Rumbles, page 19
The frequent characterisation of the stomach as volatile and unwilling to work for the common good reveals barely concealed resentment at its outsized influence on overall health. Undeterred by its inferior status, the messy viscera of the digestive system continued to wield power over even the most elevated parts, interrupting the important work of the brain and infecting the mind with dark moods. As Thomas Carlyle, who was plagued by dyspepsia for most of his adult life, observed: ‘It is not the pain of those capricious organs; that were little; but the irresistible depression, the gloomy overclouding of the soul, which they inevitably engender, is truly frightful.’245 The anarchic belly seeds lawlessness throughout the body and it is made even more troublesome by the powerful role it is called upon to perform to maintain the individual’s sense of self. Digestion always involves a kind of mediation between the interior and the outside world. To eat is to bring something exterior, a foreign substance, into the deepest recesses of the body. The act of consumption, then, entails not only physiological danger – the risk of poisoning or the possibility of an allergic reaction – but also the kind of psychological jeopardy involved in incorporating something ‘not me’ into the bounded structure of the body. Eating represents a moment of profound vulnerability, that can shake the foundations of personal and collective identity. According to the anthropologist Mary Douglas, who we encountered in Chapter Seven, what we choose to eat or not to eat is governed by our conception of ‘symbolic pollution’. In the same way as dirt is simply ‘matter out of place’, a substance that provokes disgust because it violates the agreed-upon social categories, so too are our food choices informed by culturally established boundaries between clean and unclean, safe and unsafe, self and other.246
These borders are sometimes drawn along national lines. Recall George Cheyne’s warning in The English Malady that the price to be paid for overweening mercantile ambitions – for having ‘ransack’d all the Parts of the Globe to bring together its whole Stock of Materials for Riot, Luxury, and to provoke Excess’ – was a rise in nervous disorders. One result of all that ransacking had been the introduction of ‘foreign Spices’ to British cooking. This had proved disastrous for the nation’s health, because such ‘Provocatives are contrived not only to rouze a fickly Appetite to receive the unnatural Load, but to render a natural good one incapable of knowing when it has had enough’. The English stomach, accustomed to much plainer fare, was – Cheyne insisted – ill prepared for ‘Eastern Pickles’ and exotic ‘sauces’, and likely to suffer terribly when such alien flavours were imposed on it.247 Published in 1733 as the British Empire battled with its European competitors to dominate the globe, this dietary advice clearly had as much to do with matters of national pride and national identity as it did with individual health. A country’s cuisine is a political matter or, as the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, the ‘cooking of any society is a kind of language […] which says something about how that society feels about its relation to nation and culture’.248 Communicating meaning far beyond the plate, food is part, alongside history, religion, culture and so on, of the collective imagination. This is important because it illustrates, once again, the centrality of consumption, digestion and defecation to how we make meaning about ourselves and the world around us.
Perceived as a kind of ‘language’ for the nation, culinary traditions can provoke anxiety as well as pride. Pasta, for instance, has lately generated a great deal of controversy. In the early 1980s the Italian Academy of Cuisine deposited a recipe for ragù alla bolognese at the Bologna Chamber of Commerce that purported to be the authentic and true method for cooking the famous meat sauce. Ingredients are limited to beef, pancetta, carrots, celery, onion, tomato sauce, butter, olive oil, milk and half a glass of red wine, and instructions specify cooking the sauce slowly for three to four hours. Despite this effort, home cooks around the world continue to use dried spaghetti instead of fresh egg tagliatelle and to make unnecessary additions ranging in severity from sun-dried tomatoes to dark chocolate to instant coffee granules. A social media backlash was prompted in 2017 when the television cook Mary Berry instructed her viewers to add thyme, white wine and double cream to their sauce, and the New York Times faced similar approbation when it published a recipe for ‘White Bolognese’. That a bowl of pasta can generate so much anger suggests that there might be more to it than simply sofrito, meat and olive oil. According to the philosopher Roland Barthes, certain dishes can come to symbolise the nation itself, how it perceives itself and the image it wishes to impart to the rest of the world. In his essay ‘Steak and Chips’, Barthes describes the meal as not only ‘part of the nation’ but the ‘alimentary sign of Frenchness’. In other words, the symbolic properties of steak – that it represents both ‘elegance’ and ‘bull-like strength’ – are qualities that help to define the character of the French as a people.249 Moreover, the ferocity with which Italians have attempted to protect the ‘true’ Bolognese reveals something of the role played by food in helping not only to create national identity, but also to defend it from any outside influence that might dilute or corrupt its perceived authenticity. The act of eating helps to create the national body, through shared traditions and common mythos, but it also threatens to unmake it.
What we eat and how we eat it can help distinguish insider from outsider, familiar from foreign, friend from foe. Nowhere is this more apparent than during wartime, when the national body finds itself vulnerable and assailed by enemies. During the Napoleonic Wars – conflicts spanning a twelve-year period between 1803 and 1815, throughout which an ascendant French Empire clashed with other European powers – recruiting posters in England were often illustrated with an engraving by William Hogarth (Figure 28). The etching depicts a scene at the port of Calais, as a weighty side of beef is carried to an English tavern in the harbour while a ragged cast of hungry-looking characters look on. Though the target of Hogarth’s satirical eye was clearly Catholicism – hag-like fisherwomen adorned with crucifixes, the greedy friar pawing at the meat and in the background a group of superstitious locals kneeling before the cross in the grubby streets – when the print was reproduced as a piece of military propaganda, more attention was paid to its negative depiction of the nation’s eating habits. Contrasting with the hearty joint of meat destined for English bellies, the French soldiers must make do with thin soupe-maigre, while an exiled Jacobite slumped in the foreground has been brought close to death by a meagre meal of raw onion and bread. The message to new recruits was clear: fight like the strong beef-raised Englishman you are or risk defeatat the hands of the weak effeminate soup-swilling French. Its title, O the Roast Beef of Old England, was taken from a well-known patriotic song originally performed as part of Henry Fielding’s play The Grub Street Opera (1731), the first two verses of which go:
Figure 28: William Hogarth, O the Roast Beef of Old England (The Gate of Calais), 1749
When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman’s Food,
It ennobled our veins and enriched our blood.
Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good
Oh! the Roast Beef of old England,
And old English Roast Beef!
But since we have learnt from all-vapouring France
To eat their ragouts as well as to dance,
We’re fed up with nothing but vain complaisance
Oh! the Roast Beef of old England,
And old English Roast Beef!
Nostalgic for an imaginary time passed when ‘fathers of old were robust, stout, and strong’ and the world lived in fear at the might of our ‘Fleets’, the song worries that the British have been reduced to a ‘sneaking poor race, half-begotten and tame’ and lays the blame squarely with enfeebling foreign cuisine, namely ‘ragout’. Repurposed in aid of the war effort, the threat of French invasion was recast in digestive terms, as an attack on the nation’s stomach as well as its defences, institutions and wealth.
In Beef and Liberty: Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation (2003), Ben Rogers has argued that during the eighteenth-century roast beef became emblematic of an increasingly confident English nation, set in opposition to the refined dishes of continental Europe.250 The figure of ‘John Bull’, who started life as a satirical character and wound up as a much-beloved symbol of Britishness, was key to this new-found confidence. Usually depicted as red-cheeked and rather stout, wearing a tailcoat and sometimes a Union Jack waistcoat, John Bull came to embody all the virtues – plain speaking, common sense, stubborn determination – that the British were, or perhaps would have liked to have been, associated with. As a personification of the nation state, he was dragged into political arguments over the decisions made in Parliament or fears over the declining fate of the country. Often, his stomach, replete with rich digestive metaphors, was invoked. Two satirical cartoons, the first from 1829 and the second from 1913 (Figures 29 and 30), depict the force-feeding of John Bull. In the first he is held down by Robert Peel, Home Secretary, while the Duke of Wellington, naval hero and then Prime Minister, shoves the Roman Catholic Relief Act down his throat. In the second he appears strapped to a chair as a line of figures representing everything from ‘votes for women’ and ‘socialism’ to ‘home rule’ and ‘conscription’, jostle to pour their issues into his medically administered feeding tube. Produced in different contexts and concerned with different political questions – the constitutional basis for Catholic emancipation in the first and in the second, the pile of problems facing Britain in the run-up to the First World War – the two cartoons both show the violently overstuffed John Bull as a personification of the national body placed under terrible strain, made to swallow what is disgusting, what is intolerable.
Figure 29: A large John Bull being held down and force-fed by Peel and Wellington, representing the idea of the Catholic emancipation as a breach of the constitution. Coloured etching by W. Heath, 1829
Figure 30: John Bull being force-fed via a stomach pump. Stanger Pritchard, 1913
As pieces of satire, these images were clearly intended to induce the viewer to feel outrage or to act regarding the issues of the day. It is significant that in each the provocation arises from imagined scenes of force-feeding, a process long associated with the control and violent coercion of individual bodies by various institutions of power. From enslaved Africans whose efforts at self-starvation were thwarted by the employment of a specially designed vice that wrenched their mouths open, to prisoners compelled to eat so they could serve their full sentences and asylum inmates who had tubes shoved down their throats to funnel nutrients directly into the stomach, force-feeding has been used to thwart dissent and assert the authority of the strong over the weak. We will return to the subject of force-feeding in the final chapter, but here it is enough to note how the state use of force-feeding to control bodies under its jurisdiction reveals something of the way that dominant ideologies have been articulated through the gut. The image of John Bull – representative of the national body – having unpalatable ideas, acts and demands shoved down his throat speaks potently of alimentation as a means of representing and expressing political debate or discord.
The violation of John Bull also reveals something of the violence at the heart of the digestive process itself. Eating can represent, as we have already seen, a moment of vulnerability in which the boundary of the interior self is breached by the exterior world. At the same time, however, if the eating of food is imagined as involving the absorption and domestication of foreign substances, then it could also easily serve as a metaphor for strong governance. According to historian Joyce L. Huff, the ‘construction of alimentation as the incorporation of outside elements into the body’s very structure meant that alimentary processes were easily expressed through imperialist metaphors. Indeed, the language of subjugation and conquest is everywhere in […] discourses on eating […] food was incorporated into the overall structure of the body, just as colonies became part of the empire.’251 In other words, digestion has often been envisioned in terms that pit the might of the gut against the incursion of what is consumed in ways that mirror the ideology of empire building. This version of digestion as always involving subjugation and submission to the ruling power, whether that be the eating body or the colonising nation, provides an articulation of the body politic at work in the imperial project. The philosopher Frantz Fanon, arguably the most influential anti-colonial thinker of the twentieth century, described the colonisation of countries like his native Martinique as a digestive process, in which European culture and values are foisted upon the palettes of a populace with no appetite for them. ‘In the colonial context’, he writes, ‘the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values’, but during the ‘period of decolonization, the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them, and vomit them up’.252 Freedom from an imposed regime that claims dominion over the bodies and minds of its subjects, necessitates – for Fanon – a purging of the belly, puking up the poison you have been forced to swallow. Here mechanisms of ingestion, absorption and expulsion track meaning between individual, collective and political bodies in ways that register the corporeal impact of power and organised defiance.
The gut is not only an organ that stores and then violently evacuates, it is also a source of fun, humour and irreverence that can border on the revolutionary. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon describes laughter as a powerful tool of resistance because to laugh ‘in mockery’ at ‘Western values’ is to refuse ‘the violence’ and ‘the aggressiveness’ through which those values are ‘affirmed’.253 Though fables like ‘The Belly and Its Members’ have enlisted the stomach in support of top-down paternalism, the cultural history of the belly also reveals more disruptive potentials. The maintenance of the dominant social order has, as explored in Chapter Three, often involved the careful regulation of the body’s baser functions, especially those associated with consumption, digestion and defecation. To upend the established body politic might, as we have seen, involve looking to the bawdy, burping, slurping gut an alternative source of authority. Along similar lines, while narrow versions of national identity have been bolstered by the pleasures and anxieties associated with eating, there are other, less hierarchical, ways to imagine the work of the stomach. In Dangerous Digestion: The Politics of American Dietary Advice (2015) the environmental sociologist E. Melanie DuPuis argues that an alternative story might be found in our emerging understanding of the microbiome and the important role it plays in the health of the body. Once eaten, food, she notes, ‘seems to be asocial’, but in truth the ‘fermenting that occurs in digestion is completely social, a collaboration between humans and the microbes they have domesticated, and which have domesticated them’. Instead of imagining the digestive process as a means by which the self conquers the non-self, we should think of it, she writes, as an example of ‘how people can live as a part of the multitude of beings, with a body that is a collaboration with these beings’.254 Rather than use the inner workings of the body to naturalise long-entrenched hierarchies, DuPuis holds up the gut microbiome as a utopian vision of what the world could be if we were only willing to follow its egalitarian example. Thinking more about the traction between bellies and politics, the next chapter returns to the history of the diet to consider what might be revolutionary about refusing to go on one.
11 The Revolting Gut
One of the most influential diet gurus in history was a funeral director. In 1863 William Banting published a short pamphlet, Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public, that recounted his long struggle with excess weight and the regimen that eventually freed him from the terrible burden of ‘Obesity’. The book was an immediate success, going into its fourth edition by 1869, with translations in French and German.255 Its principles were so widely taken up that ‘banting’ remained a popular shorthand for dieting well into the twentieth century. Even today, Swedish slimmers describe themselves as trying to att banta, a common term for weight loss derived directly from mid-Victorian Britain. For readers, the appeal of Letter on Corpulence lay not only in the simplicity of the advice offered, but also in the relatable personal history that framed it. As he moved through middle age, Banting was perturbed to find that over time his waistline increased to the point that he was unable to ‘attend to the little offices humanity requires without considerable pain and difficulty’.256 Doctors told him to take up more exercise so Banting took to walking long distances through the city and rowing along the Thames every morning, activities that only served to further stimulate the appetite and failed to halt his steady weight gain. Eventually, having tried an intense course of Turkish baths and every ‘physic’ known to man, he found the solution to his problem from an unexpected source. During a consultation with William Harvey, an ear, nose and throat surgeon, regarding the progressive loss of his hearing, Banting was urged to cut carbohydrates from his diet. In place of bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer, soup and potatoes, he was to consume meat, fish and the occasional slice of dry toast. Over the next few months Banting shed forty-six pounds and felt his health restored to such a miraculous degree that he was inspired to share his story with the world.
