Bread of Dreams

"Well, so far I have a Frenchman, an American, a Japanese woman, a fiction writer – and now Pietro Camporesi, who is from Bologna, an Italian communist, a literary person who was not an historian but who was trained in literary criticism and the history of literature. Camporesi identified deeply with ordinary people, with people who were oppressed, with people who were subordinated and dominated and mutilated. The history he writes here is not wholly a convincing history. In short, it extrapolates from literary sources to lived life, which is really hard to do – you can’t take Moby Dick as a template for the way in which people lived at a certain time in 19th century America, for instance. But what’s marvellous about this book is its élan, its exultation and exaltation, its plea in favour of ordinary people, and its condemnation of the manipulation of ordinary people. One of the major themes in the book is that ordinary people who have such a hard time surviving in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries are in fact poisoned in some ways by a system that forces them, for their survival, to eat inedible foods – foods which often produce, as a kind of ancillary effect, hallucinatory outcomes, trance-like states of stupor and numbness. Camporesi uses this notion of the “bread of dreams” to show that the bread that peasants ate, in particular, was often composed of this mixture of the edible and the inedible that caused people to simply become a little bit crazy. It’s in the collective dementia of people that he sees a powerful metaphor for the tyranny under which they lived. So the “bread of dreams” is not a bread of happy dreams, it’s more a bread of nightmares. It’s the bread of suffering, it’s the bread of betrayal. It’s not the bread of paternalism, it’s not the bread of nourishing princes, it’s not the bread of political legitimacy. The “bread of dreams” of Camporesi is a bread that’s meant to dull people into submission, to drug them into a kind of passivity. It’s not quite a plot or a conspiracy, but there’s that sort of inflection in Camporesi’s narrative. He has very powerful literary sources, which I think are not particularly useful for understanding the actual social history of Italians, in particular in the early modern period – but, nonetheless, it’s a book that, despite these methodological issues, is extremely evocative and offers us another way in which to try to understand food. Anyone who picks this book up will have a hard time putting it down. It’s extremely compelling. It’s well written, the translation is reasonably fluid, and I think it just gives you a very different take on what food means. In a European context, bread is the body of Christ, bread is the promise of salvation. It is, or it’s supposed to be, the staff of life – but in this instance it’s in fact the vector of illness, death, misery, melancholy and madness."