The Rituals of Dinner

The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners

Margaret Visser

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781504011693
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Brauchtum & Tradition

A New York Times Notable Book: A renowned scholar explores the way we eat across cultures and throughout history. From the wild parties of ancient Greece to the strictures of an Upper East Side meal to the ritualistic feasts of cannibals, Margaret Visser takes us on a fascinating journey through the diverse practices, customs, and taboos that define how and why we prepare and consume food the way we do. With keen insights into small details we take for granted, such as the origins of forks and chopsticks or why tablecloths exist, and examinations of broader issues like the economic implications of dining etiquette, Visser scrutinizes table manners across eras and oceans, offering an intimate new understanding of eating both as a biological necessity and a cultural phenomenon. Witty and impeccably researched, The Rituals of Dinner is a captivating blend of folklore, sociology, history, and humor. In the words of the New York Times Book Review, "Read it, because you'll never look at a table knife the same way again."

1

Behaving

Table manners are as old as human society itself, the reason being that no human society can exist without them. The active sharing of food—not consuming all of the food we find on the spot, but carrying some back home and then doling it systematically out—is believed, even nowadays, to lie at the root of what makes us different from animals. Birds, dogs, and hyenas carry home food for their young until they are ready to find food for themselves, and chimpanzees may even demand and receive morsels of meat from other adults in their pack. (Chimpanzees apparently exhibit this behaviour only on the occasions when they consume meat; their main, vegetable diet they almost invariably eat where they find it, without sharing.) Only people actively, regularly, and continuously work on the portioning out of their food.

This activity presupposes and probably helped give rise to many basic human characteristics, such as kinship systems (who belongs with whom; which people eat together), language (for discussing food past, present, and future, for planning the acquisition of food, and deciding how to divide it out while preventing fights), technology (how to kill, cut, keep, and carry), and morality (what is a just slice?). The basic need of our stomachs for food continues to supply a good deal of the driving force behind all of human enterprise: we have to hunt for food, fight for it, find it, or sow it and wait for it to be ready; we then have to transport it, and distribute it before it goes rotten. It is in addition easier for us to ingest food chopped, ground, cooked, or left to soften. Civilization itself cannot begin until a food supply is assured. And where food is concerned we can never let up; appetite keeps us at it.

The active sharing out of what we are going to eat is only the beginning. We are ineradicably choosy about our food: preference enters into every mouthful we consume. We play with food, show off with it, revere and disdain it. The main rules about eating are simple: If you do not eat you die; and no matter how large your dinner, you will soon be hungry again. Precisely because we must both eat and keep on eating, human beings have poured enormous effort into making food more than itself, so that it bears manifold meanings beyond its primary purpose of physical nutrition. It becomes an immensely versatile mythic prototype (modern economists, for example, love to assure us that our longing to “consume” goods in general, like our need to eat, is insatiable), an art form, a medium for commercial exchange and social interaction, the source for an intricate panoply of distinguishing marks of class and nationhood. We have to keep eating, so we make eating the occasion for insisting on other things as well—concepts and feelings which are vital for our well-being, but many of them complex, difficult to analyse or understand, and definitely not so easy to concentrate on as food is when we are hungry. Even where actual eating is concerned, bread alone is not enough.

“Bread,” in western European languages, often means food in general; in our tradition, bread is basic. This is true even in our own day, when people eat far less bread than they used to, and when bread often comes to us from a factory, bleached, squishy, ready-cut (so much for “breaking bread”), wrapped in plastic or cellophane. Yet we still expect to have bread on hand at every meal, as background, as completion, as dependable comforter and recompense for any stress or disappointment the rest of the meal might occasion. Bread is for us a kind of successor to the motherly breast, and it has been over the centuries responsible for billions of sighs of satisfaction.

Because we are human and because, as we shall see, “cultural” behaviour appears in us to be a “biological” necessity, bread became in addition, and has remained, a deeply significant symbol, a substance honoured and sacred. We still remember that breaking bread and sharing it with friends “means” friendship itself, and also trust, pleasure, and gratitude in the sharing. Bread as a particular symbol, and food in general, becomes, in its sharing, the actual bond which unites us. The Latin word companion means literally “a person with whom we share bread”; so that every company, from actors’ guild to Multinational Steel, shares in the significance evoked in breaking bread.

Food can be shared, abstained from, used as a weapon or a proof of prestige, stolen, or given away; it is therefore a test of moral values as well. Everyone understands exactly what going without food will mean: food is the great necessity to which we all submit. We also share a similarity in stomach size—no matter how much money you have, there is only so much you can eat. So, food metaphors are numerous and powerful in moral and aesthetic discourse; we speak of “greed,” “taste,” and “thirst” in contexts that seem to have little to do with eating and drinking. Women have always been another symbol, used for the knitting together of families and tribes; they too are “given away” in marriage, shared, stolen, used to enhance status, or abstained from. But food, as the anthropologist Raymond Firth pointed out, has the enormous advantage, as a symbol, of divisibility. “Women can be shared but they cannot be divided, whereas food can be almost infinitely portioned out without loss of quality.” The remark is amusing because it is, so to speak, “close to the bone.” Somewhere at the back of our minds, carefully walled off from ordinary consideration and discourse, lies the idea of cannibalism—that human beings might become food, and eaters of each other. Violence, after all, is necessary if any organism is to ingest another. Animals are murdered to produce meat; vegetables are torn up, peeled, and chopped; most of what we eat is treated with fire; and chewing is designed remorselessly to finish what killing and cooking began. People naturally prefer that none of this should happen to them. Behind every rule of table etiquette lurks the determination of each person present to be a diner, not a dish. It is one of the chief roles of etiquette to keep the lid on the violence which the meal being eaten presupposes.

We shall begin, therefore, with a brief look at cannibalism, its nature as a taboo and as a myth, its main varieties, and a few representative contexts in which it has been found. Cannibalism (which we are schooled to think of as unthinkable and therefore barbarous behaviour) is never in fact meaningless, automatic, or free from etiquette. Indeed, it has no doubt usually been hedged about with more solemnity and consciousness than have everyday meals: eating other people can seldom, perhaps never, have been ordinary. It evokes care and clarity, and gives rise to categorizations and limits, at all times. In other words, a cannibal repast, being a social custom, is no more lacking in table manners than is any other kind of meal. It is one of the suppositions underlying this book that no society exists without manners, and specifically without rules that govern eating behaviour. Table manners are politeness where food is concerned. They comprise the ritual movements which each culture chooses as those most appropriate to handle the mightiest of necessities, the most potent of symbols, the medium through which we repeatedly express our relationships with each other. Culture has to impose itself upon natural instinct and inclination—but it invariably sets out to do so. It is the nature of human beings not to be able to leave nature alone.

THE ARTIFICIAL CANNIBAL

While Christopher Columbus was temporarily shipwrecked off the island called by the Spanish Hispaniola (now divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in December 1492, he was regaled by the Arawaks living on the island with stories about the terrible Caribs. These were natives originally of Brazil, who had left their home for the Guianas, then set out from there in their long canoes, each hollowed from the trunk of a single tree and carrying a hundred men, to conquer the islands which are now called Caribbean, after them. By about one hundred years before Columbus arrived, the Caribs had conquered the inhabitants in all the eastern Caribbean islands and dominated the entire region.

An Arawak chief on Hispaniola invited Columbus to a feast of cassava and sweet potatoes (which the Arawaks called batatas: it is the origin of our word “potatoes”). They gave him in addition “some masks with eyes and large ears of gold and other beautiful objects which they wore around their necks. [The chief] then complained about the Caribs, who captured his people and took them away to be eaten, but he was greatly cheered when the Admiral comforted him by showing him our weapons and promising to defend him with them.” The fear of the Arawaks impressed Columbus, and what he subsequently found out about the Caribs—whether or not he accurately interpreted what he was told—did nothing to mollify him. In Cuba he heard the dialect form of the word “Carib” as Caniba, and in Spanish the adjective canibal was derived from this. The word anthropophagi (Greek for “man-eaters”) was now mostly withdrawn from circulation and replaced by cannibals in the languages of Europe.

When Shakespeare created Caliban in The Tempest (1611), he made him the embodiment of the bestial aspects of humankind. Begotten of the devil upon the Algerian witch Sycorax, yet worshipping a Patagonian god, Caliban is also humanity in its primitive, “uncultured” state. (Not being European, he could roam from North Africa to South America without changing the main point that he was from “out there,” beyond the boundaries of “the civilized.”) Shakespeare’s monster does not eat human flesh, but the idea of cannibalism attaches to him nevertheless, for the poet has given him a name derived from “cannibal,” another deformation of the word “Carib”: Caliban. Being a “thing of darkness,” Caliban poetically and appropriately has cannibalism imputed to him through his name.

The very idea of people eating each other is so abhorrent to us that we usually prefer not to think about it. Cannibalism is to us massively taboo, and forbidden with far greater success than is incest. Freud pointed out, as Montaigne had before him, that it is curious we should feel so badly about eating people, when we frequently kill them and often sense only gratification for having done so. The reason derives from the way in which most human beings have categorized their experience. If you can classify people as enemies you may feel you can kill them with justice; but people are not food, and let us keep that straight. Anthropologists interested in the purely utilitarian aspects of human behaviour have also pointed out that human flesh is simply not very economical as a source of protein: human beings are the most dangerous animals a hunter could face, and in any case eating one another has to have limits or the social group would necessarily dwindle. No, other people are better taken as allies, or even as necessary evils, than as nutrients.

Just because cannibalism has been so very successfully rendered taboo, it has always been one of the major “effects” a writer can rely on when he or she reaches for some fully fledged enormity, an atrocity to make our skins crawl. For thousands of years cannibalism has seemed to us to be everything that civilization is not—which is why Homer’s hero Odysseus, in search of home, city, order, and seemliness, must meet and vanquish such creatures as the cannibal Cyclops. Cannibalism is a symbol in our culture of total confusion: a lack of morality, law, and structure; it stands for what is brutish, utterly inhuman. The idea is that, unlike cannibals, we are upright, orderly, enlightened, and generally superior. But what we might use for symbolic purposes as an embodiment of structureless confusion has nevertheless a basis in clear cold fact: cannibal societies have existed since time immemorial. As social beings, however, cannibals must inevitably have manners. Whatever we might think to the contrary, rules and regulations always govern cannibal society and cannibal behaviour.

It was suggested by W. Arens in 1979 that there never has been any such thing as deliberate cannibalism, unprovoked by a threat of starvation; that cannibalism is merely a literary device and a libel against races we wish to cast as “other” than ourselves. The Spanish, according to this theory, made up the man-eating of the Aztec; Hans Staden, who was kept by a South American tribe as a possible future cannibal victim during the sixteenth century, and who lived to describe what he had seen, was accused of simply fabricating the entire horrific story; other reports of cannibalistic behaviour were similarly disbelieved. The theory caused a useful flurry of research, examination, discovery, and controversy. The result has been to make it clear that the sources we have cannot be discounted. This rather attractive idea—that people have never really eaten each other—has had to be abandoned. We can be sure that cannibalism has been practised in Africa south of the Sahara, in Oceania, America North, Central, and South, in northern Europe, and in the ancient Mediterranean region.

Specialists in Neolithic archaeology have on a number of occasions claimed that the broken bones and cracked skulls discovered at several sites prove that our Stone Age ancestors relished human brains and sucked bone marrow when they could get at it. If they did this, they may well have eaten human flesh also. A recent find has rendered some of the best-preserved and most meticulously gathered data in support of the argument for early cannibalism so far: at a six-thousand-year-old site at Fontbrégoua, near Nice, there were bones from many butchered animals, including sheep, goats, boar, and deer. All had been routinely slaughtered, the finders say, and the bones broken to extract marrow, then unceremoniously discarded. Human bones were found among the animal ones; they had been treated in exactly the same fashion as the others. Three human adults, two children, and one person of undetermined age had almost certainly been eaten. The remaining seven or eight other human skeletons showed less certain signs of having been gnawed by other people.

We are all aware, of course, that in times of desperate hunger people are sometimes driven to eat dead companions in order to save their own lives. If there has been no actual killing of one member of the party in order to provide food for the others, and if the eating has been done with reverence for the solemnity and dire necessity of the action, then even modern people find such an emergency measure understandable and forgivable. Indeed, we emphasize the singularity of these occurrences with such fervour that we are probably underscoring for ourselves a fundamental law for our culture: that such acts could never become normal. Eating human flesh under extreme duress and treating it as an act which would never otherwise be countenanced is not what I mean here by “cannibalism.” True cannibalism is publicly approved by the society which practises it, and is at least potentially a repeated, and usually a ritual, act.

What little we know of the ideas and attitudes of cannibals suggests that they might have done shocking things according to our system of rules, but they did not behave with merely random brutish greed. Hunger was doubtless often a driving force behind the practice; excellent arguments have been made that cannibalism can arise as a society’s response to a lack of protein. But descriptions of cannibals usually insist that they surrounded the eating of human flesh with carefully prescribed ritual. The great Aztec state, for example, fought wars to provide itself with prisoners, who were eventually eaten. Estimates of the number of victims put to death and consumed annually when the Spanish arrived in Mexico in the sixteenth century (estimates made from Spanish sources, but also inferred from archaeological remains such as skull-racks) range from 15,000 to 250,000; the figures are highly uncertain, but everyone agrees that the numbers were huge. All these thousands of prisoners of war were taken, it is suggested, in order to feast the Aztec elite and also to reward soldiers who distinguished themselves in capturing human “meat.”

The argument is that, because the Aztec had never managed to domesticate large animals which they could eat, they hungered for meat, and the desire of some of them was met by killing enemies for food. (The only large animals the Aztec had domesticated—they had killed off all the wild game except that to be found at the edges of their empire—were turkeys and dogs. They bred dogs whose flesh was not too muscular and therefore edible, but these required fattening on meat themselves; and turkeys had to be fed with precious grain.) Other, smaller societies have consumed much less spectacularly large numbers of people—whether the latter were their enemies or their own kind—for similar “biological” reasons. Where food is concerned, hunger must always play its role. But we should not be so carried away by our modern pride in practicality and in our demythologizing skills that we deliberately ignore what accounts we have of actual Aztec behaviour. We can still see the magnificent stepped pyramids they built for the performance of human sacrifices to the Sun, patron of warriors. The Sun God demanded human hearts to feed him; without these, he would pale and die, darkness would cover the earth, and chaos and death would rule as they had before time began.

In 1521, sixty-two Spanish soldiers, captured in war by the Aztec, were led in procession to one of the temple-pyramids of the capital, Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City. As Aztec prisoners of war, they were to be violently killed and their beating hearts offered to the god. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier in the army of Cortés, describes the scene: “Again there was sounded the dismal drum of Huichilobos and many other shells and horns and things like trumpets and the sound of them all was terrifying, and we all looked towards the lofty Cue [temple-pyramid] where they were being sounded, and saw that our comrades whom they had captured when they defeated Cortés were being carried by force up the steps, and they were taking them to be sacrificed. When they got them up to a small square in front of the oratory, where their accursed idols are kept, we saw them place plumes on the heads of many of them and with things like fans in their hands they forced them to dance before Huichilobos, and after they had danced they immediately placed them on their backs on some rather narrow stones which had been prepared as places for sacrifice, and with stone knives they sawed open their chests and drew out their palpitating hearts and offered them to the idols that were there, and they kicked the bodies down the steps, and Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off the arms and feet and flayed the skin off the faces, and prepared it afterwards like glove leather with the beards on, and kept those for the festivals when they celebrated drunken orgies, and the flesh they ate in chilmole.”

Fray Bernardino de Sahagun described another sacrifice as follows: “One at a time they stretched them out on the sacrificial stone. Then they delivered them into the hands of six offering priests; they stretched them out upon their backs; they cut open their breasts with a wide-bladed flint knife. And they named the hearts of the captives ‘precious eagle-cactus fruit.’ They raised them in dedication to the sun, Xippilli, Quauhtleuanitl. They offered it to him; they nourished him …”

Each heart was “dehusked” from its enveloping body like a corn cob from its sheath; it was then pressed to the stone statue of the god and dropped into a temple vessel. Cutting out the heart by severing the vena cava and the aorta would produce an enormous outpouring of blood; into this one of the officiating priests inserted a straw, sucked some of it up, and ritually splashed it over the victim’s body. The heart fed the Sun, conceived as eagle energy and as voracious jaguar; the blood quenched the thirst of the earth and produced fertility. The body was then heaved gently (the adverb recurs in the different descriptions) over the edge of the pyramid’s top and fell down the steep steps to men waiting below. The falling blood red bodies of sacrificed victims were said to imitate the sun setting in the west. But to the watching Spanish the scene partook of nightmare: “Afterwards they rolled them over; they bounced them down. They came breaking to pieces; they came head over heels; they each came headfirst, they came turning over. Thus they reached the terrace at the base of the pyramid.”

The head of each was cut from the body and taken to a rack, to be displayed in another part of the temple complex, which to Spanish eyes was a “plaza.” There in serried rows the heads rotted in the heat, the stench, and the flies, till only skulls were left. “I remember that in the plaza where some of their oratories stood there were piles of human skulls so regularly arranged that one could ...