All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present

"I chose this book because I thought it would be nice for your readers but it is also another lens, this time looking at two countries – so close together and yet with vastly different traditions and ideas about what is good, what is morally good, what is ‘proper,’ as you say in English. “For me, the main shock was when I came back to the Netherlands about 8 years ago. My office, at the time, was near the equivalent of your Bond Street and I could see people eating on the street. People were eating all the time – all the time.” One interesting new dimension that Mennell adds is that we have learned, over centuries and centuries, to control our appetite. Living in scarcity means that the control is through the lack of supply. When food becomes more abundant, society, and individuals, have to learn how to deal with this continuous supply. We are still not there, obviously. Mennell introduces the idea that culture is about trying to control all kinds of appetites – also sexual appetite, the appetite to kill each other, and so on. Culture is about restraining the options in the face of all the options. This is very relevant for food. You see that England and France have done it in different ways. The French have gone much more for refined cuisine, for limiting the options in terms of what was acceptable. What is acceptable in France is not at all what is acceptable in England, but in both cases it is about learning to control one’s individual appetite. And he looks also at the history. That’s still very relevant today. By defining certain foods as delicacies. This actually feeds into what Rachel Laudan is talking about in upper class cuisine, which is all about delicacies, things you eat in small quantities. You see that very clearly in the nouvelle cuisine in France, for example. You eat small quantities, in Chinese cuisine as well, and you have these delicacies in Japan. It’s all about tiny bits. So one way of controlling appetite is by saying to yourself, ‘I’ll only allow myself one hamburger.’ The other way, the upper class way, which then trickles down, is to consider certain things delicacies of which we eat very little. In most cases, it is about controlling the impulse because our impulse is to eat. We are hardwired for that. In my book, I have some examples of the Ottoman cuisine, where they served cooked animals with live birds in their bellies. It is all part of this ritual on impulses. 20 years ago, we didn’t eat as much. Food wasn’t as available and we were not in a condition to eat all the time. There were no places where you could buy food all the time, you were at school or at work or studying. You had long days, with only intermittent moments of eating. Now people are working at home, they are working while they are moving. There’s food everywhere. Railway stations have become food stations. For me, the main shock was when I came back to the Netherlands about 8 years ago. My office, at the time, was near the equivalent of your Bond Street and I could see people eating on the street. People were eating all the time – all the time. That time, I came from Italy. Italy was just starting that fast food culture too, though not as much. But a lot of my travelling has been to countries where food is scarce. Although the most obese country in the world is Mexico. That’s also where you see fast food catching on quickly. The fast food in itself is not bad, but if you only have fast food and then also this rapid change to not moving at all… Teenagers used to play outside. They used to help their fathers building a shed. There was much more physical movement. Nowadays children move less. Their muscles are less strong, so their bones are less strong, and they have more accidents. There are more accidents breaking bones at schools during physical education than before."