onwards acts of consumption and digestion became key to the imagination of an educated and well-rounded, modern citizen. Bumping up against this ideal, the discourse of nerves that emerged over the eighteenth century pitted the sensitive artist or scholar against a booming urban world that threatened to overwhelm their delicate, finely attuned facilities. Moving into the nineteenth century, the next chapter picks up on the idea of a nervous economy in which the seemingly unceasing demands of a burgeoning modernity threatened to deplete the body’s finite energy reserves, stymieing thought and hindering digestion in the whirl of industrialisation, urbanisation and commercialisation. Here attention lies, however, not with the romantic distresses of brilliant poets and the musings of learned philosophers, but with the rather more mundane realm of the office and the question of what to eat for lunch.
6 Eating at the Desk
Sandwiches have ruined lunch. According to the Daily Mail, the invention of the pre-packed sandwich, sometime in the early 1980s, marked the end of convivial midday dining and ushered in an era of eating on the move.154 For its detractors, the ubiquity and tempting convenience of the sandwich has succeeded in rendering the meal a rather joyless affair. Given that most of us eat lunch as part of a working day, such criticisms are often bound up with broader concerns over the demands and stresses of modern office culture. Purchased between meetings and eaten in front of a computer, these triangles of doom are held up as an everyday example of our dangerously skewed work/life balance. In 2016 the New York Times Magazine ran a series of portraits by the photographer Brian Finke that captured the horrors of desktop dining: a glassy-eyed community manager slurps soup in a staff meeting, a television producer types with a slice of pepperoni pizza hanging from her mouth, a lawyer munches crisps over a pile of legal documents and the desk of a city trader is strewn with food wrappers, napkins and not one, not two, but six bottles of hot sauce.155 In the article that accompanied these images, eating at the desk was presented as a uniquely North American phenomenon, one driven by a work culture in which staying late at the office is expected and stopping for lunch is viewed as a sign of idleness. Desktop dining is, however, on the rise around the world: The Times of India recently advised its readers on olfactory etiquette (vegetable roti and yogurt are fine, hard-boiled eggs and goat trotter soup should be avoided), Norwegians arrive to work armed with a matpakke – a rather uninspiring open sandwich of cheese, meat or jam – and when asked, almost 70 per cent of South Africans admitted to working through lunch most days.156 Even in southern European countries like Spain and Italy where the working day has traditionally been structured around breaking for a long lunch – with multiple courses and often a nap to follow – things are changing. During the Covid-19 pandemic the French government was forced to repeal a long-standing ban on desktop dining. Previously, the Code du travail had explicitly prohibited ‘allowing workers to have their meals in places dedicated to work’, but the closure of restaurants and social distancing measures meant that the regulation was no longer enforceable.157 For many, this reversal marked not only the desecration of French food culture, but also the further encroachment of work into life. What better measure of the increasing pressure to perform better and produce more than our inability to stop – even briefly – to eat lunch? Such grumblings are usually accompanied by nostalgia for a world before the tyranny of the sandwich, when food was prepared with care and time taken to enjoy it. Which is all very nice, but such hazy imaginings are hard to locate in the past. After all, lunch has long been inseparable from labour, a product of the working day rather than an escape from it.
Lunch was a Victorian innovation. A response to lengthening commutes and longer hours, in Britain it was a product of the rhythms and peculiarities of the working day. In medieval times most people ate only two meals a day, a large dinner served in the late morning or early afternoon and a small supper eaten in the evening, and it took until the seventeenth century for breakfast to become part of the daily routine.158 Something called ‘nuncheon’ appeared in the middle of the fourteenth century and the term ‘luncheon’ began circulating in the seventeenth. But neither denoted a mealtime as such, only a light repast: in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language Samuel Johnson suggested that it meant simply ‘as much food as one’s hand can hold’ and when ‘lunch’ first appeared in Webster’s Dictionary in 1817 it was used to describe simply a ‘large piece of food’.159 Only with the cataclysm of industrialisation and the transformations enacted by urbanisation did lunch emerge as an essential break in the working day. It is telling that familiar conjunctions like ‘lunchtime’ and ‘lunch hour’ entered common usage around the middle of the nineteenth century, just as new patterns of work and travel were recalibrating the rhythms of everyday life. Prior to the institution of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which was first adopted by the railways in 1847 to regulate train timetables before being publicly inaugurated with the construction of Big Ben in 1859, most people looked to local markers of time to structure their day: the sundial in the middle of the village square, the chiming of church bells, labourers returning from the fields, a candle in the parlour burned down to the wick. Industry, like the railways, required standardised time to function. Reflecting on this shift, the historian E. P. Thompson has described how the ‘first generation of factory workers were taught by their masters the importance of time’; in other words, they had to develop a new sense of time, to reset their internal clock to the demands of a new economic order.160 The precise division of time on the factory floor extended beyond the production line to the body of the worker, not only orchestrating the movement of their limbs but also – by instituting a set hour for the consumption of lunch – establishing the temporal cadence of the digestive system.
The dazzling ascent of lunch through the middle of the nineteenth century created a booming market for daytime eating. Walk around London, Manchester or Glasgow in the early afternoon and you would encounter a thriving dining culture: from street vendors and chop houses to vegetarian restaurants, cheap cafes to exclusive members’ clubs, lunch was woven deep into the fabric of the Victorian city. But outside of the restaurant industry, the advent of this new meal was not met with universal enthusiasm. Instead, in common with the rise of the pre-packed sandwich today, the advance of lunch provoked anxieties over the health of the nation and the quickening pace of urban life. Described by a witty commentator as ‘an insult to one’s breakfast and an outrage to one’s dinner’, lunch was seen as a disruption of man’s natural eating schedule: breakfast was taken too early, the evening meal was indefinitely postponed, and workers were forced to fill the gap with ill-considered and hastily consumed foods.161 Where once it had been possible to make it back home to eat a proper meal, at a solid table surrounded by a loving family, the speed of modern life had rendered that simple pleasure impossible. Industrial capitalism was, according to a host of worried commentators, a disaster for the stomach, overtaxing and unbalancing its delicate operations, so that the nation’s workforce became exposed to a host of debilitating gastric complaints.
