Before Orientalism. Kim M. Phillips

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      Food and Foodways

      The act of eating expresses profound, even intimate, acceptance. Conversely, undesirable food is met with involuntary signs of repulsion. Alimentary disgust, suggests Julia Kristeva, “is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection.”¹ Acceptance or rejection of food shows others one’s similarities to and differences from them and provides an instantly comprehensible basis for connection or distance. If you eat what I do, or if I can imagine eating your food though it is not a habit for me, we can relate. We possess commensality—we may “dine at the same table.” It is not surprising, then, that eating habits have become essential ingredients of modern ethnography and anthropology: “Like all culturally defined material substances used in the creation and maintenance of social relationships, food serves both to solidify group membership and to set groups apart.”² Observations on “foodways,” which are all the activities of a cultural group relating to their consumption of food, have become a standard part of modern travel writing, too. A growing historical literature has begun to explore premodern European food and foodways, not out of antiquarian curiosity but in recognition of their key cultural role. As Ken Albala observes, “Food preferences, being so central to identity, are perhaps even more revealing than taste in other media. If a picture speaks a thousand words, then what of the dish that savors of the homeland, or displays wealth and elegance, or smacks of simple frugality? Each of these tells a complete story about the person who eats it.”³

      Caroline Walker Bynum’s classic study of gender and food practices alerted historians, who (she suggested) had become unduly distracted by modern obsessions with sex and money, to the importance of food and eating in medieval culture. She attributes food’s centrality in medieval societies largely to the perpetual fear of dearth: “In our industrialized corner of the globe, where food supplies do not fail, we scarcely notice grain or milk, ever-present supports of life, and yearn rather after money or sexual favors as signs of power and success. … [W]e should not really be surprised to find that food was, in medieval Europe, a fundamental economic—and religious—concern.”⁴ Hunger and even famine confronted many Europeans at some point in their lives, food production and eating habits were closely tied to seasons and weather, and food and eating helped define individuals by social status as well as reinforce their sense of identity as Christians, Jews, or Muslims. Foodways deserve a central place in our analyses of medieval cultures.

      Comments on foodstuffs, dining habits, abundance or lack of produce, the role of food in religious rituals, and strange eating habits such as alleged anthropophagy are among the most common themes in medieval travel writing on distant Easts. Marco Polo’s Divisament dou monde includes mention of local produce and eating habits repetitively throughout his chapters on far eastern places, and Odoric’s Relatio shares this fascination; indeed, none of the major late medieval descriptions of eastern travel neglects the subject of food. To an extent, our authors drew on ancient Greek and Roman habits of defining foreign peoples by eating customs, such as the Rhizophagi (root-eaters), Struthophagi (ostrich-eaters), Icthiophagi (fish-eaters), Galactophagi (milk-eaters), Panphagi (anything-eaters), and Anthropophagi (human-eaters), but they brought their own new preoccupations to the theme.⁵

      When they wrote about oriental food and eating, medieval travel writers satisfied a range of desires for information and pleasure that were partly dependent on the location described but also inseparable from the motivations of the authors, amanuenses, and audiences. Travelers to Mongolia describe extreme scarcity and eating habits perceived as revolting. This information helped with the compilation of intelligence reports on a fearsome people in the context of immediate fears for political safety but also tapped into ancient prejudices about nomadic peoples. While in many respects the information was a reasonable representation of actual conditions, it also at times emphasized or exaggerated foreignness. Other writers, especially travelers to India and China, comment on sheer fertility and food abundance, taking influences from literary conventions of “Indian” plenitude as well as observation of actual conditions. Accounts of Asian foodways reveal preoccupations with famine that were especially poignant in the context of fourteenth-century European shortages, such as descriptions of the Great Khân’s provisions for famine relief in Yuan China. Readers were sated by revelations of oriental plenitude and extravagance but also by the more dubious pleasures of alien horrors, especially СКАЧАТЬ