MUCH DEPENDS on DINNER

MARGARET VISSER

Harper Perennial
Harper Collins Publishers 
MUCH DEPENDS ON DINNER Copyright  1986 by Margaret Visser. All rights
reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without prior written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in reviews. For information address Harper Collins
Publishers Ltd, Suite 2900, 55 Avenue Road, Toronto, Canada M5R 5L2

First published by McClelland and Stewart: 1986
First Harper Perennial edition: 1992

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Visser, Margaret, 1946
Much depends on dinner

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-00-637759-9

1. Food habits--Social aspects. 2. Food--Social aspects. 3. Food--
History. 4. Food--FoLldore. I. Title.

GT2855.V57 1992 641 C92-093092-1

92 93 94 95 96 GP 5 4 3 2 1

Illustrations by Mary Firth

Contents

What Shall We Have for Dinner? 11
ONE Corn: Our Mother, Our Life 22
TWO Salt: The Edible Rock 56
THREE Butter--and Something "Just as Good" 83
FOUR Chicken: From Jungle Fowl to Patties 115
FIVE Rice: The Tyrant with a Soul 155
SIX Lettuce: The Vicissitudes of Salad 162
SEVEN Olive Oil: A Tree and its Fruits 224
EIGHT Lemon Juice: A Sour Note 256
NINE Ice Cream: Cold Comfort 285
References 323
Index 338
FOR MY PARENTS

John and Margaret Barclay Lloyd
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.
BYRON Don Juan

SPECIAL THANKS are for Colin, Emily, and Joan, and for Pat
Kennedy, Emmet Robbins, Nada Conic, Norma Rowen, and Alan Koval Pierre
Berton encouraged me to write this book when I had just begun work on
it, and so did all the staff of CBC Radio's Morningside, especially Don
Harron, Richard Handler, and Peter zowski. Vesna Vukov kindly undertook
to check the chemistry sections. I would also like to thank my editors,
Ramsay Derry and Sarah Reid, and Jan Walter at McClelland and Stewart.
What Shell We Have for Dinner?

THE EXTENT TO WHICH we take everyday objects for granted is
the precise extent to which they govern and inform our lives. The
knee-high chair, the four-pronged fork, the corridor or hallway which
enables us to walk into a room without having to pass through another
room to do so: these determine (among other things) how and where we
sit down, the manner in which we approach our food, and the
thoroughness with which we live separately from others and respect the
privacy and autonomy of their lives. None of these objects is nec-
essary; many cultures eschew them altogether, and there was a time when
our own ancestors lived very happily without them. We invented them,
however, to fill needs: chairs, forks, and hallways were required by
the sort of people we have become; having them now prevents us from
being different.
The shape of chairs has kept changing over the centuries, and so have
the number of prongs in and the general shape of forks, as well as the
12 

width, length, and decoration of corridors. These "accidents" or forms
of things are a kind of language, speaking the logos of our culture,
and they are a record of its life history. One of the great eye-openers
of the twentieth century (like every discovery it springs from our
need) is the realization that the use of humble everyday objects is not
only habitual- which is to say that we cannot do without them- but that
these things are "ordinary" in the earliest and fullest sense of the
word also: they embody our mostly unspoken assumptions, and they both
order our culture and determine its direction.
Food is "everyday" - it has to be, or we would not survive for long.
But food is never just something to eat. It is something to find or
hunt or cultivate first of all; for most of human history we have spent
a much longer portion of our lives worrying about food, and plotting,
working, and fighting to obtain it, than we have in any other pursuit.
As soon as we can count on a food supply (and so take food for
granted), and not a moment sooner, we start to civilize ourselves.
Civilization entails shaping, regulating, constraining, and dramatizing
ourselves; we echo the preferences and the principles of our culture in
the way we treat our food. An elaborate frozen dessert moulded into the
shape of a ruined classical temple can be read as one vivid expression
of a society's view of itself and its ideals; so can a round ground
hamburger patty between two circular buns. Food - what is chosen from
the possibilities available, how it is presented, how it is eaten, with
whom and when, and how much time is allotted to cooking and eating it-
is one of the means by which a society creates itself and acts out its
aims and fantasies. Changing (or unchanging) food choices and
presentations are part of every society's tradition and character. Food
shapes us and expresses us even more definitively than our furniture or
houses or utensils do.
I think this realization first dawned on me (it is a common discovery
in our day) while I was chopping onions for sauce soubise, a recipe
which my husband and I were carefully following from Elizabeth David's
French Count's Cooking, one day about fifteen years ago. Chopping
onions is not an occupation which favours dreaming. Perhaps it was
boredom or annoyance or simply that when you chop onions you had better
keep your mind alert, and my concentration spilled over, but I started
wondering about onions. Every time anything savoury was "cuisine' " it
seemed to require onions. They smelled strongly and stung my eyes
(Why?), some were quite hard to peel and others easy (Why?), others
again were red (What made them so? Where did they come

13

from?). I had a dim memory that someone had said (Who?) that onions
were the chief sustenance of the people who built the Pyramids (Was it
true? Were they the same onions?). I knew that onions were used in
various ways in folk medicine (What ways, and were they efficacious?).
The next day I was at the library, supposed, I remember, to be doing
research for an essay on the causes and results of the Battle of
Arginousai, as background to the Frogs of Aristophanes. Stuck for
inspiration, and abstractedly flipping through the catalogue of what
happens to be the largest library in Canada, I looked under the
subject-heading, "Onions." There were three books listed on onions: T.
Greiner, The New Onion Culture (1911); H. H. Laughlin, Duration of the
Several Mitotic Stages in the Dividing Root-Tip Cells of the Common
Onion (1919); and H. A. Jones and L. K. Mann, Onions and Their Allies
(1963). All three were on the other side of the campus, in the Science
and Medicine Library: it had clearly been decided that onions could in
no way interest someone in "arts" or in "social sciences." (I have just
checked the catalogue again, and these are still the University of
Toronto Library's entire holdings of books on onions.)
A week later I walked across the campus and looked at Onions and Their
Allies. (I had doubtless eaten onions several times since the first
glance through the catalogue; presumably preparing those dinners jogged
my memory.) The work, with its pleasantly punning title, is an
excellent and useful one, all about breeding, planting, storing and
classifying not only onions but also garlic, leeks, chives and "other
alliums." There was, in 1963, no agreement among scientists about how
onions make eyes weep. (During the following decade the complex
chemistry of this process was to be explored and explained to those
whose knowledge of chemistry equips them to understand the
explanation.) There is in Onions and Their Allies some information, but
much less than I wanted, about the great "alliaceous odour." Nothing is
said about the various lusts for and prejudices against the eating of
onions in our, or in any other, culture. The history and social
mythology of onions takes up just three pages of the second chapter of
the book. It includes a couple of paragraphs each on ancient Egypt, on
India, and on Greek herbalists.
I was soon to find that in order to answer the questions I had about
onions, and to clear up all the uncertainties which would subsequently
arise, I would have to search in at least eleven different collections
of books and read articles in scientific periodicals, journals of
anthropology, sociology, and folldore, histories of religion,
culinary-historical
14 

journals, business and trade magazines, and so on. The problem with my
essay on the battle of Arginousai
~-~oechon of the library, in a day or two and with relatively
~t, I had a pad full of notes and a bibliography of books and in
French, Italian, German, and English going back nearly two cs, which
could have kept a conscientious scholar occupied for years. I am not
one of those who despise the study of ancient battles, but I am a child
of the twentieth century and surely I had a right to know at least as
much about the history of a troublesome but eternally useful vegetable
which I personally chopped and fried several times a week? (The French
call frying onions "making them come back": I must find out why.)
By the time I was ready to write this book, after years of enjoyment
digging for answers to my questions about food and other "ordinary"
things, it had become obvious to me how the material, in all its motley
variety, should be organized. I would describe a meal, devoting a
chapter to each ingredient on the menu. The meal I have chosen is
almost as simple and as universally recognizable as could be - norhing
"gourmet" about it.
HORS D OEWRES: Corn with salt and butter ENTREE       Chicken with rice

SALAD                                        Lettuce with olive oil and
lemon juice
DESSERT       Icecream

It will be quickly observed that I have left out bread, cheese, wine or
beer, and coffee or tea, milk, and sugar. I have allowed no sauce for
the chicken and rice, hoping that my guests would be satisfied with
more butter, salt, and perhaps the chicken drippings. I could also have
included the wildly improbable saga of pepper. Chapters on the minimal
"extras" and the drinks I have mentioned would have produced a book
more than twice the size of this one. Each food, of course, deserves
book-length treatment. But even concentrating the material into a
single chapter per ingredient as I have done, a meal by Escoffier or
Careme, or just a modern wedding banquet or Christmas dinner, would
require many volumes to do it justice.
A meal is an artistic social construct, ordering the foodstuffs which
comprise it into a complex dramatic whole, as a play organizes actions
and words into component parts such as acts, scenes, speeches, dia-
logues, entrances, and exits, all in the sequences designed for them.
15

However humble it may be, a meal has a definite plot, the intention of
which is to intrigue, stimulate, and satisfy. Let us briefly analyse
the simple dinner before us.
Firstly, it is a dinner, not a snack or a series of tidbits to be
sampled between drinks. It is home-cooking too, for invited guests:
there are no multiple choices such as a restaurant would normally
offer. It has a messy, dexterity-demanding prologue, a hot central
episode, and a dessert which, served in a dish instead of a cone (we do
not normally eat ice cream in cones at home), is rich and formal enough
fittingly to close a dinner. "The true elements of the idea" of a
dinner, De Quincey wrote in "The Casuistry of Roman Meals," are That
dinner is that meal, no matter when taken, which is the principal meal;
i.e., the meal on which the day's support is thrown. 2. That it is
therefore the meal of hospitality. 3. That it is the meal (with
reference to both Nos. I and 2) in which animal food predominates. 4.
That it is that meal which, upon a necessity arising for the abolition
of all but one, would naturally offer itself as that one."
I have chosen a meal which represents the very least I could offer
guests who are not intimate friends, that easily-contented group who
claim that they would be prepared even to accept what we call "pot
luck." This meal, as politeness to friends who are still relative
strangers demands, is pre-planned and makes certain gestures towards
decorum. Because it is dinner, those eating it will refrain from other
pursuits while it is in progress. No one will knit, watch television,
or read a newspaper. The possibility of physical violence of any sort
will not even cross anyone's mind; and neither will such rudeness as
leaving the table before absolutely everyone has finished eating and
all agree to rise. During the meal everyone will adhere to a code of
behavioural ethics called "table manners" - a set of rules far too
complex to discuss in detail here.
The ingredients which make up our dinner have been chosen for their
acceptability to people in as many different cultures as possible. The
meal itself, nevertheless, has a broadly British structure- although
this is a modern, that is, abbreviated, version of it. As David Pocock
reports in his introduction to Arnold Palmer's book Moveable Feasts, a
British dinner in the 1890S might ideally have offered: hors d'oeuvres,
soup, fish, entree, joint, game, sweets and savouries. A modern English
hotel typically serves grapefruit or soup, chicken or meat, potatoes or
rice, vegetables (often two), and stewed fruit or ice cream or pudding
16 

or melon. Our menu clearly keeps to the pattern of the English hotel
meal, even though the latter is designed to count as a substantial and
fairly ceremonial affair. A recent conference luncheon to which I was
invited in Canada offered the following menu: balls of fruit (melon
mostly) in a tall coupe, an entree consisting of chicken, rice, and two
vegetables (broccoli and small carrots) all on one plate, with a thin
noncoating gravy, and baked Alaska. The construct is palpably a
relative of the one I offer here, although there are differences.
Corn is an American vegetable, but eating it at the meal's beginning is
more common in England than in the States or Canada. A liking for corn
devoured "straight," and especially right off the cob, is thought of in
Europe as an Anglo-Saxon idiosyncrasy. The French, for example, still
have a tendency to class corn as mainly chicken-feed; the Italians like
it ground into something resembling the porridges which were the staple
of the ancient Romans. The corn on our menu plays the role of a first
course of spaghetti in an Italian dinner: it is filling, so that hunger
can be assuaged before we reach the heights represented by the entree;
our appreciation then will depend on more complex responses than simple
famished desire. Both corn and spaghetti require dexterity in the
eating: many small things have to be dealt with expeditiously. (The
fruit shaped into multi-coloured balls at the conference meal I
attended, or artichokes requiring to be stripped leaf by leaf and
dipped in sauce, are both intended to lift the spirits as well as to
whet the appetite.) Corn or spaghetti can provide a stimulating,
vivacious, and amusing overture - on condition that the guests are not
solemn with hunger, in which case the corn or the spaghetti can equally
well be consumed with fierce and silent concentration. (Our meal being,
as we shall see, rather on the genteel side, guests in our culture
would probably pretend not to be too hungry, even if they were. We
prefer, as De Quincey's essay says, "to throw the grace of intellectual
enjoyment over an animal necessity.")
Typically Anglo-Saxon, of course, is the butter served with the corn;
the dairy theme in our meal will be repeated with the cooking medium
for the chicken, and reach its final crescendo in the ice cream. I have
removed the traditional two vegetables from the centrepiece and placed
them before it (the corn) and after it (the salad). Rice is a starchy
staple, and as such does not, in Anglo-Saxon meals, or in Germanic and
northern European meals generally, count as a vegetable; rice or
potatoes are more important than a vegetable, and an all but
indispensable ad
17

junct to meat. My chicken might be roasted or fried, depending on how
formal the occasion is to be: roasted is far more prestigious than
fried.
The English (and hence the American) tradition with roasts is still to
bring in the whole bird or joint and carve it up in front of the guests
- an extraordinarily old-fashioned procedure. Ever since the Middle
Ages most European cuisines have been moving steadily away from such
confrontations with the cutting of carcasses; the kitchen is in most
cultures the place for such indelicacies, while the guests are
protected by being seated safely in the dining-room. Even in
Anglo-Saxon countries, however, modern capitulations to smaller joints,
to convenience, and to the custom in hotels, often result in the less
grand carving of a joint or a bird into pieces in the kitchen. The meat
is then served, like fried portions, already on the plates. Large
joints are less popular than they used to be because families are
smaller; added to which, North Americans in particular tend to classify
"left-overs" with garbage, so that remainders of meat are wasteful. The
result has been that joints and whole birds (huge turkeys, for example)
have become especially festive in connotation: they are for relatively
rare large gatherings, when almost all the meat will probably be
consumed at a sitting. (A whole aspect of household management-one
hesitates to call it a cuisinehas in this process been largely
eclipsed: that of What to Do with LeftOvers, how to present them at
another meal in a form which the family will accept.)
Whether roasted or fried, my chicken and its accompaniment of rice
without gravy would sit clearly differentiated on the plate. This is
very American in outlook: it is totally unlike, for example, the famous
poulet basquais, where the rice can be cooked in the same pot as the
chicken, together with tomatoes, onions, garlic, sausages, and paprika,
and the whole is served with considerable overlap among ingredients.
North Americans usually hate being served several foods mixed together,
unless they have consciously chosen to eat an "ethnic" dish. Many will
actually eat all of each portion of meat and vegetables one after the
other, so keeping the constituents even more obsessively separate,
although everything is to be found on the same plate. Some culinary
sociologists attribute this to the famous "puritanical" heritage of
North America: the desire to be clean and clear. It is a relatively
modern taste, however, depending as it does on the household's
possessing lots of pots and pans. Huckleberry Finn complained because
the widow who adopted
18 

him (puritanical as she was) cooked everything by itself: "In a barrel
of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice
kind of swaps around, and the things go better." Another frequently ex-
pressed desire is to "know what it is I am eating." This must have some
roots in English tradition: British cuisine has always despised and re-
jected frivolous, dishonest, or merely confused Continental concoc-
tions; the ideal has always been "the best ingredients, undisguised."
My lettuce salad is placed where the French would put it- after the
main course and before the dessert. (Utterly un-French, of course, is
my omission of cheese.) Americans traditionally like salad to open a
meal; they might even place the salad on the same dish as the chicken
and rice (on the "everything on one platter" principle). But in this
matter, especially given the overture of corn, Americans might let the
lettuce in this position pass. The rationale for it is to provide a
pause, to refresh the palate before we launch into the dessert, to get
our systems used, after the hot central course, to things at room
temperature before we take on something frozen. The ice cream is
marvellously modern: a technological feat, rich, formal, and semi-solid
in its dish, something which most people in our culture like, but which
the host is free either to buy ready-made (this is perfectly
acceptable, especially if the host has an absorbing and time-consuming,
therefore "important" job) or grandiloquently to make from scratch. In
middle-class circles few gifts are as generous or as complimentary
these days as the taking, on one's friends' behalf, of time and
culinary trouble.
Let us consider the structure of our meal in a little more detail. The
core of it is the comfortably traditional schema, M + S + 2V Meat,
Staple, and Two Vegetables. The Meat and Staple are definitely the
centre of attraction, the whole point of the meal, the married couple,
as it were, at the wedding. The two vegetables (the English like
referring to them with cosy familiarity as "two veg") resemble
bridesmaids; theirs is a decorative but wholly subordinate and
supporting role. This structural principle is foreshadowed by the twin
attendants upon the corn (salt and melting butter) and taken up again
with the double ornamentation of the salad (more seasoning plus oil and
lemon dressing). Subordination, as in the clauses of an English
sentence, is still one of our cultural trademarks, in spite of a new
tendency to display, in part in order to save time, everything at once
on one platter- a whole meal, even, on one Tv-dinner tray or airplane
dinner package. Equality, plurality, and choice still have to battle
with hierarchies of size and Volume. 
19

Our meal requires several culinary techniques in its creation, for we
are not only complex but also competent. We have employed boiling,
roasting or frying, tossing raw in a prepared dressing, and freezing.
In our meal we use teeth and hands, followed by napkins and perhaps
fingerbowls to clean ourselves up (for the corn), a knife for cutting,
together with a fork to spear the meat and hold it still (the chicken),
the fork held supine, prongs curving up and the knife as a sweeper (the
rice), the fork with prongs piercing as primary implement (the salad),
and the smooth and comforting, infantile spoon (the ice cream). The use
of all these implements, each in the right way at the right time, is
something we have had drummed into us since childhood until it has
become utterly effortless: a valuable opportunity for a demonstration
that we have been Well Brought Up, and are therefore the kind of people
who will unquestionably Do.
Again, we should be aware that our meal is almost totally female in
connotation. Corn is the American Indian "mother and nourisher";
chicken (pale meat, no red blood, and little fat in evidence) is for us
a typically "female" choice; rice, a delicate grain-especially when it
is "fluffy," as we like it-white like chicken, and in its mythical
origins (though not in our culture) a girl-child; lettuce is light and
unfattening, but also cold, green, and (therefore) female; lemons
nippled, olive oil virgin, ice cream cold, milky, and served in
definitely womanly, rounded shapes. Salt is the one exception, but even
it is neuter and not masculine; butter from cream is again female.
Chicken, furthermore, is traditionally festive in overtone, in spite of
everything modern factory farming has achieved in making the bird cheap
and constantly available. Barbara Pym's novels are full of sly insights
into culinary anthropology; in them, "a bird" is for when clergymen are
invited for dinner: elevated, not too fleshly, and with a skin
"gold-embroidered like a chasuble," as Proust put it. Nowadays chicken
and salad are both "chic" for not being faKening and ice cream has
prestige because it is luxurious yet democratic and triumphantly
modern. Dessert ends the meal on a "high" note, for, notwithstanding
our modernity, we are Romantics still, determined to end our works of
art with a climax, in spite of the classical centrality of the main
course.
My exceedingly simple yet slightly pretentious meal, then, can mean for
us a good many things, and entertain us like a well-constructed play in
which the partakers are both actors and audience. But equally im-
portantly for my purposes, the construction of a meal requires close
20 

attention to variety and contrast among the materials used. All the
continents on earth and a good many countries are represented in the
ingredients for this particular dinner, and all the types of food:
vegetables; staples; meat; raw leaves; fruit; milk and sweetness;
vegetable oil; butter, the dairy essence; and the strange, worrisome
mineral, salt. (I chose lemon, not vinegar, for my salad dressing for
several reasons: I usually prefer it and lemon goes well with chicken;
vinegar entails a discussion of wine, which is far too large a subject
to undertake in the space available; and finally, I needed a fruit to
make my panoply of foods reasonably complete.) The subject matter has
also been chosen because it provides appropriate contexts in which to
discuss modern social and institutional phenomena such as fast foods,
supermarkets, advertising strategies, food fads, and the mythologies on
which they batten. Each of the foodstuffs I have chosen has a weird,
passionate, often savage history of its own; each has dragged the human
race in its wake, constrained us, enticed us, harried, and goaded us in
its own particular fashion.
These nine foods among them require the consideration of mighty
problems which especially afflict the modern world. Some of these are:
the dangers and the triumphs of crop uniformity and genetic engi-
neering; the salting and pollution of the desperately precious fertile
areas of the earth; the destruction of cultural tradition and the
replacement of it by - what else? - replaceability; democratization
being turned into an enemy of culinary excellence; farm mechanization
and the loss of human livelihoods; cheap meat versus animal rights;
food irradiation, additives, antibiotics, herbicides and pesticides,
and the angry distrust they can arouse in us. When I began this book I
meant it to be primarily amusing; often, however, I wrote it in outrage
and in fear.
Boredom is the twentieth century's version of social miasma; we bear in
addition, of course, our speciality in natural miasma, which is pol-
lution. Boredom arises from the loss of meaning, which in turn comes in
part from a failure of religio or connectedness with one another and
with our past. This book is a modest plea for the realization that ab-
solutely nothing is intrinsically boring, least of all the everyday,
ordinary things. These, today, are after all what even we are prepared
to admit we have in common. We have recently discovered in ourselves a
determination to consider nothing to be beneath consideration, and a
willingness to question passionately matters which used to be thought
too basic for words. I think the reason for this is that we are
fighting
21

back with an altogether healthy urge to recapture ancient but pitifully
neglected, thoroughly human responses such as participatory attention,
receptivity, and appreciation. We have learned well the lessons about
the stupidities of superstition, of misplaced, because ignorant,
wonder. It is time now to think about whether we have leaped from the
trivial to the vacant. Boredom is an irritable condition, and an
exceedingly dangerous one when it is accompanied by enormous
destructive power. "The old warnings," W. H. Auden wrote,

still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to
an ugly finish, Irreverence
is a greater oaf than Superstition.
22

CHAPTER ONE

Corn: our Mother, our Life

A North-AMERICAN SUPERMARKET is market place, temple, pal-
ace, and parade all rolled into one. It is both the expression and the
symbol of the goals and the means of North American civilization,
physically embodying the culture's yearnings for size, availability,
freedom of choice, uniformity, variety, abundance, convenience,
cleanliness, speed, and the reduction of hierarchy to quantity: money
and amount. It both tempts and constrains us: lets us loose inside but
controls and defines us even as it exacts its toll at the exit. Buying
a bag full of groceries at a North American supermarket is as essential
for a traveller attempting to understand this culture as taking an
evening stroll would be in Spain or Italy, or eating in a popular
restaurant in France.
The driving wheel of the supermarket is not always visible: it is not
the business of a driving wheel to be ostentatious. But it is there-
everywhere. It is American corn, or maize. You cannot buy anything at
all in a North American supermarket which has been untouched by

23

corn, with the occasional and single exception of fresh fish- and even
that has almost certainly been delivered to the store in cartons or
wrappings which are partially created out of corn. Meat is largely
corn. So is milk: American livestock and poultry is fed and fattened on
corn and cornstalks. Frozen meat and fish has a light corn starch
coating on it to prevent excessive drying. The brown and golden
colouring which constitutes the visual appeal of many soft drinks and
puddings comes from corn. All canned foods are bathed in liquid
containing corn. Every carton, every wrapping, every plastic container
depends on corn products - indeed all modern paper and cardboard, with
the exception of newspaper and tissue, is coated in corn.
One primary product of the maize plant is corn oil, which is not only a
cooking fat but is important in margarine (butter, remember, is also
corn). Corn oil is an essential ingredient in soap, in insecticides
(all vegetables and fruits in a supermarket have been treated with
insecticides), and of course in such factory-made products as
mayonnaise and salad dressings. The taste-bud sensitizer, monosodium
glutamate or MSG is commonly made of corn protein.
Corn syrup - viscous, cheap, not too sweet - is the very basis of
candy, ketchup, and commercial ice cream. It is used in processed
meats, condensed milk, soft drinks, many modern beers, gin, and vodka.
It even goes into the purple marks stamped on meat and other foods.
Corn syrup provides body where "body" is lacking, in sauces and soups
for instance (the trade says it adds "mouth-feel"). It prevents
crystallization and discolouring; it makes foods hold their shape,
prevents ingredients from separating, and stabilizes moisture content.
It is extremely useful when long shelf-life is the goal.
Corn starch is to be found in baby foods, jams, pickles, vinegar,
yeast. It serves as a carrier for the bubbling agents in baking powder;
is mixed in with table salt, sugar (especially icing sugar), and many
instant coffees in order to promote easy pouring. It is essential in
anything dehydrated, such as milk (already corn, of course) or instant
potato flakes. Corn starch is white, odourless, tasteless, and easily
moulded. It is the invisible coating and the universal neutral carrier
for the active ingredients in thousands of products, from headache
tablets, toothpastes, and cosmetics to detergents, dog food, match
heads, and charcoal briquettes.
All textiles, all leathers are covered in corn. Corn is used when
making things stick (adhesives all contain corn) - and also whenever it
is necessary that things should not stick: candy is dusted or coated
with corn,
24 

all kinds of metal and plastic moulds use corn. North Americans eat
only one-tenth of the corn their countries produce, but that tenth
amounts to one and a third kilograms (3 Lb.) of corn - in milk,
poultry, cheese, meat, butter, and the rest - per person per day.
The supermarket does not by any means represent all the uses of corn in
our culture. If you live in North America - and even very possibly if
you do not - the house you live in and the furniture in it, the car you
drive, even the road you drive on, all depend for their very existence
on corn. Modern corn production "grew up" with the industrial and
technological revolutions, and the makers of those revolutions were
often North Americans. They turned their problem-solving attention to
the most readily available raw materials and made whatever they wanted
to make - antibiotics or deep-drilling oil-well mud or ceramic
spark-plug insulators or embalming fluids - out of the material to
hand. And that material was the hardy and obliging fruit of the grass
which the Indians called mais.
In English, the word corn denotes the staple grain of a country. Wheat
is "corn" to the people of a country where wheaten bread is the staple.
Oats is "corn" to people who eat oats; rye is "corn" if the staple is
rye. When Europeans arrived in America they saw that, for the Indians,
maize was the basic food, so the English-speaking newcomers called it
"Indian corn." We continue in North America to recognize the primacy of
maize in our culture by calling it "corn." In Europe it is called by
some form of the Indian word "mais," and it is differentiated from
wheat, England's "corn," by being called in England "corn on the cob."
The word maize, in American usage, refers to the plant as it was when
the Indians grew it, before the white men arrived in America - or it is
used as a generic, more "botanical" term. American Indians, in their
many different languages, always spoke of corn as "Our Mother," "Our
Life," "She Who Sustains Us."
The Indians are said - by themselves and by the first outsiders who
encountered them - to have lived and died by corn. They measured out
their lives by it, used it to build shelters and fences, spent more of
their working days at producing it than at any other pursuit, wore it
and decorated their bodies with it, ate it as their most substantial
food, reverenced it, and offered it to the gods. Mais was omnipresent
for them - and now it is every bit as omnipresent in North American
life.
Without corn, North America- and most particularly modern, tech-
nological North America-is inconceivable. Perhaps the relentlessly
25

common-sensical, practical, handy American temperament would have
created its lifestyle out of something else if corn had not existed:
out
of rice perhaps, or potatoes, or even from some other totally unpro-
moted and therefore "uninteresting" plant. But corn was there, and so
corn both founded and spearheaded the triumphant expansion of mod-
ern technology. By the same token, the very golden grains which con-
stitute the riches of North America contain within themselves one of
the acutest dangers we face: a peril diabolically wedded to our
weakness.

HOW THE CORN PLaNT WORKS

Maize is a giant grass which bears unusually large seed, even for a
giant. Each corn kernel is really a fruit with an oily germ or seed
surrounded by its starchy nutrients and enclosed in a skin or hull. The
plant is, in fact, a genus all to itself and is the only species in its
genus. Its botanical name is Zea mais: zeia means "grain" in Greek, and
the Haitian Indian term mais may be translated as "the stuff of life."
The Indians observed that different types of corn could cross and
produce offspring with characteristics derived from both parents. They
believed that the plants' roots mingled underground to produce this
effect, and this theory was not proved wrong until 1724, when Judge
Paul Dudley of Massachusetts noticed that changes took place in corn
when different types were separated by a river, but not when they were
separated by a high fence. The "crossing" must therefore take place in
the air and not underground. In 1694 the German botanist Camerarius had
first startled the world with the news that plants have a sex-life. But
James Logan, who worked as an administrator for the Province of
Pennsylvania under William Penn, presented in 1727 the first theories
about how sex worked in the corn plant. The silks, which hang like
bunches of hair from the cobs, are the female element. The male maize
flowers are borne on the tassel, and they produce the pollen, 25
million grains per tassel. When the pollen is ripe it is shed and
drifts in the wind over the cornfield.
Each time a pollen grain falls on the sticky thread of a corn silk,
either on its own plant or on another, a kernel is conceived. The silk
develops a tube, and the pollen grain travels through the tube to the
embryo at the root of the silk in the cob. There the baby corn kernel
takes shape, tightly anchored by a short stem to its place amongst its
26 

rows of siblings. Every pollen grain contains two nuclei - one for the
oil-germ and one for the starch-endosperm in the kernel. The corn plant
adjusts the length of its own cobs according to the likelihood of the
amount of grain it will be called upon to house. The factors which the
plant mysteriously takes into account include the density of the plant
population in a field, weed competition, moisture, the amount of nu-
trients it is getting, and the availability of light.
The corn cob, together with its progeny, plumps and ripens, and as it
does so the silks change colour, from pale greenish white to deep red
to brown, so that an expert picker knows just what stage the kernels
have reached by the colour of the silks. When the kernels are fully
ripe the silks turn into a stiff black fuzz. Corn can be picked and
used or eaten at many different stages, and is often preferred when
immature. This adds inestimable value to the plant, as long as modern
machinery does not dominate the harvest, for it means that the fruit of
a single sowing of corn plants can be used over a long period, some
ears first as a tender boiled vegetable, some later for roasting, then
some for grinding, and some later still as hard feed-grain for animals.
When sweet corn is picked for boiling, it must be rushed at once to the
pot; purists claim that you should have the water ready boiling before
you go out to pick your corn, so that there will be the least delay
possible before the heat seizes the sugar in the kernels. The sweetness
of sweet corn begins to turn to starch and lose its flavour the moment
ù the cob is snapped from its stalk. Thus sweet corn bought several
days old in a shop falls enormously short of its potential flavour. For
once the frozen product, if it has been processed correctly, may be
gastronomically preferable: modern freezing installations are built as
close as possible to the field. The corn is picked, husked, and
stripped of its kernels in the field, and should be rushed to the
freezer, where the natural process which substitutes starch for sugar
is instantly shut off.
The main varieties of maize are popcorn, sweet corn, dent corn, flint
corn, and flour corn. Popcorn and flint corn have very hard hulls. When
popcorn is heated, the starch inside the skin of the kernel fills with
steam until it bursts: steam leaks out of the skins of other types of
corn because their hulls are less horny. Popcorn's beautiful cloud and
butterfly shapes were greatly prized by the Indians who used them for
necklaces and ornaments, just as we string them to decorate Christmas
trees today. Many scientists believe that the accidental popping of
hard grain in a fire might have first revealed to man the edibility of
cereals.
27

Flint corn, especially Tropical Flint, dominated world markets until
the 1920S: flint corn is hardy and resistant to tropical insects, long-
lasting and delicious even when eaten daily: the Indians generally
liked it best of all types, and most Africans still do. Flour corn is
grown little outside of South and Central America, where it is still
prized for the ease with which it may be ground by hand. The
corn-grinding metate stone and the hand-held stone called a mano are
common sights all over South America where they are most often placed
outside houses, so that the women can work at corn grinding while
chatting with their neighbours.
The giant crop among corns all over the world today is dent. It is
named after the dimple in the top edge of every kernel, which is formed
because of the shrinkage of the soft starch in the endosperm. Dent corn
is sweet and starchy - the most prized characteristics for the uses of
our civilization. It used to be thought of by the Indians as one of the
prime symbols of the female, and it proclaimed the maternal aspects of
the divine corn plant.
Sweet corn - the type which we are having to open our meal - must be
cooked or frozen immediately. With the exception of this one variety,
however, corn which has been successfully dried and correctly stored is
one of the longest-lasting foodstuffs known. Ten-year-old corn kernels
will germinate. Archaeologists endlessly search for the origins and the
time-scale for the development of corn; at one dig made in the pursuit
of more knowledge about the history of corn, thousand-year-old corn
kernels were uncovered. A donkey happened on the find, and thought it
appetizing enough to eat. It has also been found that one-thousand-
year-old popcorn can still be successfully popped.
One of corn's main attractions for man has always been its adaptability
to storage: corn is the ultimate "long shelf-life" food. Many North
American Indian bands kept stocks of kernels under earth-mounds for the
winters and times of war, and these fed the earliest European settlers
who came upon such hoards during their first cruel winter in 1620-21 It
is still customary in Zambia and other maize-growing countries in
Africa to save dried corn-kernels underground in covered pits. And as I
have mentioned, today corn is the precious material by which modern
technology keeps a myriad of other products edible through thousands of
miles of travel and months, even years, of storage before they are
bought.
The corn cob and its seed is covered entirely with a durable husk.
28 

This is another convenience for man: the green envelope makes the cob
easy to harvest, easy to feed to livestock, easy to transport, easy to
store. It protects the grain from damage during mechanical harvesting.
The corn cob is the original packaged food- again apparently made to
suit modern demands.
All this is so miraculous that there has got to be a hitch - and there
is. Corn, because of its tight, strong, all-enveloping husk, cannot
seed itself. Even if a cob fell to the ground freed from its husk, the
resulting seedlings would choke each other because they are so closely
set, and so tightly bound to the cob. In fact, if man ceased to take a
hand by unwrapping the cob, plucking the seed, and planting it out, Zea
maize would become extinct.
Man depends on the corn he has helped to create, but the corn also
depends on him. It depends on him for its nutrients; corn is one of the
most demanding of food plants in this respect. Corn needs a great deal
of water: 370 kilograms of water for each kilogram of dry fodder; 537
litres of water per litre of grain harvested and stripped from the
cobs. (That is 4,300 Imperial gallons of water per bushel of grain for
those of us whose minds still function in Imperial measurements.) It
takes five to twelve years for soil which has once borne maize to
return to its former fertility by natural means. When corn is
repeatedly sown on one spot, the land has to be artificially
fertilized, and this means enormous expenditures of energy and money
for the machines, the nutrient chemicals, and their transport. The
added fertilizers mean that modern farmers need not leave the land to
recover, and can do without rotation of crops. But the fertilizers
encourage weeds as well as corn, so that weed-killers have to be
assiduously applied.
In a healthy, weed-cleared, and fertilized cornfield, the plants grow
extremely quickly. Growth slows down during the day and speeds up in
the evening. Under ideal conditions a day's growth can reach eleven and
a half centimeters (4 1/2 inches). There are hundreds of accounts of
American farmers who say they have heard their corn growing. On a warm
windless evening during the peak growing time you can sit in a
cornfield and hear the earth and the vegetable kingdom at work: a
gentle stroke and rasp of leaves unfurling and sweeping along stalk and
leaf edge: the hum of the driving wheel of North American civilization.
29
THE ORIGINS OF CORN

More is known about corn, its demands and its enemies, how it pro-
pagates itself and how it grows, than about any other plant on earth.
Yet the importance of this vegetable is so enormous that research into
corn is being pursued more intensely today than ever. Corn is now known
to have originated in Central America. But one great mystery remains:
what did the American Indians do to produce corn in the first place?
Nothing like this man-sized plant with its huge cobs and succulent
kernels exists in uncultivated nature.
In 1953, the earliest known fossil corn pollen was discovered as foun-
dation cores were being drilled for a skyscraper in Mexico City; it was
buried deep in what had been the muddy bottom of a lake. There was a
great deal of corn pollen in the silt down to a seven-metre (23-ft.)
depth, then nothing for sixty-two metres more. At sixty-nine metres,
(226 ft. ) corn pollen reappeared. It dates from the last interglacial
period, and its age is estimated at about eighty thousand years. The
corn-like plant which bred this pollen must have been a wild grass with
kernels which could fall separately to the ground so that the plant
could reseed itself and so survive without the human intervention
necessary in corn as we now know it.
One grass which looks as if it could conceivably have developed into
corn, and which still exists in the wild because each of its kernels is
enclosed in its own hard self-sufficient shell, is teosinte. Teosinte
and corn, however, have crucial genetic dissimilarities. In 1978 a
botany student called Rafael Guzman found in the Mexican Jalisco Hills
a hitherto unknown type of teosinte grass which could easily crossbreed
with corn; the discovery was described as the most important botanical
breakthrough of the 1970S. This obliging plant has provided corn not
only with what most scientists now think of as a bona f de ancestor,
the secrets of whose genetic makeup might unlock even more riches from
the corn plant, but it has also been made by careful crossbreeding to
share with corn its resistance to many diseases and pests. Yet we still
do not know what the Indians did to turn the self-seeding teosinte
grass, with its small self-contained grains, into a plant with huge
podless kernels growing in tight rows on a cob covered with a single
sheath.
An archaeological dig at Bat Cave, New Mexico, in the 1940S uncovered
seven hundred corn cobs and some tassel fragments, the oldest of which
have been dated to fifty-six hundred years ago. These are
30 

modern, "man-influenced" corn cobs all right - except for one fact. The
cobs (not the kernels, but the cobs) are no longer than a human fin-
gernail. How we do not know, but by the next identifiable stage, three
thousand years ago at the latest, the corn cob, presumably because of
intervention by Indian farmers, had increased in size to ten
centimeters (4 in.) long. At the Coxcatlan cave in the Tehuacan Valley,
Mexico, a clear sequence of corn cobs has been found, increasing in
length from one to twenty centimeters (I/2 in. to 8 in.) over a span of
fifty-five hundred years.
Mexico appears by most accounts to be the heartland, or at least the
most fruitful "mixing bowl" for the evolution of corn. But this theory
has also been challenged. In 1961 digs were being carried out in
Ecuador, on sites which had been inhabited by the Valdivia cultures
between about 4000 and 2000 BC. Amongst a heap of pot-sherds left
behind by tomb-robbers, archaeologists found pieces of pottery which
had been decorated by pressing maize kernels repeatedly into the wet
clay in order to produce ornamental designs. One sherd actually had a
corn kernel still imbedded in it. The kernel was charred, but its
outlines are still clear enough to identify it. Two facts about what is
now known as the San Pablo Corn Kernel caused a real shock: the
pot-sherd can be securely dated to 2920 BC, and the kernel is the size
of a modern one!
If there have been no mistakes made, this find disrupts the whole
picture derived from the Bat Cave and other discoveries, in which large
kernels do not arrive for at least another thousand years.
When Christopher Columbus arrived in America he immediately noted
American corn and its immense importance for the Indians. On November
4, 1492, Columbus disembarked on the island now called Cuba. He was met
by Indians who hospitably offered gifts, the most sacred and prodigious
substances they knew: tobacco and corn. The word they used for the
latter, in the Haitian language spoken on the island, was mais. In this
manner, and on a single day, these two fateful plants were introduced
to Europe and the rest of the world. Columbus's journal for November 5,
1492, reads in an early translation: "There was a great deal of tilled
land sowed with a sort of beans and a sort of grain they call 'Mahiz,'
which was well tasted baked or dried, and made into flour."
Over and over again the letters and narratives of the early explorers
of America express amazement at the cleanliness, the diligence, and
31

efficiency of Indian farming. In Europe at this time (the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries) seed was sown broadcast, that is in great
scattered handfuls, irregularly spaced by the chance fall of the
grains. Farmers then waited for the weeds to come up with the crop
before any attempt was made to sort through the jumble of growing
plants and remove the unwanted growth. The Indians did things
differently. Round many of the settlements on the eastern seaboard,
fields were laid out with chequerboard accuracy, a mound of earth
heaped up in every square. There were no draft animals in North America
before the Europeans came; all land-clearance and mound-making was done
by hand, with the help of axes and sticks, and with hoes whose blades
and points were made of wood, sea-shells, antlers, and the
shoulder-blades of large animals.
The women then moved onto the prepared land. They did all the
agricultural labour thereafter, up until the harvest, which in some
tribes was allotted and stored in quantities decided by the women. At
planting time they poked holes into the mounds, and dropped seeds into
them: four or six of maize, and, a little while later, a few of beans,
a few of squash. Corn, beans, and squash were always eaten together and
always planted together: in Iroquois myth they were represented as
three inseparable sisters. When the plants emerged from the hill, the
corn grew straight and strong, the beans climbed the corn, and the
squash plant trailed down the side of the hill and covered the flat
land between the mounds. The spreading squash plant helped to keep down
weeds. The coastal Indians would plant a fish in every hill as well; to
neglect this was sacrilege, and the corn repaid such a sin by refusing
to grow properly. The Indians-who can imagine how?-had discovered that
maize needs massive doses of fertilizer if it is not completely to
drain the soil of nutrients.
Planting was sacred and performed in association with vehement dancing
for fertility. In many tribes the women would shake their long hair to
encourage the magically similar corn silks to flourish. In Central
America, Aztec ceremonies at corn planting included human sacrifice,
serpentine dances, skirmishes among priestesses, and a rattle-strewing
rite, where the rattle imitated the seed tumbling into the earth. The
Green Corn Dance of the Pueblo Indians of the southwestern United
States is a survival of ancient customs such as these, and is still
performed today.
The right moment for planting was always a matter for extreme caution
and meticulous science. "When the young leaves of the oak tree
32 

are the size of a squirrel's ear, then plant," the early European
settlers were told by the Indians, on whom they depended for any hope
of survival. In Guatemala today the descendants of the ancient Maya
continue to grow corn by the methods of their ancestors and still there
is the anxious scanning of wind and leaf signs, the elaborate
preparations and the intensely religious awareness of the right moment
to place the seed in the earth. The ancient method for planting is
still in favour in Guatemala: poke a hole in the ground with a stick,
drop the kernel in, cover, and move on.
The Indian tribes who planted their seed in spaced hills zealously
guarded the soil all round each hill from weeds. The first Europeans to
see this marvelled at the revelation of this novel neatness, and at so
much willing hard work. They were also staggered by the size of the
maize plantations: Diego Columbus, Christopher's brother, said he
walked twenty-nine kilometers (eighteen miles) through an immaculate
field of corn, bean, and squash mounds, and never came to the end of
it. The Indians in South and Central America still like to grow beans
up their cornstalks, and still they keep down weeds by growing pumpkins
and squash between the stalks.
Corn, beans, and squash are as constantly wedded in Indian cooking
today as they were in the past. Sometimes meat is added: for the early
Indians that meat would often have been puppy. And always they added
ash: burnt hickory or the ash of some other wood, or the roasted and
crushed shells of mussels they had eaten, or (as in modern Ecuador) the
burnt shells of land snails. All this was sheer tradition: corn, beans,
and squash, with a pinch of ash in every pot. Only very recently have
scientists fully grasped the wisdom of the Indians' behaviour. Corn, we
now know, is about 10 per cent protein, but is deficient in the amino
acids lysine and tryptophan, which people must get from food. In
addition, although corn contains the vitamin niacin, almost all of it
occurs in a "bound" form called niacytin, which makes it biologically
unavailable to human beings. Corn, in other words, cannot feed people
adequately if it is not supplemented by other foods, and beans and
squash are excellent complements to corn. The holy threesome, in fact,
enabled corn to be consumed as a staple. Wherever the rule has been
broken, and corn eaten without the correct supplements, the conse-
quences have been disastrous: outbreaks of pellagra and kwashiorkor,
the agonizing diseases of nutrition deficiency.
Pellagra (from the Italian pelle a,gra, "rough skin") causes skin
lesions,
33

sore mouth, nausea, and eventually mental disturbances. It was common
in the nineteenth century among the poor of the southern United States,
who lived typically on a diet of corn in its many versions, gravy,
collards, sweet potatoes, rice, and sugar. Joseph Goldberger proved in
1916 that pellagra was induced by the lack of niacin in this
corn-centred diet; he was finally forced, in order to make his point,
to perform several dramatic experiments on his own person and on those
of his wife and friends, to demonstrate that the disease was not caught
by infection. The remedy was simply a greater variety of vitamin-rich
foods. Kwashiorkor is an African word meaning "the disease of the elder
child when a new one is born." It occurred when a child was weaned at
the birth of a sibling: the disease set in when milk was withdrawn and
a diet of corn substituted. Kwashiorkor, caused by deficiency in
protein, niacin, and amino acids, is still the main cause of child
mortality in many parts of the world.
What about the ash that American Indians added to their corn? They
realized that ash (that is, lime or alkali) softens the skins of the
corn kernels and makes these easier to grind and to digest. But there
is more. Lime, when added to corn, releases the "bound" vitamin niacin,
and makes it available to human beings. In fact, if the Indians had not
somehow (How?) learned this secret, corn could never have become the
main food crop of several civilizations, as it did in pre-Columbian
America. The Indians sensed, too, that the ash was for man, to supply
his bodily need: when they offered their sacred grain to the gods they
never added ash.
The mythology of corn among the American Indians forms a vast and
varied tapestry, a revelation of the rich intensity of man's response
to nature: his anxiety, his gratitude, his sense of wonder. Since
Indian cultures were in many ways founded upon corn, beliefs about the
grain express not only its own reign over men, but also much more
specific and detailed aspects of human society and institutions. For
example, the Indians commonly saw the world as having six directions:
north, south, east, and west, and also up and down. Each of the
directions was associated with one of the six main colours of corn. For
many tribes (colour associations did vary from tribe to tribe) red was
for the north, blue the east, black the south, yellow the west; white
was for "up" and variegated corn was "down," the underworld. The
ancient Mayans of Guatemala, Belize, and the Yucatan placed four corn
kernels in each planting mound, one for each of the four Bacabs, the
gods who
-       34 

hold up the sky at the four corners of the earth. The fifth day of the
Mayan month was named for planting the maize; its pictograph was a ring
quartered by a cross, and containing a small circle in each of the
quarters: it was a depiction of a planted corn-mound. The first day of
the month was Kan, which stood for maize; its pictograph was a stylized
corn kernel.
Among the people ruled by the Incas of Peru, no corn could be planted
before the supreme Inca himself had announced the spring by turning the
earth with a golden plough. He was given a special maize drink
concocted by the "chosen virgins" who slept with him alone. This rich
fermented brew was used for sacrificial ceremonies and as a drink
exclusively for the supreme Inca.
The people of ancient Peru learned ingenious methods of tapping
subterranean water for their thirsty maize. They also sailed out to
islands in the Pacific to gather guano, the droppings of sea-birds,
which they transported to their nutrient-hungry corn on the backs of
llamas. They added fertilization to the fields in the form of
sardine-heads, one for every planted seed. They dried meat and roasted
corn for the long journeys they made through their steep lands - and
the Indians of Peru today travel the same routes, with the same
provisions. Making their intoxicating maize beer called chicha
necessitated chewing the kernels slightly first and spitting them out.
Human saliva breaks down the starch and converts it into the maltose
and glucose necessary to produce alcohol. Many pottery chicha vessels
have survived, decorated with corn cobs, demon heads, and drunken
leaning figures. Chicha is still a popular brew.
When the Aztecs of Central America performed human sacrifices the
priest cut out the victim's heart with a flint knife, and tossed the
warm corpse over the side of the temple terrace. The heart was thought
of as having been husked, like a corn cob from its sheath. The head was
kept on a special skull rack until its flesh dropped off and only the
skull remained, indistinguishable from numerous others like it. Most of
the remainder of the body may have been eaten in the form of a "man-
stew"-with maize. The Aztecs savagely punished any kind of theft; yet
owners of maize fields were expected to allow the hungry travellers who
passed by to help themselves to ears from any corn plants that bordered
a route.
Corn, for the Indians throughout North, Central, and South America, was
a tragic and sacred plant. Every society regards its staple food
35

stuff in this way: man respects, admires, and may even adore his "stuff
of life." He feels sorrow and guilt because he must cut it down in
order to live, and he feels joy and gratitude because the plant accepts
death and agrees in time to return-if due respect is paid to custom and
science - to feed its murderers again. A central myth of the Indians -
told with a myriad variations but always essentially the same-may
representatively be given in the version of the Ojibways from the
region of Lake Superior.
The Ojibways once lived only by hunting and fishing; a hard and
precarious life. There arose a young and religiously gifted man with
the power of attaining shamanic visions, whose name was Wunzh. Wunzh
knew the suffering of the hunter, for his father had no luck and
therefore could not feed his family. Wunzh fasted and prayed in order
to receive a spirit guide who would tell him what to do to end hunger.
At last the spirit guide came: a young man dressed in yellow and green,
with a head dress of green feathers. He demanded that Wunzh should
wrestle with him, despite the Indian's weakness from fasting. They
wrestled until Wunzh was exhausted, and suddenly the spirit disap-
peared. Twice more he came, and twice more they fought. And then the
visitant announced that the Great Spirit was pleased with Wunzh and
would grant his prayer. Wunzh must wrestle again till he conquered the
spirit and killed him. Then he must strip off his adversary's clothes
and throw his corpse down on the ground. This Wunzh did, and in sorrow
left the broken body of the wrestler in the forest. When he returned
later to the spot the body was gone, but Wunzh saw the tips of the
warrior's plumed headdress showing through the earth. Eventually it
grew into a plant as tall as a man, and to this cruel but glorious
event the Ojibway Indian owed his sustenance, his security, and joy.
Corn for the Indian was both One and Various. Its many colours orange,
white, blue, black, and the rest-seemed to him the manyfaceted
manifestation of the single and divine sap of mas. There was a deep
obligation to preserve its variety. The Hopi Indians allotted to each
family in a village one type of corn, and it was that family's
responsibility to maintain the purity of that corn type through the
generations. In other words, hybridization, the core of the modern
development of corn, would have been anathema to the Indians: hy-
bridization confuses categories, refuses priorities, and denies the
aspect of Many to what was One.
An eighteenth-century Franciscan missionary wrote of the Mexican
36 

Indians among whom he worked: "Everything they did and said so
concerned maize that they almost regarded it as a god. The enchantment
and rapture with which they look upon their milpas (cornfields) is such
that on their account they forget children, wife, and any other
pleasures, as though the milpas were their final purpose in life and
the source of their felicity." Corn must never be wasted, for this was
sacrilege: Mexican Indians still say that scattered corn which has not
been picked up will complain to God about it. Corn was afraid of being
cooked, so a woman must breathe on the corn before throwing it into the
pot, to comfort it and accustom it to heat. After the birth of a child,
corn cobs must not be burned lest the face of the child should be
pitted and blackened like them. Hell, for the Natchez, was a barren
waterlogged place where the wicked would eat the flesh of alligators
and rotten fish, and where "they will not have any kind of corn." Zuni
Indians thought that corn sprinkled across a doorway should be
sufficient to keep an enemy at bay: pathetically, they tried it when
the Spaniards came - the people who had no respect for maize.
The Indians had no traction animals and no horses, raised no cattle and
drank no milk. When the Europeans came the Indians immediately offered
them their maize, as well as the other weird and wonderful vegetables
and fruits of the New World, which were soon to change human eating
habits the world over. The Europeans brought their great beasts over in
ships-and proceeded to feed them on maize, an act which was sacrilege
to the Indians, for maize was of the gods, and man alone among
creatures could eat it.
The Spanish wasted no time in taking the new grain back to plant at
home. American corn has been cultivated in the Iberian peninsula since
the sixteenth century. The Indians had shown the Spaniards and
Portuguese how corn must be dried before it can be safely stored, and
how to safeguard it from predators while it dries. They built wooden
platforms in their milpas, so constructed that rats and other creatures
could not climb up to the grain cache on top. The Spanish version of
the early corn cribs were the horreos in stone (they are called
espigueiros in Portugal): wonderful simple structures raised on short
fat columns, looking like illustrations from some exotic fairy-tale,
and which still are commonly visible, with many regional variations, in
Spain and Portugal.
Very soon after Columbus's journey slaves were being brought from
Africa to work the new American lands for European colonists from
various countries. The British slave-trader Sebastian Cabot used the
37

Indians' maize to buy slaves from Africa: corn travelled well across
the ocean, and it was eagerly received in exchange for men. Those
slaves went out to America in the holds that had carried maize, and not
a few of them worked corn plantations whose fruits bought more slaves.
John Leo visited Africa as early as 1535, and two hundred miles inland
on the Niger River he met a tribe who had "a great store of a round and
white kind of pulse, the like whereof I never saw in Europe." The
Africans called it manputo, "Portuguese grain." "This," adds Leo, "is
called maiz in the West Indies."
The Portuguese island off the west coast of Africa, Sao Tome, was
busily importing maize from Equatorial Guinea and Gabon on the mainland
in the early sixteenth century. Portuguese ships carried maize to
Morocco, Burma, and China and round the coasts of the African
continent; South Africans still call the ears of maize "mealies," from
the early Portuguese term, milho grosso. Holland spread the grain even
further afield. The Turkish Empire caused American corn to spread over
North Africa and into Hungary and Romania. The Turks themselves never
liked maize much: they remained eaters of wheat. But it suited them to
let their subject peoples take to maize, because it meant all the more
wheat for themselves. For a long time in Europe there was confusion
about where the deluge of new foodstuffs was coming from; for many it
seemed that the exotic Turkish Empire must be responsible and that the
produce came from the East or from Africa. The huge new American
chickens were called "turkeys"; and maize was called Guinney wheat,
Indian barley, or Turkie wheat in England, granturco in Italy, and
"Turkish" grain in Germany and Holland.
The very early familiarity of North Africans with maize may have come
about through the Moors, who could have carried it with them when many
of them were expelled from Spain between 1499 and 1502. Some scholars
suggest that Africa had maize much earlier still: the Arabs, who are
known to have been navigating the Atlantic as early as 1100 AD, might
have encountered it and brought it across the relatively short stretch
of ocean from Brazil to Africa. The persistent belief of Europeans that
maize came to them from Turkey, and of the Chinese that they received
maize from the west (not by sea from the Portuguese as is still most
commonly believed) might support the theory that maize spread to the
Old World from the New before the journeys of Columbus. Names and dates
are less than the tips of the icebergs of history; ideas and
commodities can appear to travel faster than people - if the
38 

only people we consider are those for whom we have names and dates.
After 1492, maize spread over the world with extraordinary alacrity. It
was hardy; it travelled; it grew quickly; it provided plenty of food.

HOW CORN IS EATEN

The European settlers in North America survived their first winters
because they listened to the Indians and learned fast. They brought
wheat seed on the ships with them, and planted it-but owing to
different weather and soil conditions or because of bad storage on
board, the seed failed, and maize became the mainstay of their lives.
They sowed it as the Indians taught them, planting a fish in every
mound. On the eastern seaboard the fish were mainly alewives, the
herring of the Atlantic which in those days teemed at spawning (and
planting) time so copiously that a man had only to lace his fingers in
the water and fish would swim into his hands. The Europeans also
learned to keep their fields as neat as a "garden bedde" as the Indians
did, "not suffering a choaking weede to advance his audacious head
above their infant corne." They were taught how much the maize needed
water, and when and how to harvest at different times for different
purposes.
Then came the cooking lessons. The meal which serves as the structural
principle for this book begins with simple boiled immature cobs,
buttered and salted. Sweet corn was relatively little prized among most
American Indian tribes: sweetness can quickly pall in a food eaten as
one's chief sustenance. Boiled young sweet corn was an occasional treat
among the bands that raised this particular variety; butter was
unknown, and salt in many cases rare. Far more commonly eaten were the
kinds of corn that lent themselves to roasting and to grinding into
meal. Stoneground corn, as South Americans have traditionally made it
and as modern "gourmet" cooks increasingly realize, is far more
delicious than machine-ground, because the germ, complete with its fat
and nutrients, is left in the grain.
One could have suppawn, a corn porridge lightened and slightly sweet-
ened with crushed green corn stalks. Succotash was corn and beans
stewed together. Hominy was flint corn boiled with ash so that the
pericarp of the kernels could be washed away; after prolonged boiling
39

the grain emerged greyish white with a smoky flavour. Cornmeal could be
cooked on a stone or griddle as a flat cake which was handy to take on
journeys, hence its English name, "jonnycake." Hoecakes were baked in
an oven, spread thinly on a greased iron hoe blade; the name in one
Indian language for such a cake was a nookik: is it coincidence that
this sounds very much like "an hoecake"?
Pone was an Algonquin word for corn cooked as a thin layer of batter on
a heated stone, like the hoecake or "journey cake." The method had also
been common among the Aztecs, who rationed out corn to every person
according to his age, in what was considered an appropriate number per
day of thin flat cakes, each at least a foot in diameter. Maize could
even be baked into something resembling bread-flat, dense, crumbly
(corn lacks the gluten that enables wheaten flour to rise), but filling
and delicious. The addition of buttermilk or clabber was a European
invention: the Indians had not consumed animals' milk. But the mixture
was often cooked in the embers wrapped in husks, which was an Indian
method. Spoon bread is more elaborate, a baked affair lightened with
beaten eggwhites and puffy like a souffle. Grits are coarsely ground
white cornmeal with the fine grains sifted out.
In Central and South America, wet hominy is squeezed and kneaded into a
dough (masa) and fried or baked as tortillas or stuffed and fried as
enchiladas. Masa ferments quickly in its wet state, so that today it is
often dried and ground into flour which is sold as masa harina. Tamales
have meat or vegetables inside, and are wrapped in corn husks and
boiled or steamed. In South America corn is used to make all sorts of
drinks as well as food: atole, pinolillo, chicheme, colada, and the
chicha made from chewed corn. Peru prizes its purple corn, which gives
colour and flavour to sweet dishes and drinks.
Maize is also precious in Africa-too precious to feed it, as North
Americans do, to livestock; cattle in Africa may be given stalks to
eat, or the hulls which have been removed from the kernels. The Yorubas
of Nigeria eat corn as ogi, a mush which requires painstaking soaking,
grinding, and washing for several days before it is boiled. The same
preparation wrapped in banana leaves and cooked is acidi, an important
dish in Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast; a variant is kenkey, from
Ghana. Often peanuts, red peppers, and palm oil are mixed with the
corn; or it is simply cooked and dipped in relish. Corn needs supple-
mentary foodstuffs to complete its nutrient value, and "dipping" is one
40 

obvious way to achieve this. The distinctively American habit of
dipping food in sauces may well have developed in part from this manner
of eating corn.
By the mid-eighteenth century the newcomers to North America had
totally accepted Indian corn as their staple food. They had corn for
breakfast, lunch, and supper. American soldiers captured in Canada in
the War of 1812 and imprisoned at Halifax, Nova Scotia, expressed their
deepest need - for the corn they were accustomed to eating daily.
"Their cry for 'mush and milk' was incessant," wrote the superintendant
of the camp. "I soon placed before the poor sufferers the object of
their longings." North Americans did everything they could to induce
Europeans to like corn. The dissemination of recipes for cooking the
new vegetable was one of the most important means to this end.
Yet in Europe maize has had a chequered history. The Belgians have
never accepted corn as part of their national cuisine, and neither have
the Germans, the Scandinavians, or the Swiss. The French have always
tended to turn up their noses at it, relegating corn to chickenfeed,
cooking oil, and the plastics industry. In 1847 the starving Irish
refused at first to eat stores of corn brought by the British from
America. They called it "Peel's brimstone" after the British prime
minister and because it seemed to them to have a sinister colour,
yellow like sulphur.
In about 1650, however, Italy suddenly embraced maize, adapting it to
the production of the ancient Roman grain porridge, puls or pulmentum,
which was originally made of spelt, millet, or chick-pea flour. Today
what the Italians now call polenta is popular in the north, cooked much
as it is in Africa, and served with squid in its black ink, or tomato
sauce. The great nineteenth-century novelist, Alessandro Manzoni, de-
scribed steaming yellow polenta being poured out onto a wooden board as
looking like "a harvest moon in a mist." Byron had a beautiful Venetian
mistress who used to float with him in a gondola down the Grand Canal,
lazily nibbling bits of polenta from a ball of it which she kept warm
down the front of her dress, between her breasts.
One of the most assiduously corn-eating nations in Europe is Romania.
The Romanians took to the American plant largely because their Turkish
overlords did not: they could keep all the maize crop themselves, while
the Turks had access to more Romanian wheat. Maize was thrown as a
fertility charm at weddings, much as rice is in other European and
American countries. (Maize mixed with rice is still part of wedding
rites in Spain.) The Romanians used it in popular medicine
41

to cure colds, burns, and skin diseases. The Romanian poet Lucian Blaga
recounts an intoxicating memory:

As a child I used to love to jump naked into the maize barrel, drowning
up to my neck in golden grain. . .

CORN FLAKES

A useful cash crop in nineteenth-century America was a special kind of
sorghum (Sorghum vulcgare technicum), grown for the long bristles which
sprout from its ears; bristles which created a minor household revo-
lution amidst all the thunderous transformations of housekeeping which
occurred in that century. Really efficient brooms were mass-manufac-
tured out of this "broomcorn." Their bristles were densely clustered
and evenly trimmed, flexible, and strong.
Selling brooms was the first real employment of a teen-aged Seventh Day
Adventist called Will Kellogg. Will's father and mother had become
Adventists after the death of their daughter through medical incom-
petence. When they heard of the medical theories of the Adventist
leaders Elder White and Sister White of Battle Creek, Michigan, they
sold their broomcorn farm in Connecticut and moved to Battle Creek,
where they opened a broom factory.
Water cures were one of the Adventists' healing methods: sponge baths,
wrapping patients in wet sheets, sitz baths, foot baths, watersprays,
and plunges. Sister White was told in a vision to open hospitals where
baths could be administered, and vegetarianism, proper rest, and
exercise taught and practised. She opened a sanatorium in Battle Creek
and ten years later Will Kellogg's elder brother John Harvey Kellogg,
who had prepared himself with a medical degree, took charge of the
Battle Creek Sanatorium. The Doctor misspelled the word as "Sani-
tarium," but stuck to his error when it had been pointed out to him.
"Sanitarium," he said, would find its way into dictionaries by the time
he was through building up Battle Creek. He was right; it did.
Under John Harvey Kellogg the Sanitarium became one of the largest,
richest, and most influential hospitals in the United States. John
Harvey himself wrote and argued prolifically about his health philo-
sophy, which he called "biologic living," and about the roles of food,
42 

light, water, and exercise in the curing of disease. He wrote over
fifty books and was celebrated throughout the United States as a
surgeon and a kind of medical guru.
John Harvey was a demonic worker. Only one man could compete with him
for sheer energy and concentration on work: his overshadowed,
underpaid, unglamorous factotum and younger brother, Will Keith
Kellogg. Will did all the organizing of the "San," while his brother
was the celebrity and figurehead. He followed wherever his elder
brother led. One of these leads was into a series of experiments John
Harvey set up in order to find a way of making bread more easily
digestible. The Sanitarium had already invented a ground and toasted
granular food called Granola.
John Harvey claimed that the idea of flaking wheat by compressing it
came to him in a dream in 1894. The rollers already in use for making
Granola were set to work to experiment with boiled wheat, and of course
a lot of the dull trial-and-error operations which resulted from the
flash of inspiration were handled by brother Will. One night the wheat
had been left too long after boiling, but the brothers rolled it
anyway, and found that each berry turned into an elongated thin flake.
They baked the flakes, which turned crisp. It was Will who argued that
the flakes- peculiar to look at as they were - should not be ground as
Granola grain was ground, but left whole.
Wheat flakes began to be offered to the public, and to catch on, as a
breakfast health food. Many companies formed to profit from the new
fashion, in spite of the difficulty people had at first with the idea
of cold food for breakfast. Three years after the first discovery of
the flaking technique, Will began to experiment with corn instead of
wheat. "Horse food," the sceptics called it, and the first corn flakes
were thick, flavourless and unpopular. But gradually they were
improved, flavoured with malt, altered in texture and keeping qualities
with chemical additives, thinned, and crisped until corn flakes as we
know them were complete. The Kellogg "grain-tempering" process was
patented in 1894.
Will Kellogg eventually broke with his brother and the Sanitarium and
at last felt capable of striking out on his own. He was forty-six years
old. He began to advertise as no one yet had advertised in American -
or any other - business practice. He gave away samples of his
revolutionary product. He discovered the importance of the package
itself as advertising medium: the corn flakes girl, "Sweetheart of the
Corn," was dreamed up and then emblazoned on every box. She was
43

an American reincarnation of the mother goddess, of youthfulness and
sudden impulse, as with a brilliant smile she embraced a corn-shock.
The Sweetheart delivered none of the minatory restrictions Will's
brother meted out with his health foods; she suggested health and
wholesomeness and sound country living (all of them evangelically
American values), but advised nothing and promised nothing except
pleasure. Early Kellogg slogans included: "Wins its favor through its
flavor!" "The breakfast treat that makes you eat!" and "America's
Waking Thought." W.K. Kellogg had already discovered the two basic
necessities in advertising: recognisability and continuous repetition.
He used jingles, famous faces, his own personal signature as
endorsement, and insistence that his corn flakes were "the original."
Children were perceived almost immediately as a powerful and
susceptible means of access to their parents' purses: children were
pictured on packages and offered contests, cut-outs, free samples, and
rewards for collecting cereal-box tops. Kellogg's also supported corn
shows, with prizes for the most uniform ears of maize, in the days
before hybrid corn.
When the Depression struck, Will Kellogg surveyed the scenes of despair
and catastrophe in the business world all about him. His response was
not to cut back, but to redouble his advertising, actually embracing
the Depression as his company's biggest break. This was probably his
greatest hour as a businessman. For, in fact, it was during the
Depression that Americans permanently altered their breakfast habits.
The heavy hot early meal became a relic of the past; the reason was
partly a lack of money and time, and partly the alternative promulgated
by Mr. Kellogg and his imitators and competitors.
From this point on the corn flake enters social history. Zea mais, the
divine life-sustainer of the pre-Columbian Indians, the humble under-
pinning of North American wealth, now enters a new phase of its ancient
mythical life. Long ago North Americans had chosen yellow corn and
white corn and rejected the rest: blue, black, red, orange, and
multi-coloured maize had become so exotic as to be almost indecent-
unless used for purely decorative purposes. White, for us, means
"pure," and food must look pure, always. Yellow is a little more
problematical, but it does suggest sunshine. The xanthophylls present
in yellow corn make the skin and legs of the poultry fed on it yellow,
and yellow is considered more appetizing than white in a chicken:
yellow means "golden," and promises the succulence of roasts and fried
meat. Kellogg's and other corn flakes manufacturers work hard to
achieve a golden
44 

flake. It must be toasted, but not too dark, or people will not eat it,
no matter what its taste. Kellogg's used to go out of its way to buy
white corn in order to achieve just the colour the consumer wants.
White corn is not grown much in the Battle Creek area. Now the company
has found out how to get the same colour with the more easily available
yellow corn: you first bleach the kernels white, then proceed.
Corn flakes' connotations for us are of swiftness, sunshine, youth, and
brightness. They are as crisp and snack-like as potato chips, sweetened
and salted like junk-food, yet hallowed by Milk, which always says
"Mother." In North American culture nothing bathed in fresh milk can be
threatening or bad. Corn flakes are light, and therefore can get away
with being eaten cold, even for breakfast. They are modern and easy,
yet already traditional; a fast-paced bachelor food which still manages
to remain associated with childhood and with families. Eating them for
breakfast is a habit known to many countries on earth yet universally
recognized as typically American. Since the food which it eats provides
a nation with its identity, corn flakes thus gains yet another claim to
be considered as an institution. There is no great distance between
cultural "institutions" in this sense and the reverence and sacrality
which characterized the attitude of the Indians to corn in
pre-Columbian America.

CORN AND GENETICS

The ubiquity of the corn plant in Colonial America had made it standard
material for a thousand uses which had nothing to do with food. One
device, which united tobacco and corn, was the corncob smoking pipe.
This became an institution in the United States when it began to be
manufactured commercially in 1869 at Washington, Missouri, still the
corncob-pipe capital of the world. A University of Missouri professor
has even provided the business recently with its own specially
developed hard cob, corn hybrid MO Pipe 12. The cobs are aged seven
years before being carved. They are light, strong, and plentiful, so
that the pipes are disposable and replaceable: traditional and rustic,
yet convenient and modern. Corn cobs have also done service as fuel,
fishing corks, bottle-stoppers, mousehole plugs, back-scratchers,
scrubbing brushes, hair curlers, and toilet paper. Stalks piled up
outside the walls of a house 
45

provided insulation for the winter. Husks were shredded to stuff mat-
tresses and woven into chair-seats or hats.
The colonists moved westward only as fast as corn-lands could be
cleared and planted. And as modern American society invented itself,
more and more uses were found for corn.
The corn embryo in its kernel is surrounded with a copious sugar food
supply, which changes in time to starch. Starch is insoluble in cold
water, but in warm its granules burst and form a viscous, jellylike
liquid which becomes firm when it cools; a high temperature produces a
gum-like substance called dextrin, which is extremely useful for its
adhesive properties.
Dextrin, used in the manufacture of porcelain, has to be treated first
with sulphurous acid to prevent discolouration in the ovens. In the
first decade of the nineteenth century a Russian chemist called G. S.
C. Kirchoff mistakenly overdid the treatment, and found to his
amazement that he had turned his dextrin into a sweet sticky stuff
which (coloured and treated) we now call corn syrup. And so man found
that he could convert starch, readily available in the familiar corn
kernel, back into the magical substance for which he had been prepared
for so long to kill and enslave: sugar. Sugar was to become as
limitlessly available as corn starch, and as cheap.
The several spectacular metamorphoses of which starch is capable make
it one of the most versatile materials on earth. The ancient Egyptians
had obtained it from wheat and used it to coat and stiffen papyrus. The
Romans used it in medicines, cosmetics, foods, and fabrics. Wheat was
the source of starch in early America also: a company called Colgate
and Co. of Jersey City produced starch from wheat. In 1841, an En-
glishman, Orlando Jones, showed how starch could be extracted from
corn, thereby doing a great deal to change the course of American
history. In 1844, Colgate dropped wheat for corn as their source of
starch.
Today only one-third of the corn starch produced is used in food. The
rest goes into thousands of commodities, from latex paint and
toothpaste to core binders for the moulding of iron, steel, and alumin-
ium. The Starch Round Table of the American Corn Industries Research
Foundation is an annual conference of scientists from all over the
world who review the latest research on starch in the service of
mankind. They discuss water-resistant (hydrophobic) starch, adhesive
starch and anti-adhesive starch, starch in textiles, rubber,
woodworking,
46 

leather, metallurgy, paper-making, cosmetics, and plastics. They also
discuss how to reduce the constituents of starch which absorb oxygen
and kill fish when starchy waste waters are discharged into rivers. The
Board watches constantly for new mutants of corn. One famous mutant of
maize was the previously unknown waxy corn, which was discovered by J.
M. W. Farnham, an American Presbyterian missionary in China, and was
later found in North and South America as well. Its starch is nearly
100 per cent amylopectin, which makes waxy corn an important commercial
crop for the glue and instant pudding industries.
The scientists also discuss genetics. Corn grows very fast and responds
extremely well to hybridization. Add to these facts the huge economic
importance of the corn crop, the centrality of corn to what is techno-
logically the most advanced society on earth, and it becomes clear why
it is that corn is genetically the most tinkered-with plant in
existence. Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who discovered the laws of
genetics, used peas in his little garden for his experiments. Very soon
after Mendel's forgotten discoveries had been brought to light again by
a Dutch botanist in 1900, an American named George Harrison Shull began
Mendelian researches into corn.
Eventually the secret of control over corn breeding was found. The
rule, once formulated, is very simple: first you produce four inbred
lines of maize. Then you cross, and cross again. The pathetic stunted
little cobs with twisted rows of kernels which result from inbreeding
resume and then multiply their vigour when they are allowed to cross
with other similarly inbred plants. Desirable traits triumph over un-
desirable; quantity is enormously increased; there are no disappoint-
ments from controlled seed, and no nasty surprises. Since the 1920S,
hybrid corn has revolutionized American farming, and hybridization has
been called the greatest agricultural accomplishment since agriculture
itself was invented ten thousand years ago.
The Indians had relied on spiritual qualities in themselves-prepa-
ration, attitude, and intent- to produce good crops. They insisted on
variety, and they knew that maintaining variety meant preventing dif-
ferent types of corn from mixing. The European newcomers had adapted
Indian beliefs and methods to their own empirical ways. They set about
perfecting types of corn, learning by the look and feel of a cob
whether it was producing good healthy seed, then choosing the best
kernels to plant. The idea was to improve the crop gradually by always
planting the best of every batch. Increased yields were the goal:
bigger cobs and more ears per plant wherever possible.
47

In 1893 a farmer called James Reid won a prize for his spectacular
corn. He had inherited the strain from his father Robert, improved and
perfected it for many years, and finally showed it at the Chicago
World's Fair. It was called Reid's Yellow Dent, and it was the result
of a failure and an accident. Back in 1847, Robert Reid's crop of
reddish corn had failed in patches, so he planted the bald spots in his
fields with a flint corn called Little Yellow. One type fertilized the
other, and Reid's Yellow Dent was the prize-winning result. The cobs
were heavy with golden yellow kernels, all of them plump and evenly
spaced from cob tip to beautifully rounded butt. Reid's Yellow Dent was
snatched up and planted by whoever could get it; it spread across the
United States.
A corollary of all the jubilation and success was hardly noticed then,
but for the first time the bell tolled, enunciating the theme of one of
the twentieth century's nightmares. Reid's Yellow Dent was so good, so
obviously preferable, that other corns were forgotten, simply not
planted. And "not planted," when we speak of "man-created" Zea mais,
means nonexistent forever after. Thousands of kinds of corn, varieties
reverently preserved and kept separate and distinct by the Indians, as
well as many carefully improved by American farmers, disappeared off
the face of the earth.
The years between 1900 and 1920 in the United States and Canada were
the years of the corn shows. Farmers were educated in farming methods
and modernization. There were corn trains which travelled across the
continent disseminating information, teaching farmers how to recognize
good seed corn, and how to test it to make sure it would grow before
planting it. Corn-shucking contests became a spectator sport. At the
annual corn shows, farmers exhibited their best cobs and won prizes for
the beauty of the ears. One of the great American myths was being
created and accepted with ever-increasing confidence and fervour: that
beauty-in corn as in anything else-is largely a matter of uniformity.
Straight rows of kernels were admired, truly cylindrical cobs, absolute
uniformity of colour, yellow or white. (Red corn, black, blue, and the
rest had long ago been eliminated as unacceptable for North Americans.)
Curiously enough, beauty was allowed to overshadow performance in these
years: a farmer showed only a few perfect ears; the amount of the yield
was not taken into consideration in awarding the prizes.
In 1922 hybrid corn began to become commercially available. By 1950 the
corn shows and the corn judges had been swept away: hybrid corns (based
largely on germ-plasm from Reid's Yellow Dent) became avail
48 

able which were absolutely reliable, predictable, and capable of yields
previously undreamed of. Farm machinery was invented, and once it
appeared it had to be bought if a farmer wanted to stay in business.
Corn genetics enabled farm machinery to operate, because it produced
plants to order which the machines could handle.
As mentioned earlier, a corn plant is both male (its tassels) and
female (its silks). Hybrid corn seed is achieved by removing the
tassels of the inbred line of corn which is to bear the grain, so that
the plant cannot seed itself but will receive pollen from the other
inbred parent chosen to be planted in the same field. "Tasselling"
(removing the tassels, which has to be done by hand so that the rest of
the plant suffers no damage) is still an enormous summer task in many
countries, demanding waves of temporary labour at the appropriate
times. Poor tasselling can mean an undesirable mixture of hybrid and
non-hybrid seed. Ultra-modern seed farms in the United States and
Canada, and increasingly in Europe, have adopted a new technique which
does away with this human labour: male sterile plants have been
designed, by genetic manipulation, to produce no pollen.
Corn has been bred for "standability": stalks stiff enough that ears
can be mechanically harvested without the plants collapsing. "Standa-
bility" is placed above "yield" in many lists of the desirable features
of corn for the farmer. Other priorities in hybrid corn are: yield,
maturation at a time when the least possible drying is required,
disease and insect resistance, machine suitability (not too many cobs,
a plant which does not grow too high or too low, relative weakness of
ear-attachment to the stalk), uniformity and quality of grain.
Geneticists have also tackled corn's protein deficiency in an effort to
make grain capable in itself of supplying all nutritional needs. They
have come up with Opaque II named after a corn gene which increases
available lysine in the kernels. Opaque II has so far proved most
useful in feeding pigs, which have nutritional needs very similar to
man's. But Opaque II "buys" its uncommon protein strength with what
geneticists call "garbage traits": low yield, and a soft kernel
susceptible to moulds and damage in harvesting.
The world now grows 500 million metric tons of corn a year, nearly half
of it in the United States. Eighty per cent of the American maize crop
is produced in the Corn Belt, an area 350,000 miles square, which
stretches from western Ohio to eastern Nebraska, with the largest corn
tonnage of all coming from Iowa and Illinois. The hungry mouths of
49

the world and the tireless wheels of industry depend upon this modern
hybrid wonder, the answer to thousands of years of human fears, hopes,
and endeavours. American corn is a spearhead of the modern "Green
Revolution," one of the proudest answers of scientists to the threat of
world hunger.
"And he gave it for his opinion," Jonathan Swift wrote in Gulliver's
Travels, "that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of
grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would
deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country
than the whole race of politicians put together." What would he have
thought of the scientists who gave us American corn, a single grain of
which in four months flat can multiply itself eight hundred times over?

NOW THE BAD NEWS

In the 1930S, farms in the United States, and soon after in Canada,
began to be mechanized. The arduous labour of farming was lifted from
man's shoulders for the first time since he had learned to make
vegetation grow for him instead of having to hunt for it. Today's corn
farmer prepares his soil with machines. Maize drains the soil of
nitrogen and this must constantly be replaced, so anhydrous ammonia- a
stable gas created when atmospheric nitrogen is flared under pressure
with methane - is sold in huge metal cylinders to farmers. They
literally inject the soil with gas, drawing a system of knives behind
tractors mounted with pressurized tanks of ammonia.
Machines then move in to plant the seed by means of calibrated plates
or air pressure. Next phosphorus, often in liquid form which permits
direct contact with the seed, and potassium and other nutrients are
added in proportions ascertained by scientific analysis of the soil.
Insecticides are applied - the seed already having received treatment
with insecticides before planting. Weed-killers are essential, because
soils artificially nourished with nitrogen and other chemicals make
weeds grow as fast as corn. Herbicides, like insecticides, are, in the
language of the sales catalogues, "preplant incorporated, preemergence
or postemergence in application."
But weeds and insects are learning to adapt to these poison doses:
insects resistant to insecticides and "new" weeds immune to herbicides
50 

constantly appear, and ever more complex programmes of poisons must be
developed. More and more farmers are arming themselves with computers
to analyse soil and correct plant populations.
The growing corn needs huge quantities of water, which nearly always
has to be piped in and sprayed over the plants. This water seeps
through a soil soaked in chemicals, and inevitably leaches the
chemicals into the region's groundwater system: the nitrite levels of
groundwater in the Corn Belt are often twice as high as what is thought
to be the upper limit of potability. Phosphate runoff from these soils
fills rivers and ponds with algae.
The harvest is done mechanically: the kernels are even stripped from
the cobs in the field. Human labour is reduced to driving the tractors
and sorting, and even the latter is scarcely necessary for corn, so
high is the predictable uniformity of the hybrid product. And then the
corn must be speed-dried with hot air to improve its keeping qualities,
and carefully cooled to prevent cracking. Natural drying is very
difficult if quantities are very large, as they are on a modern farm.
With corn, as with so many crops, machines replacing people means more
food, but fewer people working. In the early twentieth century over 60
per cent of North Americans lived on the land; now 97 per cent of them
live in towns and cities. That is quite a transformation, a shifting of
population on an unprecedentedly huge scale. Just over 3 per cent of
the citizens of the United States now feed the entire population.
Decline in the number of people living in the countryside means huge
farms, and far fewer of them. Few indeed can afford the capital
investment in machinery and in chemicals that are needed to begin, or
even to continue, a farm. The wonder-corn seed must be constantly
created anew: it does not keep its vigour. Therefore seed companies
create hybrid grain, and farmers must buy their seed every year.
Small towns have disappeared by the hundreds in North America, and with
them rural social institutions, customs, traditions. Farmers now must
travel huge distances to get off their own farms - to transport their
children to school for example, or to get to a doctor. Even on
successful working farms with all their battle array of heavy
equipment, farmers find that they need non-farm income: increasingly
they take other jobs - bus driving, teaching, selling insurance, even
working in factories-with all the travel involved in getting to the
extra employment. The truth is that farmers are not often rich, or even
particularly
51

well off. The machines certainly produce plenty of corn and other farm
crops, but prices to the consumer are extraordinarily low, and the ma-
chines are extremely expensive to run and repair as well as to buy.
Less is paid for food, in terms of percentage of income, in North
America than anywhere else on earth since the history of universal
"incomes" began. North Americans keep their money for other things -
mainly for other machines. Low food costs, brought about by machines,
permit people to buy themselves more machines. It seems simple, and
quite delightful; as long as hidden costs (loss of water for example,
or loss of alternatives) are kept out of sight.
Vast quantities of the corn crop are consumed by people in the form of
beef, pork, and chicken. Corn-fattening animals for market is a hugely
profitable process. Beef calves are kept, after weaning, for six months
on three meals a day of hay, oats, corn, and cornstalks. When they
weigh 365 kilograms (800 Lbs.) they are sold to a feedlot operator, who
gives them an unvarying diet of ground corn till they clock in at 550
kilograms (1,200 Lbs.), the agreed market weight. The animals are kept
in large numbers and in very close confinement: movement, by building
up muscle, inhibits fat. Feed is carted in to them automatically and
the manure is trundled out. But even granted modern transport and
disposal technology the pollution resulting from the endless massive
tonnages of manure which result from beef fattening is a horror which
has hardly begun to be understood, let alone treated. Water, both
underground and in surrounding streams, is poisoned and
wasted-irreparably, so far.
In Guatemala today live the descendants of the ancient Mayans. Like
many Indian tribes, they practise agricultural methods a thousand and
more years old. Every farmer first chooses his corn patch or milpa with
enormous care, having regard to the site and the soil. He prepares his
land by slashing the underbrush and cutting down the trees. Next, he
waits, watching clouds and leaves, moon and wind, leaving his plot to
dry out until the perfect day arrives.
Then comes the exultant moment when the dry vegetation is set on fire.
The Indians report that the firing causes them "immense joy." The fire,
they say, kills the insects noxious to corn and makes the soil "sweat,"
which is extremely good for it, especially if rain occurs immediately
after firing. The moment the ash has cooled, and not a day later, the
planting is done, right into the ash. The farmers poke sticks into the
ground, drop in a few kernels and cover them roughly. They leave tree
52 

stumps standing; they make holes not in rows but wherever seems right
in the spaces between stumps.
As the corn grows, they double the stalks over to protect the cobs from
rainwater, and watch it carefully, scaring off swarms of parrots and
other predators. Often a family moves into a hut in the corn patch -
which might be quite far from the village - and lives there while the
corn grows, tending it and enjoying the hunt for animals which the
growing maize draws to itself like fish after bait. Living in the milpa
for a few months is regarded as a restful, recreative time, full of
stimulating fun and profit. Finally the harvest is culled, by hand.
After this the milpa is abandoned: left for nature to re-instal itself,
and for the land to become "young and strong" again. A milpa cannot be
slashed and burned for at least seven years after a harvest, for the
corn has "sucked dry" or "withered" the soil.
Now all this slash-and-burn or "swidden" agriculture (the method is
typical of that of many societies which still exist) is not nearly
productive enough. It is far too much work, wasteful and slow and
unaware of the power man now has of controlling the plant and its
predators. Besides, populations are growing and hungry: they need to be
fed. Once hybrid corn was established in the United States, it was not
long before a movement began to carry the new knowledge and its
successful progeny to the Third World. HYVS (High Yielding Varieties)
of corn were introduced to people long used to much less, and much
slower production. The "Green Revolution" had begun. It was
enthusiastically and gratefully accepted. There is no doubt that large
numbers of people owe their lives to its benefits.
Yet - once again - there has been a heartbreaking price to pay. It was
discovered (too late) that the sudden introduction of modern
agriculture into traditional societies very often benefited the rich,
destroying the small farmers' livelihoods and all their independence.
Expensive machines are available to few, and instantly crush
competition. Mechanization always reduces employment, forcing people to
leave the land for the crowded and often desperately poor cities.
"Green Revolution" methods cost a great deal in water and in money for
chemicals and seed, even when the machines have been installed.
Technological prowess has so far maintained its prestige almost intact,
because its benefits are so swift and so obvious. The risks it takes
are only intermittently perceived to be risks, and then only when the
damage has been done.
A well-meaning team of agriculturalists moves in to a swidden system
53

not unlike the Guatemalan example we looked at. The untidiness, the
wastage of the slash-and-burn method are swiftly gauged. In goes the
heavy equipment. No more tree stumps, slashed undergrowth, ash. Parrots
are so heavily discouraged that they will never trouble this region -
or any other- again. For a year or two, an unbelievable amount of
cylindrical yellow straight-rowed corn is triumphantly grown on ground
pumped full of nitrogen and phosphate. But finally truth is revealed
and tragic knowledge achieved: it becomes apparent that the forest's
topsoil- that topsoil which had been preserved, waited on, and
respected by generation upon generation of Indian slash-and-burn
farmers - has been destroyed. And that top-soil can never be restored.
The damage is done and irreparable.
It will not be long before dependence on artificial fertilizers will be
so intense that it will be counterproductive in terms of cost and
further destruction. By this time, many traditional crops will also
have been lost to modern streamlining and size: vast, fragile corn
monocultures with surpluses to sell for cash will have replaced a whole
gamut of nutritious, home-grown foods. The fossil fuels and the
phosphate upon which the "Green Revolution" relies have often to be
imported at considerable and unending cost. It has been estimated that
by the new methods it takes the equivalent in fossil fuels of seven
hundred and fifty litres of petroleum to produce one hectare of corn
(67 Imperial gallons to produce 1 acre).
Worst of all, varieties of corn are disappearing by the dozen even as
these words are being written. A corn not being planted is a corn which
ceases to exist; man alone can keep Zea mais alive. Hybrid corns have
been created, and continue to be crossed and improved and adapted to
various circumstances, but hybrids are combinations only. Their
ancestral lines are germ-plasm from corn varieties. Which lines are
used is in fact largely a matter of chance. Reid's Yellow Dent was
itself an accident. And often corn types which have extraordinarily
valuable traits have come to light in obscure traditional corn
cultures. Who knows what possibilities lay in the genetic material of
the thousands of corns we have rejected and therefore lost in the last
hundred years?
In 1970 an epidemic of corn leaf blight struck the United States:
oblong lesions appeared on the leaves, stalks weakened and fell, yield
was greatly reduced. This new mutant strain of an ancient scourge
victimized only one type of corn - but that type had been planted by
almost every farmer in the country. This corn variety contained Texas
54 

cytoplasm, the secret of the new way to prevent the labour of
tasselling. Scientists hurriedly replaced the Texas with normal
cytoplasm, thousands of people suddenly found temporary tasselling jobs
again, and the danger was soon averted. This was possible only because
alternative genes existed. One of the most popular traits of the
labour-saving corn hybrids with Texas cytoplasm in their parentage had
been the built-in resistance of these plants to corn leaf blight - the
corn leaf blight people were used to, that is. It took only a slight
mutation in the same blight to cancel out this scientific advance.
Meanwhile confidence in the latest technology had led to intense
standardization and therefore to a terrifying vulnerability to the
disease. Yet even now, with the lesson of 1970 behind us, only six main
strains make up the gene stock of nearly 50 per cent of all corn grown
in the United States.
Sheer variety in the plant kingdom turns out to be a fact of
inestimable value for man. The Indians, as we recall, had revered
variety. The war which modern North Americans have waged against the
necessity to work has benefited from what seems at first sight a
tactical triumph: uniformity. Uniform crops are easy to sow, easy to
harvest, easy to sell. Machines like, demand, and produce uniformity.
But nature loathes it: her strength lies in multiplicity and in
differences. Sameness, in biology, means fewer possibilities and,
therefore, weakness.
Awareness of the fragility of huge monocultures of corn (or of wheat,
rice, or anything else) has spurred efforts to preserve examples of
threatened plant types, even if they do not seem for the moment to be
useful. The trouble with these collections, however, is that they are
even more dependent on man than corn is in the field. Plant libraries
must be artificially operated and maintained; mistakes or interruptions
in the servicing of these institutions-a simple electric power cut for
example - can, of course, mean disastrous and perhaps permanent losses.
And who is to own the plant collections? The people from whose
countries the germ-plasm was taken in the first place? Or the people
who found and saved the germ-plasm, built the new preserving facilities
when the dangers were first realized, and who now take most respon-
sibility for the upkeep of the holdings? The United States and Canada,
Japan and Europe have hardly any natural resources of germ-plasm for
the major food crops of the world, most of which originated in Latin
America, Asia, and Africa. Central America gave corn to the world, yet
North American and European-owned multi-national corporations control
the creation of hybrid corns and sell the seeds to the Third
55

World. The same corporations produce the whole array of products
without which "Green Revolution" farming cannot continue: fertilizers,
pesticides, herbicides, and heavy machinery. Some Third World rep-
resentatives even complain that they are not getting the very best
hybrid seed, that the United States and other powerful countries keep
the best grain for themselves, and that they limit access by poorer
countries to the germ-plasm holdings.
So the wrangling and hard feelings continue, even as genetic erosion
goes on almost unabated. Uniformity, disguise itself as it may behind
the multiplicity of cans, boxes, bottles, and cartons in our
supermarkets, is a peculiarly modern curse. Everything on the shelves
contains corn. We therefore depend on corn. But corn depends
increasingly, because of our wanton wastefulness, on us. Our own
demonstrations of our incapacity to manage have placed us more and more
exclusively and inescapably in charge.
56

CHAPTER TWO

Salt. The Edible Rock

THE FIRST OF THE SALT MEN on record was found in 1573. He
was bearded and fully clothed in a woollen jacket and trousers, leather
shoes, and a conical cap. His flesh was yellow and hard as a rock, but
perfectly preserved because he was buried in salt. After the people of
the village had had a good look at him, spread out in church "like a
salted codfish," he was given a Christian burial in the mountain, "to
get him out of men's thoughts." At least three other bodies in a
similar state have been found in the shafts of salt-mines in the same
region near Salzburg (Salt Town), Austria. They were all victims of
mine accidents between two and three thousand years ago.
In 1836 a cemetery dating back to the age of the Salt Men was found in
the vicinity of the nearby village of Hallstatt (which also means Salt
Town). So far, well over two thousand graves have been excavated at
this site, many of them royal burials equipped with gold jewellery,
chariots, iron weapons, and joints of salt beef for the journey to the
57

other world. Tiny Hallstatt has given its name to a whole civilization
whose confines stretched from Spain to Yugoslavia during the First
Millennium BC These were the early Celts, who made the transition from
the Bronze to the Iron Age in Europe. Hallstatt princes could import
the finest art works from ancient Greece. They traded with the
Etruscans, the Egyptians, and the Romans, and their merchant subjects
continually travelled back and forth for distances as great as that
between southern France and Cornwall.
Neither the riches nor the travel would have been possible without
these people's knowledge of salt deposits, salt mining, and the
properties of salt. Hallstatt miners knew exactly how and at what angle
best to sink a shaft through surface layers of soil to the richest salt
seams in the mountains. As they walked down into the tunnel they had
made, they would grip their "lamps" in their teeth: long pine sticks
soaked in resin and lighted at the end. Down below, roped bunches of
burning pine lit the work-face. Remains of these torches have been
found, together with many miners' tools, the goatskin sacks they
strapped to their backs for hauling back precious lumps of salt, wooden
buckets, water bags - even a Wagnerian-looking musical instrument made
of horn, used, perhaps, to signal a miner's whereabouts in case of
mishap.
These Iron-Age men used old-fashioned bronze in the mines, for they had
found out that bronze resists salt corrosion better than iron does.
They were prepared to live and work high in the cold and dangerous
mountains in order to get salt, even though contemporary settlements
are almost invariably to be found in sheltered valleys. The miners knew
how and where to find salt, and this gave the Hallstatt Celts an
endlessly useful headstart in trading relations with other people less
fortunate, less energetic, or less informed than themselves.
"God has distributed His benefits in such a manner that there is no
area on the earth so rich that it does not lack all sorts of goods,"
wrote the French political theorist Jean Bodin in 1568. "It appears
that God did this in order to induce all the subjects of His Republic
to entertain friendly relations with one another." For many thousands
of years human beings have longed for salt. Until one hundred years
ago, salt was to be had only from great distances; at the cost of long,
skilled, and watchful labour; or with the aid of enormous courage and
technological expertise. Salt has forced man to explore, to think, to
work, to travel. To obtain salt he has erected whole political and
economic systems; he has fought, built, destroyed, extorted, and 
haggled.
58 

Like corn, salt has received the full blast of modern man's scientific
attention, but until recently salt has been available only in
relatively tiny amounts: its historic importance has been a direct
function of its rarity. Salt has never been thought of as motherly or
bountiful like maize. On the contrary, its mythical character is
habitually dry and sterile. Salt is clever and sly and hard to get; a
little of it goes a very long way. It is a thing of fate and
malediction, both necessary and absolutely irreplaceable.

SALT MINES

In the earliest times, men usually let animals find salt for them. An
outcrop of rock salt was called a salt-"lick" because animals went
there to lick it. When the Europeans came to North America they did not
find it trackless, for buffalo trails had been worn for centuries to
the salt-licks, and it was along these smoothed short-cuts through and
round natural obstacles that the first explorers began to move across
the continent. Amazingly early in human history, men began to dig into
the earth to find salt. All over the world, people like the Hallstatt
miners have tunnelled along salt seams, braving floods, the collapse of
roofs and walls, exhaustion, salt-burn, suffocation, and accidents with
their light-source, fire.
Modern salt-mining has become, in comparison, almost miraculously safe
and productive. In many cases, mining engineers take advantage of what
has always been considered one of the eeriest of the attributes of
salt: the rock is not only edible but it also dissolves, and can be
returned to its solid state again. Water is injected into the salt
seams through tunnels bored from the surface; the brine is pumped out
and then evaporated to produce salt again.
This method, like the digging of rock-salt mines, leaves empty spaces
under the earth where the salt has been removed. A quarter of the city
of Detroit, Michigan, stands over the hollow warrens of a salt mine.
Gigantic glittering vaults, salt pillars, and passages can make awesome
sites for tourists to visit today, and satisfy man's ancient craving
for caves and grottos in the earth. The salt mines of Wieliczka, near
Krakow, Poland, are over a thousand years old. They contain huge
toothed wheels, vast wooden staircases, and support structures worthy
of the imagination of Piranesi. Dance halls have been installed in the
mines;
59

elaborate bas-reliefs in salt decorate the walls, and there are also
chapels, with statues and altars carved in granite-grey sodium
chloride. Part of the mine has become a hospital for sufferers from
respiratory ailments because the temperature and the humidity in the
vaults is ideal and constant. An old salt mine near Erivan in Soviet
Armenia has also become a clinic: the sulfates and other microelements
remaining in its salt walls are considered beneficial in the treatment
of allergies.
For over a hundred and fifty years after the Europeans' arrival in
North America, their increasingly determined hunt for underground salt
deposits was bedevilled by the irritating fact that a discovery of salt
was very often accompanied by a gush of filthy black pitch. A salt-dome
is a vast, seemingly bottomless, column of salt squeezed up from the
earth's depths, often "billowing" near the surface into a dome shape.
In 1901, drilling at a salt-dome in Texas produced the largest spurt of
the black stuff yet seen. But by this time scientists understood the
properties of petroleum, and Spindletop, as the gusher was called,
showed that it was possible to find oil in sufficient quantities to use
it as fuel. So the petroleum industry was born. From this time onwards,
the discovery of salt became precious as one useful pointer to the
possible presence of oil-wells.
Most of the salt-domes in and around the Gulf of Mexico in the United
States have now been explored and a good deal of their associated oil
extracted. Many of the old salt-works, both there and elsewhere in the
United States, are being used as storage facilities, for oil reserves
mostly: old mines are hidden, easily guarded, and use no surface space.
The Underground Vaults and Storage Company of Hutchinson, Kansas, owns
an old salt-mine which it rents out as a depot to anyone who wants to
use it. The survivors of a nuclear war will be able, if they can make
their way to Hutchinson, Kansas, and get 200 metres (650 feet) down
into the salt-shafts, to retrieve an assortment of objects which have
been chosen partly with them in mind. There are seeds of hybrid plants,
the files of various commercial enterprises, secret formulae for making
brand-name products, food for the treasure-finders, and even folding
cots, just in case they bring their babies with them. There is a film
library which includes Gone with the Wind, Polly of the Circus, and
lots of Buster Keaton.
A further use for salt-dome cavities has been suggested recently. Could
we not use these spaces - deepened, or even especially created to store
the ever-mounting quantities of nuclear waste which our en
60 

ergy-hungry age keeps producing? Nuclear waste (which is at present
being, we hope temporarily, stored in steel and concrete tanks) can
remain a radioactive threat for ten thousand years; perhaps we could
safely bury it in a salt-dome, fill the cavity up with salt, and
somehow keep memory of the spot green for thousands of years, so that
no one in future ages will accidentally find their way into a lethal
waste-dump. Salt beds have the advantage of dryness, and tend not to be
present in earthquake-prone areas.
The idea has been seriously considered. One snag is a recent finding
that gamma radiation and heat from waste canisters creates corrosive
acid in salt, and this in turn attacks the protective packaging and in-
creases radiation leakage. American government regulations say that the
packaging around nuclear waste must remain intact for three hundred to
a thousand of the ten thousand dangerous years, so (for the moment) the
idea is in limbo. There is also, unfortunately, a danger of water
leaking into a salt dome: in November 1980 a good deal of a lake
drained away into the shaft of a salt mine under Jefferson Island,
Louisiana, when an oil drill punctured it by mistake. Even keeping
reserves of petroleum in salt cavities is dangerous: in 1980, for
instance, the population of a small town in Texas fled as fumes began
to leak out of the ground. The town was built over a salt-dome which
was being used for storing oil and natural gas products.

SALT GARDENS

Salt is an edible rock- a contradiction in terms. Not only is it mined,
but it is also harvested- and this is another of the ways in which salt
slips out of our net of categories, which customarily pits Hunters and
Gatherers against Agriculturists, and Miners (industrial workers)
against Peasants. Those who make gardens in order to win salt from the
sea must prepare their land with intimate knowledge of its position and
properties, watch the climate with unceasing vigilance, wait for the
crop, remove obstacles in the way of its growth, and bring it in at
precisely the right moment. They must have the shrewdness, the knowhow,
and the patience of farmers, and must run many of the same risks.
A salt garden is a chequerboard of wide shallow basins or "saltings"
created at a place which the sea tide covers in a manageable measure.
Incoming sea water has to be shut out when the ponds contain exactly
61

the right amount of water. They must be kept clean and whole, and the
sea water has to be guided where it ought to go, from basin to basin as
the sun evaporates it to a thickly concentrated "pickle" or
"mother-liquor" from which the salt will crystallize out. Passage
through lime ponds for the deposition of calcium sulfate is followed by
more draining, waiting, washing, storing, and cleaning of salt-ponds so
that the process can begin again.
Rain is a grave set-back for a salt garden: the ponds should, if
possible, be covered before rain comes, and rainwater must be carefully
skimmed off if it falls onto the carefully acquired brine
concentrations. Sun is needed- a great deal of it. Salt, said
Pythagoras, is born of the purest of parents: the sun and the sea. The
end-product of this process is known to the trade as solar salt. This,
probably the oldest of salt-winning techniques, is the one often
preferred where salt is used in religious observance. Ecologically, the
solar method is by far the least damaging way of winning salt, but it
takes time and human labour, and so the practice is gradually dying
out.
Salt is an exceptionally heavy commodity; in the past, people who lived
far from the sea or a salt mine, or on a coast with not enough
sunshine, had to pay high transport costs or find other ways to get
salt. They might burn plants which contained salt, or char brine-soaked
wood and sprinkle the black ash or the powdered burnt wood over their
food. They might leach salt-impregnated peat or sea sand, or, in very
cold climates, concentrate brines by removing ice from them. A very
early method was briquetage. Clay cups of brine were fired until the
water evaporated and the salt hardened; the clay was then broken off
and discarded. Many archaeological sites, from the Second Millennium BC
to quite recent times, are laden with the debris of briquetage.
When Julius Caesar arrived in Britain he was disgusted to find the
natives of Cheshire flinging heated stones into the brine of their salt
springs, and scraping off the resultant salt crusts. He sent for
"salinators" from Rome, and these men taught the Britons to boil their
brine in shallow lead pans over fires-a method which slowly improved,
survived, and is still used today.
If brine is swiftly boiled it produces cubic salt crystals; if it is
gently heated just enough for surface evaporation to take place the
crystals are pyramidal, and to the naked eye look flaky rather than
granular. Surface evaporated salt, as opposed to salt evaporated
mechanically and chemically from the brine, is called "grainer" salt in
North America, and has
62 

survived as a specialty product: it is close enough to the pure solar
salt to be accepted as kosher by Orthodox Jews. It is also highly
sought after by gastronomes, because it is not treated with additives.
"Unrefined," in the perversity of modern language and practice, has
come to be synonymous with "pure."
Most salt used for culinary purposes today is the result of evaporation
of brines by means of sophisticated heating machines. The first
multiple effect salt evaporator was built in the United States in 1899.
The salt is separated from the brine, heated, cleaned, spun and sucked
dry, then mechanically packed and labelled. The process is fast, and
the salt is fine-grained and extremely free from impurities.
Unprocessed sea salt, on the other hand, is grey, with coarse and
irregular grains, and often damp. It is loaded with calcium and
magnesium chlorides which deliquesce and give a slightly bitter,
faster, and sharper taste sensation which is much prized by gourmets.
Salt is hygroscopic: it attracts moisture. This is why the holes in
salt shakers can clog up in damp weather. In the past most salt was
served frankly damp in a dish, and it was taken with the fingers or in
a spoon. Erasmus said it was very impolite to take it with a knife
which had not been cleaned off first on a hunk of bread. But people
would much rather it ran free, so that "When it rains, it pours," which
is the (justified) claim of one of the most successful advertising
slogans ever devised, that for Morton's Salt (1910). For this reason
salt grains are marketed with a coating of chemicals to keep them
separate. A tiny percentage of potassium iodide is also added in areas
such as the Swiss Alps and the North American Great Lakes region, where
there is a deficiency of iodine in the soil and therefore in people's
diet. Iodine deficiency leads to goitre, a swelling of the thyroid
glands at the base of the throat. The iodide is accompanied by a
stabilizing mixture of sodium thiosulfate and calcium hydrate. To
sensitive palates, the result of all the subtractions and additives is
a condiment depleted in complexity as well as in sheer salty taste.
The arts of salt-winning are various, and they are all ancient. Even
modern heating machines serve merely to evaporate, which is a variant
on the old solar or salt-boiling method. Japan is today the only major
industrialized country which has no underground salt beds in its ter-
ritory, although Scandinavia is also chronically short of salt. The
lack is serious, and only partly alleviated by solar salt gardens,
which are annoyingly slow for modern industrialists. Brine-boiling uses
enormous
63

amounts of fuel, which the Japanese do not have. Instead they have come
up with the first really new idea for retrieving salt since prehistory.
This is electro-dialysis; sea water is concentrated into brine by means
of electrically charged membranes. These collect and separate the po-
sitively and negatively charged ions of sodium and chloride, the com-
ponents of common salt; the salt-cleared water is then drained away
from the concentrated brine. The method has been in successful op-
eration, both to obtain salt and to desalinate sea water, since 1965.

THE MYSTERIES OF SALINITY

Most people sitting down to a meal such as the one we are considering
will reach for the salt-cellar, knowing that its contents can enhance
the taste of the corn, the rice, the lettuce, and probably the chicken
as well. Those of us who seem to want more salt than others do were
especially relieved to be told recently that salt is not really as
dangerous as we had been led to believe. For some years we had been
loudly exhorted to curb our appetite for salt and even to cut out salt
altogether, because it raised our blood pressures and caused us to
retain fluids. Which of these claims is true?
The fact is that our desire for salt is little understood; so is our
need for it, and so is the reason for the saltiness of our bodies. It
is usually thought that we are salty - our blood, our sweat, our tears,
our urine, our saliva (the word derives from sal, Latin for "salt"),
are salty - because life began in the sea. We are walking marine
environments, and the appeal of the taste of salt for us is in our
natures.
Consuming salt nevertheless makes us thirsty. It has only recently been
established that the hypothalamus at the base of the brain is what
arouses our desire to drink. This organ measures the concentrations of
sodium and potassium ions in our body's fluids, and when these become
too high because of a loss of water, or if we take in an excess of
sodium as a component of salt, we feel thirst.
Sodium and chloride ions have electrical charges which enable them to
carry current: together they keep the liquids in our cells and their
surroundings in balance, drawing water molecules through membranes when
necessary to hold them in steady quantities. If blood cells were
surrounded by a saltless liquid, water would seep into them through the
membranes and they would burst. The amount of salt itself in the
64 

body is governed by many co-ordinated mechanisms: the kidneys, for
instance, which get rid of excess salt through urination; and sweat
which throws off varying amounts of salt, whatever will suffice to keep
the balance.
A sufficient salt intake for a normal human being is between 1.1 and
3.3 grams a day. But the average European or American customarily eats
as much as ten times that amount; we leave it to our bodies to deal
with the overdose. When "modern" diseases make us worried and we look
round for a "modern" cause, salt is easily pounced upon as the culprit.
Hypertension, and consequent heart and kidney disease and stroke, have
recently been blamed on salt: there must, we feel, be a cost for our
grossly excessive behaviour. Now scientists are saying that merely
cutting back on salt is far too simplistic a solution to hypertension,
and that eating too little calcium or potassium is just as likely to be
harmful to the body. And yet salted foods like cheese (which provides
both calcium and potassium) are often just the things people do without
when they give up salt.
Why is the earth full of salt? We now know that it is full of salt, in
spite of the apparent rarity of the substance which has tantalized man-
kind for so many thousands of years. Almost every country on earth
possesses vast resources of underground salt in seams and domes and
layers often hundreds of metres thick and hundreds of kilometres in
extent. Where did it come from? Many scientists have believed that it
came from the sea. In eons of geological time, oceans have spread then
evaporated, and the salt they left has been folded and rolled, squeezed
and kneaded deep into the earth, or extruded above it as salt mountains
and salt glaciers.
Where did the sea get its salt then?
The sea varies in its salinity, but is, on average, 3.5 per cent salt;
that is enough salt, if it were powdered, to cover the whole earth
thirty-six centimetres (14 ins.) deep. Aristotle's explanation for the
presence of salt was the opposite of the one mentioned previously: the
sea, he thought, began as fresh water, but became salty from rain and
rivers washing salt into it from the earth. Even allowing for the fact
that the sea is constantly depositing some of its salt on the land,
this would mean that the sea would get saltier all the time, and we now
know, from the evidence of tiny pools of sea-water trapped in
sedimentary rock, that the salinity of the oceans has not increased
since at least Cambrian times; it was if anything greater then. And the
fossils of
65

marine life in those rocks are similar to the creatures living in the
sea today; their environment must, therefore, have been not unlike our
ocean. Moreover, rock salt does not contain marine fossils, and this
throws doubt upon its oceanic origin.
Another of salt's mysteries is this: if our bodies need so little, why
do we crave it so much? Unlike the human "sweet tooth," our salt hunger
is shared by animals: cows, for instance, love salt, and will lick a
hole in a wall they find pleasantly salty. Our tongues are well
supplied with salt-tasting buds, and to compound our frailty, saltiness
enhances the taste of sweet things and disguises bitterness. It also
helps make stale or spoiled food edible.
But many peoples have simply never known that salt existed and have
lived perfectly healthy lives without it. Australian aborigines and
American Indians and Inuit often knew no salt. Early human settlements
were apparently not built to be near salt-springs. Human beings, it
seems, learn about salt (and become addicted to it) at a very precise
moment in their history: when they cease being almost exclusively
carnivorous and learn to eat vegetables in quantities usually available
only when they grow them themselves. When people begin not only to eat
a lot of vegetables, but to reduce the salt content in their food by
boiling it- a cooking method which presupposes the ability to make
metal pots that can be set directly over a fire - then salt becomes
more desirable still.
Carnivorous animals and meat-hunting men find enough salt in blood to
satisfy them. Certain African tribes who have never been able to assure
themselves of a salt supply, prick the necks of their living cattle and
drink their blood. There is no immediate need to slaughter a cow for
meat since, alive, she is a sort of walking larder, providing protein
and salt.
It is herbivorous animals that love salt. One theory about the origin
of the domestication of cattle by man is inspired by the "salt tie"
which still operates between reindeer herders and their animals. Cattle
may originally have been taught when very young that they could get
their salt from men. They would then range freely in search of pasture.
Their "owners" needed only to visit them occasionally in the field with
gifts of salt to remind them that they were no longer wild. Men could
then proceed to take advantage of the relationship.
Salt, in myths all over the world, is seen as a "newcomer," an addition
whose necessity is not perceived before it arrives, but which is
intensely
66 

attractive, indeed irresistible, once it is tried. Here, for example,
is a North American Indian myth about the presence of a salt-lick near
the home of the Indian who told it:

Salt used to be far away. He was a man and was travelling through the
country. The Indians never used salt then. He looked ugly all over, and
the people did not like him. He came to a camp and said, "Let me put my
hand in there, then the food will taste well."
"No," said the cook, "I want to eat this, you look too ugly."
He went off to another band and said, "Let me put my hand in here, it
will taste well."
"No, your hand is too dirty."
He came to another band and said the same thing, but people declined
his offer. At last he came to a single man, and he was a cook. He said,
"I want to put my hand into the food, then it will taste better." And
the cook allowed him to do so, and he put in his hand.
"Now taste it." The Indian tasted it and it was good. Salt settled
there and stayed forever, about ten or twelve miles from St. Thomas.

Notice in this story that people are suspicious about salt. For one
thing, eating it is eating earth, and that in itself is peculiar
behaviour. You add it to your food, it disappears, yet it indescribably
alters the taste of everything you eat. Salt is weird, powerful,
dangerous, and "extra." In religious symbolism it is always linked with
"strong," powerful substances like iron or blood. We feel that a little
of it is all we need, that this little has made all the difference, and
that we ought not to abuse the privilege of having it. Furthermore,
adding salt is being clever, and getting salt has always taxed human
intelligence. By the same token we feel that we could easily be tricked
by someone who cunningly adds salt without our knowing it, thus
imparting a sinister attraction to something we ought not to want. When
someone "salts" a mine he wishes to sell, he plants nuggets of gold in
his worthless property for dupes to find.
All these ancient symbolic notes are struck in our modern, apparently
"scientific" distrust of salt in our food. Our readiness to feel uneasy
about the hand of processors in what we innocently buy and ingest is
encouraged by revelations about the salt content of common packaged
foods. We did not know until the alarm was raised recently that instant
chocolate pudding has more salt in it than potato chips, that canned
67

vegetables always receive a mechanically-supplied salt tablet (How
large?) before the can is sealed, that tomato ketchup is a bottled
battlefield for the forces of salt and sugar. Our response is to demand
explanations, to insist on better labelling-and in many cases to switch
to saltless food. And instantly the challenge is accepted by a business
community alert to what it is that people will pay for. A whole new
market has been created, where the sophisticated prestige of "No Salt
Added" replaces the primitive seduction of hidden seasonings.
Salt is both "farmed" like wheat, and "searched for" like game or wild
berries. Bread (grown, harvested, ground, leavened, and baked) and salt
(found, won, collected and efficiently transported) together cover the
field: they represent man as Farmer, patiently and wisely nurturing his
crops, but also as Hunter, Scientist, Adventurer, and Organizer. Bread
and salt are customarily offered in Russia (where the word for
"hospitality" means literally "bread-salt") and in other countries, as
a sign of welcome to a guest: bread and salt symbolize the precious
stores of the house, the fruits of the host's labour, his patience, his
ingenuity, his civilized foresight and preparedness.
Oath-taking, in many cultures, is a ceremony involving salt, just as
the act of swearing may employ blood or iron as a sign denoting a
person's unbreakable word. Salt is shared at table, in a context of
order and contentment. Traditional Bedouin will never fight a man with
whom they have once eaten salt. When the Lord God of Israel made a
covenant with the Jews, it was a Covenant of Salt, denoting an
unalterable bond of friendship. It also meant that the Jews had settled
down in the Promised Land, had ceased to be sheep-herding nomads, and
would now eat the fruit of their harvests, cooked and seasoned with
salt.

KEEPING AND MOVING

Soon after the Arabian camel reached Africa in the fourth century AD,
the peoples of the Mediterranean found a way to reach a new world.
Gold, the immortal metal of kings, was becoming ever scarcer in Europe
and more prized. The Africans away to the south, beyond the Sahara, had
plenty of gold, and apparently thought it nothing special. There was
one thing they did want and could not find for themselves, and the
Arabs and later the Europeans soon found out what it was. And
68 

so the salt caravans began to cross the desert to the salt deposits of
Teghaza in northern Mali. From the eighth century onwards, the three to
four thousand camels in each of these caravans were loaded up by their
Moslem owners with copper pots, woven rugs and clothing, grains and
dried fruit, all of which would later be exchanged for slabs of salt at
Ouadane (Mauritania), Teghaza, and later Taoudeni (Mali). Then they
plodded on, bearing their cargo of salt, to Timbuktu, a place whose
whereabouts was kept secret from the infidels. Timbuktu gradually
became to the European imagination a city of magnificence and mystery.
Explorers dreamed of finding it for hundreds of years; the Frenchman
Rene Caillie finally did in 1828 - and was bitterly disappointed.
Timbuktu was a trading post founded by Tuareg nomads in about 1000 AD,
on a branch of the Niger River. It has no gold, and no salt; it merely
served as a stopping-place for the caravans, a place where guides could
be found for the most secret part of the whole journey. Many days'
travelling out of Timbuktu a place was reached where the Mute Exchange
with the mysterious Africans could begin. First the seller would beat
drums to show he had arrived, leave a heap of saltslabs out, and
retire. In time the buyer would venture forward and leave gold, or
ivory, or sometimes a slave, next to the salt, and then disappear. The
seller looked over the offering and would leave without touching
anything if he was not satisfied. His unseen client would then raise
the offering or remove it. When the seller took the African's offering
he beat his drums again, and the deal was sealed: they never saw each
other or exchanged a word.
When all the trading was done the caravan returned to the sea coast of
Morocco. There the goods it carried (gold dust, ivory, slaves, and goat
skins to be sold as "Morocco" leather) were shipped to the Near East
and to Italy or Spain. The caravan journey had taken about six months.
In this manner, from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries AD, Europe
alone received six metric tons of African gold per year. The gold/salt
trade finally ceased at the end of the nineteenth century, but to this
day caravans from Taoudeni carry salt to Timbuktu.
The Danakil Depression in Ethiopia is a weird moonscape 193 kilometres
(120 miles) long, covered with brilliantly coloured salt hills and
chemically green warm lakes. It bubbles with sulphur springs, geysers,
and volcanic activity. Five thousand Danakil nomads hold traditional
rights to exploit the salt plain. They cut and load salt bricks in the
boiling sun and live for the season in houses made of salt. An ancient
69

trail still leads camels, donkeys, and mules many kilometres up into
the hills for trade with the Ethiopian highlands and beyond. The salt
they carry is used as money; it passes from hand to hand in exchange
for other goods; it increases in value in proportion to its distance
from the salt plain of Danakil. The Aksum Empire of Ethiopia traded
this rich asset with Egyptians, Romans, Arabs, and Indians before the
third century AD, but the exchange is certainly far older. The
incredible exertions of all these people and animals, the intricate
systems of relationship and value, and the vast distances travelled,
are typical effects of the human desire for salt.
Salt towns have always been rich and busy places, and proud of their
special status. The Greek word for salt is hals. Derivatives from this
word often substitute s for h, which is why the Romans called it sal
and we say "salt." Salt names abound for western European towns,
rivers, and hills, and these may be clues to the history of their occu-
pation: Halle, Hallein, Reichenhall, Hallstatt; Ales, Alesia (the
French drop their h's); Salies, Salins, La Salle, Moselle, Salzburg,
Salcott, Salsomaggiore. Salina was the original name of Syracuse, New
York. Malaga is Phoenician for "salt."
At least by the date of the Domesday Book, the Anglo-Saxon term wich
meant "a place where there is salt," so we get Droitwich, Nantwich,
Northwich, Sandwich. Sodom, in the neighbourhood of which Lot's wife
turned into a pillar of salt (petrification, turning into stone, is a
common story-punishment for looking back when you shouldn't - but then,
salt is "rock"), was near to the Dead Sea and to numerous salt mines.
Its name is probably a contraction of Sadeh Adom, meaning "red field"
or "field of blood." The reason may be that when solar salt is
evaporated from brine springs and lakes, the concentrate often turns
bright red because of bacterial action.
Salt towns were often centres for the salting of meat (if inland) or of
fish (by the sea), for salt was man's most useful preservative: without
it he would have suffered greatly during the winters. Until recently,
unless a farmer had enough land to grow his own hay, he had no means of
keeping his cattle alive during the cold months, and thus the feast of
St. Martin, November 11, was the day on which farmers traditionally
slaughtered their animals, salted the meat, and packed it in barrels to
keep. On that day the innards, ground and enclosed in sausage-skins,
were consumed in vast quantities, together with the first of the new
wine. Martinmas was known as the Feast of Sausages and Black Pud
70 

dings. Brined pork-in-the-barrel was a precious source of meat and fat
for soups,,garbures, sauerkrauts, and cassoulets through the winter.
The pork-barrel was also to become a North American institution,
together with "pork barrelling," which meant doling out tasty morsels
of jobs or patronage to one's friends. Beef was often "corned," or
covered with large salt crystals. (The Old Norse word korn meant a
grain-sized lump of anything.)
Ocean fish was salted as soon as it was caught. Fresh sea fish was not
available to anyone who lived away from the coast until the arrival of
modern transport and refrigeration. Salted foods were big business so
big that not even wars interrupted trade. The northern Protestant
countries of Europe supplied a great deal of salted fish to the
Catholic southern countries for consumption during Lent and the rest of
the year, all through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries. But the north (where the fishing was excellent and
efficient) needed solar salt from the warm south in order to send back
their herring and haddock (both words may derive from hals, and mean
"salted"), and cod. And the south-mainly the western coasts of France,
Spain, and Portugal-supplied salt through all the long wars of those
centuries, to the profit and satisfaction of everybody involved.
The chemistry of salt's preservative action is still not completely ex-
plained. It prevents spoiling microbes from living where it is present,
but, used in the correct amounts, it also promotes the growth of lactic
acid bacteria, and this helps products like salted cabbage to ferment
into sauerkraut. Salt penetrates moisture-filled meat, fish, or
vegetables. It also causes blood and water to run out (in this role
salt renders meat kosher in Jewish observance), and in sufficient
quantities it will dry flesh and skin completely. Blood extraction and
the prevention of decomposition make salt vital in the curing and
tanning of leather - just as it was an important ingredient in the
Egyptian recipe for mummification.
Its role in seasoning and food preservation made salt so necessary that
people were willing to travel punishing distances to get it. But
without salt, and its ability to keep food, long journeys would them-
selves have been impossible. People carried hard nutritious cheese and
salted beef-dry, light, delicious, and edible without cooking-when they
had to travel lightly and did not know where the next meal was
available. Salting made food exportable. The fish of faraway Newfound-
land was worth catching for consumption in Europe because, with a
certain amount of careful organization, it could be salted.
71

From the end of the fifteenth century, Basque, French, Dutch, and
English fishermen were hauling in Newfoundland cod, the most bountiful
catch mankind has ever recorded. (From the sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries cod made up 60 per cent of all fish eaten in Europe.) Fishing
fleets called in and loaded up with salt at Spanish and Portuguese
ports before sailing across the Atlantic. Once caught, the fish was cut
up, cleaned, and salted right in the fishing boats, which were filled
to the brim with their load. This "green" cod was often dried as
bacalao, either when the ship returned to Europe or at facilities set
up on the Newfoundland coast itself. Some of the fish was taken to the
Caribbean, where it fed slaves on cotton and sugar plantations. The
boats, emptied first of their salt, then of their cod, now took
molasses on board, and cotton and rum, for the journey back to Europe.
Salt caused travel, used trade channels, and simultaneously facilitated
both travel and trade. Caribbean people still have a taste for salt
cod. And Portuguese fishing boats still arrive in Newfoundland ports
loaded with salt to preserve their cod-catch from the Grand Banks.
Salting food is now a relatively minor industry: Parma ham, brandade de
morue, conserved goose have become gourmet treats where once they were
peasants' standbys. The modern method of keeping food is by
refrigeration, which means that not only can we keep perishable goods,
but we can supply them for sale far away from their place of origin.
But salt has not been dislodged from its central role in the keeping
and moving of food, for the freezing process itself depends on sodium
chloride. Salt's combined melting and temperature-lowering action upon
ice and water has the effect of removing latent heat from adjacent
substances. It is mixed with crushed ice in refrigerated railroad cars,
and later in our meal we will see that it is used in the same way in
the old-fashioned method of making ice-cream. In fact, ice itself is
manufactured by salt brines, cooled through alternately compressed and
expanded ammonia or other gases. Liquid sodium, one of the two main
ingredients of common salt, is what is used to cool nuclear reactors.
Even the roads travelled on in cold climates depend these days upon
salt to clear them of ice and snow and keep traffic moving. When salt
is thrown onto snow, some salt dissolves and some ice melts to produce
brine. Each salt grain melts a path downward through the ice for
itself, forming brine on the way. When the brine hits the pavement it
spreads out and melts the bond between the pavement surface and the ice
over it, making it easy to break the ice and throw it aside.
72 

Finally, as the Hallstatt miners knew, the presence of salt makes
metals rust. Our cars are attacked by the salt laid down to clear a way
for them, because salt increases the solubility and therefore the
availability of the cause of corrosion, which is oxygen.

TAXES

Salt was one of the first articles traded by man. Ever since the
earliest pact was reached, many thousands of years ago, between people
who had salt and people who had none, salt has been one of the most
manipulated, most politicized substances on earth. The world's oldest
trade routes often had the principal aim of connecting salt resources
to human habitations. One of these is the Via Salaria or Salt Road,
which connected the saltings of the port of Ostia with Rome and the far
Adriatic; it is one of the oldest roads in Italy. Salt has been sold in
lumps, loaves, tablets, bricks, and grains. It has helped make the
fortunes of towns, countries, and whole civilizations. The word
"salary" dates from the Roman distribution of salt as part of their
soldiers' pay; an inadequate person, we still say, is "not worth their
salt." Marco Polo saw salt, moulded into cakes and stamped with the
imperial seal of the Great Khan, used as money in Tibet.
Many wars have been waged over salt. Morocco fought Mali in the
sixteenth century for the mines of Taoudeni; the Venetians, whose salt
interests are an historical study in themselves, destroyed Comacchio in
the tenth century and the salt gardens of Cervia in the fourteenth;
pirates throughout the centuries ambushed and raided the slow heavy
convoys of salt ships. Cortes and his Spaniards found important allies
for their conquest of Mexico in the Tlaxcalan people, to whom they
offered access to salt and cotton. The Tlaxcalans hated Montezuma and
the Aztecs, says a sixteenth-century source, because "they ate no salt,
since there was none in their country, nor were they allowed to buy it
anywhere else, nor did they wear any cotton clothing...." It was the
Aztecs who kept these people from salt and from their favourite
clothing material; even tyrannical foreigners seemed to them useful
allies against their oppressive neighbours.
One of the ways in which governments have made themselves useful is in
assuring all their subjects sufficient salt from a common store and at
a standard price by monopolizing all salt sources and their
distributing
73

mechanisms. The ancient Egyptians had a salt monopoly, as did China
from the seventh century BC. Salt was also one of the first commodities
to be taxed.
"The art of taxation," said the seventeenth-century French statesman
Jean Baptiste Colbert, "consists of plucking the goose so as to obtain
the most feathers with the least hissing." Colbert could not have
spoken of taxation without an implied reference to the Gabelle, the
famous French salt tax. He could not, perhaps, have guessed that his
particular goose would one day do a great deal more than hiss.
The Gabelle was instituted in 1259 by Charles of Anjou in Provence, in
imitation of the Arabs, who were the first since the fall of Rome to
re-introduce the concept of salt monopoly and salt taxing. (Al quabala,
"tax" in Arabic, is the origin of the word Gabelle.) The French kings
began to use the system in the fourteenth century, and it spread all
over Europe. France kept on using it in spite of inefficiencies,
irritations, abuses, and riots, even despite its status as one of the
causes of the French Revolution, until 1945. (Its abolition by the
Revolution lasted only fifteen years.)
Taxing salt had definite advantages. Salt sources were always well
known, and salt transportation a cumbrous business which could easily
be regulated: salt was taxed at frontiers and on entry to provinces and
towns. Everybody ate salt in more or less equal amounts, so everyone
paid the tax equally. (This is repugnant to our concept of taxing ac-
cording to income; we should recall, however, that in the fourteenth
century very few people had what we would call an income, and not
everyone "without an income" was poor.) Honey can take the place of
sugar, and margarine may be used instead of butter; but there is no
substitute for salt. Demand for it, in the economic jargon of our own
day, was "inelastic": taxation could therefore realize dependable sums
without changing people's buying habits.
The salt tax was never accepted with docility. If the theorT of the
Gabelle is a lesson in crude economics, the history of it is also a
lesson in tax evasion. People pretended to have lost their stores of
salt in rain storms and household accidents, they clandestinely made
their own salt by digging for it or by evaporating brine, they sold
inferior salt at superior prices, smuggled it, and passed it to each
other in secret. In England and Scotland, "every year 10,000 people are
seized for salt smuggling," wrote the Earl of Dundonald in 1785, "and
300 sent to the gallows for contraband trade in salt and tobacco." He
thought civilized
74 

people should tax hearths (as England had once done) instead of salt,
for a hearth did not move around, and its owner was rich enough to own
a house. A salt tax was almost as thorough as a census: everyone paid,
rich and poor alike. The principle was thought important enough to
warrant forcing each person to buy a certain amount of salt. And when
the government needed more money, people were simply required to buy
more salt. (We recall that originally salt monopolies were invented to
assure each person's supply. ) Enforcement of a salt tax cannot be
achieved without violation of privacy: inspectors would search people's
houses, peer into families' cooking-pots, and haul offenders away from
their dinner tables.
in 1825, after four hundred years of resentment, England abolished her
salt tax. She was the first country to do so. The impetus was the
growth of her empire, the Industrial Revolution, and the advancement of
technology which was to reverse totally the role of salt in human
history. Not much earlier, however, Britain had monopolized salt in
India; in 1863 she abandoned the monopoly (already very unpopular in
the colony) and imposed a salt tax. She simultaneously began exporting
Cheshire salt to India, to sell it there at the same price as India's
own product.
Home salt-making- even looking for salt- now became a crime in India;
the malangts or salt evaporators became almost extinct as a class. For
many years unrest and real suffering grew in intensity. Poor Indian
peasants, with their vegetarian and frequently monotonous diet, had a
great hunger for salt. In 1923, almost a century after Britain had
abolished the tax in her own country, the British government, with
singular callousness, doubled India's salt tax. Many British
parliamentarians protested, with no result.
When Mahatma Gandhi was asked by the All India Congress Committee to
initiate a "call to action," he made a theatrically brilliant decision.
He began a three-week pilgrimage to the sea, gathering followers as he
went. On April 6, 1930, Gandhi reached Dandi Beach in Gujarat. After a
ceremonial sea bath (salt water, like salt itself, means purity),
Gandhi began to pick up salt incrustations which lay free for the
taking on the beach. India's fight for independence had begun.
Satyagrahis (non-violent activists) undertook to get India's salt and
sell it free of tax. They carried it from the beaches in their fists;
police had no other way of confiscating it than to snatch it from them,
handful by handful. Many were beaten and imprisoned; many more kept
taking
75

their place. The movement grew; satyagrahi salt, people said, was "as
pure as blood." Valuable jewellery was given away in exchange for a
lump of salt wrapped in a leaf. Women came out of purdah to violate the
salt laws; foreign salt was dumped into the sea; there were strikes,
pickets, and giant meetings.
Finally Lord Irwin, Viceroy of India, made a pact with Gandhi in March
1931. People living near the salt sands and solar salt ponds could, as
a result of this agreement, collect salt, or make their own, and sell
it in local villages. The most irritating aspect of the salt tax - the
prevention of free domestic use- was thus alleviated, although the com-
mercial tax remained. At the signing of the pact, Irwin drank Gandhi's
health with a cup of tea, but the Mahatma asked for a glass of lemon
juice and water, and added a pinch of salt. With superb timing and his
instinct for the perfect symbol, he had tested his theory of
non-violent resistance, and he now judged that the Indian people were
ready and able to embark on the process of making the British leave
India.

SYMBOLIC SALT

Salt is the only rock directly consumed by man. It corrodes but pre-
serves, desiccates but is wrested from the water. It has fascinated man
for thousands of years not only as a substance he prized and was
willing to labour to obtain, but also as a generator of poetic and of
mythic meaning. The contradictions it embodies only intensify its power
and its links with experience of the sacred.
Salt brings flavour to life, and people accustomed to salt find their
food tasteless, flat, and dull without it. This is the point of the
folktale from which Shakespeare derived Kin,g Lear. In the original
story, the youngest daughter of the king, unlike her articulate and
dishonest sisters, tells her father that her love for him is not like
silver or gold, as they had claimed, but "like salt." Enraged, he
throws her out of the palace. She eventually is to be married, and
invites the king (who does not know who she is or recognize her under
her veil) to the wedding feast. She has ordered all the food to be
prepared without salt. The king, finding the dinner inedible, weeps for
his youngest daughter and finally understands how important a pinch of
humble salt is to man's happiness. She identifies herself, the two are
reconciled- and presumably the salt-cellars are produced with a
flourish. The story shows that
76 

a daughter's sincere love is unassertive and may be taken for granted,
but it is dependable and irreplaceable. In refusing or in losing it, a
father is left without the kind of thing that gives zest to life.
When Jesus called his followers "the salt of the earth," he was telling
them that they were irreplaceable, and that their mission was to give
people what makes life worth living. There were few of them, but they
were sufficient to season the whole earth, as a very little salt or a
tiny bit of leaven is enough. They and their message would persevere
and endure, as salt is the great conserver, the image of permanence.
Jesus went on immediately, in Matthew's Gospel, to use an image of
light. The two metaphors are connected both by opposition (salt is in
the earth, light must be raised on high; salt is tasted while light is
seen), and by similarity, for salt has always been associated with fire
and brightness.
Salt, once isolated, is white and glittering. It is the opposite of
wet. You win it by freeing it from water with the help of fire and the
sun, and it dries out flesh. Eating salt causes thirst. Dryness, in the
preSocratic cosmic system which still informs our imagery, is always
connected with fire, heat, and light.
For the alchemists, common salt (one of the elements of matter) was
neither masculine nor feminine but neuter: the edible rock always has
something a little inhuman about it; it disconcertingly sits astride
categories. Salt does have to do with sex, however, because it is a
dynamic substance which both alters itself and causes change. Like sex,
it is exciting and dangerous and gives pleasure. Salt comes out of the
sea like the goddess of sex, Aphrodite, whose name the ancient Greeks
thought meant "sea-foam-born." In European folk custom, impotence has
traditionally been cured by a hilarious, bawdy salting of the disob-
ligmg member by a crowd of women.
Often priests or mourners or people who are in a state of crisis those
whom society has marginalized, for whatever reason -must observe a
taboo on salt. Eating no salt, which is often accompanied by sexual
continence, means a fight to maintain equilibrium at a time of
turbulence and difficulty, when one has no need of the dynamic. It also
means that one has left society, rejecting the enticements and the com-
forts of civilization, or that one intends to dramatize a profound dis-
content with the way society is conducting itself.
Salt represents the civilized: it requires know-how to get it, and a
sophisticated combination of cooking and spoilt, jaded appetites to
need. Its sharp taste suggests sharpness of intellect and liveliness of
mind.
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Salt (bright, dry, titillating, and dynamic) is synonymous in several
languages with wit and wisdom.
It preserves things from corruption - even as it corrodes other things
with its bite. A little of it fertilizes the land; a lot sterilizes it.
Because salt stops rot and because it is fiery, salt is intrinsically
pure. It is the child of the sun and the sea, two basic symbols of
cleanliness and purity. Salt keeps meat safe for the winter and so
feeds man; it is, therefore, a blessing. Salt also means barrenness,
and it is, therefore, used for cursing. Its imperishable rock-nature,
and its purity and wisdom make it the material of oaths and covenants,
which guarantee, if the swearer breaks his oath, that malediction will
fall upon him.
Salt as covenant-sealer signifies friendship and hospitality. The
silver salt-cellar was a central and often highly decorative ornament
on the banquet tables of all rich European families: it marked off the
close friends of the family from those "below the salt," who were not
considered worthy of such intimacy. When someone inadvertently spills
salt, it is considered unlucky because it signifies enmity and
malediction. Leonardo da Vinci followed this tradition in his fresco of
the Last Supper when he depicted Judas as upsetting the salt-cellar.
Here as before, however, salt is powerfully contradictory: because it
is pure and strong, it counteracts malediction. Witches hate salt. They
never served it at their sabbaths, and if you put some under a witch's
cushion she could not sit down: this was considered a sure-fire method
of finding out whether someone was a witch or not. Devils also detest
it. Therefore, if you are unlucky enough to spill salt, all you have to
do is throw some over your left shoulder (where all bad spirits con-
gregate) and the evil will be undone. An owl's cry is a malediction: to
neutralize it, one has to sprinkle salt on the bird's tail.
Until recently, salt was part of the Roman Catholic baptismal ceremony
(Luther banned it as Popish superstition). A few grains were placed on
the baby's tongue to signify purity, endurance, wisdom, power,
uniqueness ("You are the salt of the earth"), and protection from evil.
It was a sign of God's friendship and his power over Satan.

SALT AND MODERN TECHNOLOGY

Humphry Davy succeeded in separating the components of common
salt in 1810. There was chlorine, a poisonous greenish gas; and sodium,
a silvery quasi-liquid metal which burst into flame when it touched
78 

water, was corrosive for inorganic matter, and absolutely lethal to
anything living. No conceivable use could be imagined for either
ingredient, and each was so violently reactive that it could barely be
contained or stored under laboratory conditions. People marvelled that
the contents of their dinner-table salt-cellars should be shown to be
so dreadful. Humphry himself was to inspire, in a bored
sixteen-year-old chemistry student called E. Clerihew Bentley, the very
first clerihew (the verse form has since become traditional, like the
limerick):

Sir Humphry Davy Abominated, gravy. He lived in the odium Of having
discovered Sodium.

It took many decades for the effects of the splitting of salt to take
hold, but the truth was that salt would never look the same again, and
the earth has never recovered from the shift in human perception; maybe
it never will.
The power of chlorine was found to be applicable as a textile bleach,
and this was to remain its principle function for a hundred years. The
production of this chlorine from salt entailed, of course, the piling
up of the noxious left-over sodium. Scientists began to search for a
use for sodium.
Potash had been an ingredient since ancient times in the making of soap
and glass. But in the eighteenth century a new function for potash was
found in the creation of saltpetre for gunpowder. Whole forests were
burned in Europe and her colonies to obtain potash for military use;
glass and soap had increasingly to depend on natural soda to replace
potash. This led to a shortage of soda - just at a time when soap,
rather than lye, was increasingly in demand for household laundry:
people living in cities had no access to wood, and lye cannot be made
of coal ashes. The French chemist Michel-Eugene Chevreul discovered the
nature of the action of alkali upon fat in the making of soap, and his
compatriot Nicolas Leblanc developed a method of making soda (alkali)
out of the previously maligned sodium. Waste had been turned to gold.
Artificial soda factories in Manchester by the 1850S were pouring out
hydrochloric acid fumes and the "rotten egg" gas, hydrogen sulphide.
These, combined with smoke from two million tons of coal burned per
year, provoked the earliest dazed realization that perhaps a problem
was being born. A use was urgently sought for the unfortunate by
79

product of artificial soda, hydrochloric acid. It was found at last in
the dye industry.
Meanwhile, research into further uses for sodium went on. Soda or
sodium hydroxide were found to be effective in extracting aluminium
from its ore - the first new major metal extracted from the earth in
two thousand years. Then sodium hydroxide was applied to cellulose to
create rayon, the first artificial textile. From this time on, sodium
was admitted to be a highly productive chemical. Chlorine became a
sideeffect of sodium hydroxide production, and a use had now to be
sought for the mounting quantities of it.
In the early twentieth century, chlorine's bleaching properties were
applied not only to textiles but also to wood-pulp for the paper-making
industry. Then it was found that chlorine could disinfect water. But
chlorine finally burst into stardom when it became indispensable in the
making of vinyls and other plastics, solvents, pesticides and
herbicides, and in the cooling, braking, and "anti-knock" fluids used
in automobiles.
Chlorine is the basis of various defoliants and poisons for gas
warfare; its compound chloroform was considered a miraculous
pain-killer (until it was found to be more dangerous than ether). It is
part of carbon tetrachloride, which was extensively used as a
dry-cleaning spirit until other chemicals replaced it. Refrigerant
fluids now depend upon chlorine as does the gas in aerosol cans.
Plastic, pesticides, the aerosol can: all are the progeny of chlorine -
and therefore of common salt.
We met pesticides and herbicides in the history of corn, as the
miracleworkers of the modern "Green Revolution." They are chlorinated
hydrocarbons, man-made substances which have not so far been found in
nature. They are not, therefore, unmade by nature either: they are
"non-biodegradable" substances which, after use, add to the ever-grow-
ing quantity of wastes we cannot get rid of. In addition, the huge
amount of chlorine required to make plastics, pesticides, aerosol cans,
solvents, and other things leaves behind the rest of the salt from
which it has been derived. The disposal problem, in other words, has
reversed itself and reappeared: since 1970, sodium hydroxide (from
which chlorine had been the unfortunate refuse) has become an excessive
waste product of chlorine. What now shall we do with the unused sodium
hydroxide. . . ?
Because of the salting of our roads, and the necessity for "automotive
fluids," for aluminium, and for plastics in every car, the automobile
is the world's largest consumer of salt. (We recall that the history of
80 

petroleum, the fuel of the automobile, is also part of the history of
salt. ) Road-salting, which in the United States meant the sprinkling
of thirtythree kilograms of salt per head of population in 1974, has
now become so extravagant and widespread that it amounts to an actual
redistribution of terrestrial salt. Fresh-water lakes receive hundreds
of tons of salt run-off annually. The saline content of Lake Erie, for
instance, increased five times between 1939 and 1971, mostly because of
road salting.
Some of the richest farmland on earth is to be found in California. Two
spectacularly fertile areas, the Imperial and the San Joaquin valleys,
were once the possessors of deep dry soils with no water supply. They
have been brought to life by vast artificial irrigation schemes. In
1901, the Imperial Valley began to be watered from the Colorado River,
which had deposited its silts to create the rich soil in the first
place, then changed its course. Thousands of miles of canals now carry
water to every corner of the Valley, which produces feed-lots of grass
for fattening cattle, and billions of vegetables of every kind, which
are transported in refrigerated rail-cars for sale in every state in
the United States and all over Canada. Because the Colorado River is a
turbulent flooder, it has twice been dammed - by the Hoover Dam and the
Imperial Dam - sotliat the water can be further controlled.
But the Colorado, because of the salty desert lands through which it
flows, is also an unusually salty river. It carries with it the
salt-laden run-off from other irrigated areas on its route, and
evaporation from the huge dammed lakes concentrates its salinity
further. A sixty-five hectare (160-acre) cotton field in one growing
season receives about 1,800 metric tonnes (2,000 tons) of salt with the
water of the Colorado, and the amount is steadily increasing in spite
of vast funds being poured into desalination projects. The story of the
San Joaquin Valley is similar, although on an even larger scale. When
two huge new water projects are complete, nearly two million metric
tonnes of salt will be deposited in the Valley, along with the water,
every year.
Holland has a comparable problem: its underground soils are already
salted by sea water, and its fresh-water source is the salty and
chemicalladen Rhine. Egypt's Aswan Dam has eliminated the periodic
flooding of the Nile, which used to wash salts out of the region's
topsoil. A vast new drainage system to combat salt build-up is now
being constructed at a cost of a billion dollars. It will be able to
correct salt damage to part of one small valley only. It is estimated
that salt spread by irrigated
81

agriculture will have destroyed between 50 and 65 per cent of all arti-
ficially watered land on earth before the end of this century.
The only remedies seem to be better drainage, and the leaching of the
excess salt from the soil by pouring millions of gallons of fresh water
over and through it. But the drainage schemes to cost more than the
original irrigation systems did; and unpolluted water is swiftly
becoming a precious commodity, not to be wasted as a mere washing
facility for salty soil. Scientists are fighting to find salt-resistant
hybrid strains of cotton, of lettuce, of tomatoes, and the rest - so
far without success. Salt-tolerant strains of food plants simply
produce too little, and no one yet has found a way out of what appears
to be nature's rule: the higher the growth rate, the more
salt-sensitive a plant will be. The most promising work being done at
the moment is in juggling high-saline and less-saline water with the
periods of plant life-cycles. For instance, low-salt water is kept for
the germination of seedlings, high-salt water being permitted when the
plant reaches six inches high, and so on. Relatively salt-resistant
plants which remove some of the salt from the soil, are rotated with
sensitive ones, and sloped beds are furrowed with salt-collecting
depressions which are later flushed out to help cleanse the soil of
salt. The organization and the technological cunning required to work
all this out and to balance the whole panoply of strategies and varying
conditions become more complex and expensive year by year.
Before 1850, everyone knew what salt was for: men ate it, shared it
with their cattle, and used it to preserve food. It was complicated and
often dangerous to get it and to supply it; most people received it in
very limited quantities at the end of a long and hard journey. Ever
since 1850, there has been a universal and continuous increase in human
consumption of salt. The salt industry has been called "perhaps the
most tangible realization of the ideology of perpetual growth."
From time to time the public becomes aware of a strange new word, the
name of a pollutant which is scarcely known outside laboratories and
chemical catalogues until something nasty leaks onto a highway or
spills into drinking water or poisons the air and forces its way into
everyday human conversation. Most of these chemical pollutants (ef-
ficient in their place but lethal and where else) are in some way or
other salt-derived, with chlorine or sodium designated in their
unwieldy names. Examples are chlorinated phenols and the notorious
poly-chlorinated biphenyls (PCBS).
82 

The use of salt for culinary purposes has become "statistically insig-
nificant" in relation to the quantities in demand for industry. The
making of solar salt has declined dramatically because modern mining
methods are increasingly fast, efficient, and similar all over the
world. The ancient, almost esoteric arts of salt-winning have become
completely inadequate to produce the huge tonnages of salt now required
for industry. Trade in salt has dwindled, for with modern boring and
geological expertise, any country can find its own salt deposits, which
we now know to exist in or near most regions in the world.
The earth contains almost inconceivable quantities of salt: here is one
resource we need never fear using up. However, getting salt and using
it requires energy. Even primitive salt-boiling uses vast amounts of
fuel: in its time the practice has caused timber shortages, wood- and
coal-smoke pollution, and even human migrations. The principle fuel for
modern chemical industries is oil rather than wood, and the main raw
material for many chlorinated chemicals is also petroleum-but
petroleum, unlike salt, is not inexhaustible, and unlike wood, is not
renewable.
Salt, whose strangeness has always awed men's minds, has never been
less understood by ordinary people. Its secrets have become the
preserve of chemists, whose complex and arcane skills cut them severely
off from the comprehension of most of us. At the same time, never has
common salt more effectively ruled human behaviour. The familiar
salt-cellar appears at times to have unleashed a double demon with
whose dance we Sorcerer's Apprentices can barely keep up. If we are
ever to gain the upper hand, we shall have to exorcize him, salt his
tail with sodium chloride, the ancient symbol of wisdom itself.
83

Chapter Three

Butter--and Something "Just as Good"

FRESH SWEET CORN boiled and eaten straight off the cob, is a
dish so simple that it is scarcely appropriate to call it a "dish" at
all. Because of this, and because we are allowed to dispense almost
entirely with utensils in the process, eating corn off the cob makes us
feel robust, earthy, and in touch with nature and basic rock-bottom
reality. But the delicious, simple, honest corn cob is in fact the
crowning achievement of enormous human efforts of will, imagination,
foresight, drive, and relentless, obsessive selectivity - to say
nothing of the inconceivable complexities of "simple" nature. The pinch
of salt we sprinkle over the corn is an ancient symbol of creative
ingenuity, and today more than ever representative of human
technological ambition.
Finally, with a lordly gesture, we douse our corn in butter. The rows
of kernels, rounded and yellow like little butter pats themselves, are
anointed with a golden semi-solid fat which melts and trickles over the
corn, lubricating it, rounding out its flavour, and completing its
appeal.
84 

It is exceedingly difficult for us to achieve opportunities to revel in
the experience of extreme simplicity. And it is not easy either to
describe or to account for our own culture's particular predilection
for buttera loyalty so fierce and so unreasoning that it is called, by
those opposed to it, the "butter mystique."
Butter is the creme de la creme, the quintessence of the risen richness
of milk itself, and as such has traditionally belonged to the exclusive
category of "best" things: "top," "opulent," "pure" things. Even for
cultures that almost never eat it, butter often achieves an aura of
medicinal and cosmetic power; among the butter-eaters, that minority of
people who originate in the steppes and the cold north, it has always
had regal status as a substance both unique and splendidly filling.
In some respects butter has only one peer among foodstuffs, and that is
honey. Milk and honey are the only substances people commonly eat which
are created by animals specifically to feed their young. Butter is
thick and golden. So is honey, which in many religions is the nearest
thing to the food of the gods themselves. Butter and honey are
delicious together: they complement each other, and harmonize with each
other. They are the ultimate fat and the original sugar, products of
land which is rich and fertile (and may be said to "flow with milk and
honey"). Our enjoyment of them demonstrates human domination over the
animal kingdom. At the same time, neither butter-making nor honey-
collecting necessarily entails the guilt which men have sometimes, in
their more thoughtful moments, suffered when they killed animals to
feed themselves.
Butter has it both ways: not only is it a fat, and as such broadly
delectable; it also comes haloed with all the complexities and
perversities of status. The immediate appeal of grease resembles that
of sugar: it is so easy to like it that "good taste" (that ineffable
and therefore unattackable bastion of the elite) is always very quick
to find it disgusting. The German word Schmalz usually means lard, but
includes the very finest fat, which is butter; in Yiddish it means most
commonly chicken fat. The term in English now denotes (as it can in
German and Yiddish) a far-too-easy and therefore repulsive
sentimentality, of the kind we also describe as "sugary." Too many
people like it; they pile it on; it is offensive to the superior few
who have plenty available and are therefore sickened by excess. But the
Germans still have an expression which most aptly describes the other
side of the coin: something
85

ohne Salz und Schmalz, without salt and grease, is boring and wishy-
washy.
In spite of modern struggles against obesity and the consequent
revulsion of people of taste from most fats wherever they are
detectable, butter still maintains the "high" connotations which it has
inherited from the past. Butter has always seemed magical because of
the mystery of its solidification out of milk. Absolutely nothing else
is made like this, or from such a noble substance as milk. Butter is
irreproachable, unique, and irreplaceable. In this it is like salt,
except that salt, as earth, is strange in being edible, whereas milk's
prime function is to feed. Corn, as we now normally eat it, is either
white or yellow. Salt is white. Milk is white, butter yellow, honey
gold. For us the colours white and gold have distinct meanings, but
they both signify purity, delectableness, even heavenliness.
Industrialized modern civilizations, whether capitalist or communist,
find it extremely difficult to accept that anything is either unique or
irreplaceable. The myth is egalitarian, and the ostensible goal is
either universal availability of everything, or absolute
interchangeability, or both. This means that the claims of anything
either to rarity or to having no substitute must instantly be
questioned. Salt has remained irreplaceable, but it has been found to
be anything but scarce - indeed we risk being salted to death if we do
not take care: the battle against the rarity of salt is definitely
over.
The "butter mystique" is challenged by margarine, a substance born of
the industrial age, expressive of technological claims and methods, and
one which relentlessly contests the notion that the quality of butter
is inimitable. But the old monarch refuses to be dislodged, and has not
been above using some thoroughly disreputable tactics in the battle.
The ferocity in itself should alert us to the fact that there is a
great deal more going on here than a simple scrap for a market between
butter and margarine.

BUtTER MAkiNG

The first cooking pots were containers found in nature: pods, husks,
gourds, shells, and animal skins. Since butter as it separates from
milk
is a highly perishable commodity, the extensive use of it is usually
found
86 

in cold countries, and among people who herd animals for a living. It
is perfectly possible that butter was first discovered by travellers
carrying whole milk in animal-skin containers, who opened their pouches
after a long bumpy trip to find the miracle had occurred: the milk had
spontaneously turned into butter and a thin, still drinkable liquid,
buttermilk. People had only to reproduce the jouncing and agitating of
milk to create butter whenever they wanted it. Until very recently in
the Middle East, butter churning was often done by street vendors,
squatting before a paunch full of milk suspended on cords from a stick
tripod, which the milkman shook and jiggled till he could hear that the
butter had "come" inside.
It takes about twenty litres of milk to churn out one kilogram of
butter. Exactly how churning works is still unclear. The process
involves breaking down the foam produced by the incorporation of air
into whipped cream by continuing to beat the mass at a temperature
between 12ø and 18 C. (53ø and 64 F ) Membranes which keep globules of
fat apart in the cream are first softened then broken; the fat begins
to coagulate, and emulsifiers such as lecithin from the ruptured
membranes help burst bubble walls in the foam, so allowing all the fat
to mass together. The finished butter, separated from its buttermilk,
is an immensely complex system of water droplets, air bubbles, milk fat
crystals and free (non-crystalline) fat. Butters can vary a good deal,
because of the churning, in density and spreadability (that is, in the
ordering of their molecular composition) as well as in taste.
The Celts, whom we have already met mining their salt at Hallstatt in
modern Austria, are thought to have had much to do with introducing the
technology of butter-churning to the areas of modern Europe, such as
modern Germany, France, and Britain, which they influenced for over a
millennium before Christ. They were expert barrel and churn makers, and
their access to salt must early on have given them the means of
preserving butter.
Hand churning always called for both strength and discernment. The
simplest of the European butter churns, invented early in the Middle
Ages and commonly in use well into the nineteenth century, was a narrow
upright wooden tub with a lid, through the centre of which ran a long
wooden rod fitted with a perforated attachment at the bottom. The
dairymaid stood over the tub and pounded this plunger or dasher up and
down in the cream till the sound and the feel of the contents told her
the butter had formed in globules of the correct size.
87

The regularity, the precise speed, and the length of the strokes were
important. Churning had to be done at the right time of the morning or
evening to ensure that the temperature was correct; the process could
take hours in hot or stormy weather.
The butter when ready was collected, kneaded, and pummelled to expel
any beads of buttermilk still enclosed in the fat. Then it was "flung"
into pots for home use, or salted and packed into firkins or barrels
for sale. When people made their own butter, every town and every
household provided a different product. Each region preferred a
distinctive traditional shape - round, rectangular, or cubed; and every
farm had a carved wooden stamp for marking its merchandise. In Cam-
bridgeshire, butter was cylindrical, passed through a ring gauge and
sold by the yard. Butter also came in pieces the size and shape of an
egg, which is why old-fashioned recipes often awkwardly demand that you
should "take a piece of butter the size [sometimes this is changed to
the "weight"] of an egg...."
After the butter had been made, the buttermilk could be heated and its
remaining solid content strained off to make hard cheese. Those who
could afford to feed buttermilk to their pigs produced prime quality
pork. (The "buttermilk" sold in North American supermarkets today is an
entirely different product, made of pasteurized skim milk with a
culture added to thicken it and increase its lactic acid content.)
Dairy work included milking, making cream and butter, and also the
sophisticated art of making cheese. In Europe it was always done by
women. The word "dairy" is from Middle English dey- a female servant.
The dairy was associated with the house as opposed to the lands; "in-
side" has always been female in the Western imagination, and "outside"
male, so that the man's place was in the public eye while the woman's
was at home. Also, milk was perhaps considered self-evidently a woman's
affair.
A "cool hand" was the term used for giftedness in butter-making:
kneading butter required swift, firm movements and a low temperature.
When a farmer from an English county like Cheshire, famous for its
dairy produce, sought a wife, he chose brawn over delicacy every time.
In one village it was traditional for a young girl to lift the
immensely heavy lid of the parish chest with one hand, to show how
desirable she was.
People often claimed that they could tell from the taste of the butter
which of their cows had produced it. Differences stemmed from the
88 

physical constitution of the cow, what she had eaten, and what season
of the year it was, as well as from variations in the treatment of the
milk itself. The milk was left to stand while the cream rose to the
top. Fine butter was made from the first cream skimmed from the milk.
The second skimming produced lower-quality "after-butter," while "whey
butter," the cheapest, was made from curds remaining in the whey after
cheese had been made from whole milk. The best butter of all was made
from the "strokings," the cow's richest milk which arrived, with the
aid of the milkmaid's careful stroking, only at the end of each milking
session.
The length of time the cream was allowed to stand was of enormous
importance to the taste of butter. People used generally to like a
strong lactic flavour, so that cream was left to ripen before churning
for at least three and as long as seven days. Most factory butter sold
today is from "sweet," very newly risen and pasteurized cream, with a
mild lactic acid added. The method discourages bacteria and also
satisfies the increasing modern demand for mildness of flavour in
everything. Ripe butter enthusiasts in North America can buy a product
which is given the added strength of dried bacillic cultures imported
from one of the European countries which still produce strong-tasting
butter: Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium, or Switzerland. This
butter, labelled with the happy epithet "cultured," is sold at "luxury"
prices in specialty stores; a minority of people are willing to pay
more for something resembling the original heady taste. Butter made
from newly risen cream requires more salt for keeping than does ripe
butter, and this has until quite recently resulted in taste
preferences: salt for mild butter lovers, and saltless for those who
like butter ripe.
At least four hundred volatile compounds have been detected in the
aroma of butter. The alteration or lack of even one of these is liable
to be noticed immediately, so sensitive and fastidious are our bodily
mechanisms for responding to milk. "Rancid" derives from the Latin
rancidus, "rank" or "stinking": it is a term reserved exclusively for
fats. There are two main kinds of rancidity: hydrolytic (change caused
by the absorption of flavours from food or micro-organisms) and
oxidative (reaction with oxygen in the air). People can learn actively
to like some forms of the first type, acquiring a taste for soured
cream, ripened butter, and the various rotten properties in the great
cheeses, such as Stilton, Pont l'Eveque, and Roquefort. Aroma
scientists sadly concede that people's reactions to "offflavours" are
"subjectively organoleptic": different peo
89

ple like different things. Hydrolysis is our own body's method of di-
gesting fat.
Oxidative rancidity, on the other hand, is totally unacceptable; re-
action to it is always immediate revulsion. We are, it seems,
biologically primed not to eat oxidated fat, for doing so can cause
diarrhoea, poor growth, loss of hair, skin lesions, anorexia,
emaciation, and intestinal haemorrhages. Oxidation begins with exposure
to air, and for this reason butter should be kept covered. Supermarket
fluorescent light indeed light of any kind-promotes rancidity, which is
why good quality butter is now sold wrapped in foil.
Butter varies in colour from pale cream to yellow, depending largely on
what the cow eats. Winter butter has always been pale, and summer
butter yellow. It was believed for centuries that eating buttercups
made the cow give yellow butter; this, indeed, is the origin of the
flower's common name. (In fact, of course, all kinds of plant pigments,
not merely yellow flowers, give butter its colour.) Children still hold
a buttercup under a friend's chin, and if a golden colour is reflected,
they say, "You love butter." People have always liked the idea of
butter being yellow: the colour distinguished butter from lard, and
since the essential richness of the milk was the dominating idea, gold
is naturally the desired colour.
From the Middle Ages onwards we have records of people colouring butter
which they did not consider yellow enough. A law was passed in Paris in
1396 forbidding the tinting of butter with "saucy flowers," herbs, or
drugs. Marigolds (that is, pot marigolds or calendulas, not the
originally American plant of the same name) were traditionally stored
salted in earthenware pots, taken out when needed and beaten with a
small iron ball to extract juice for colouring winter butter. Carrot
juice, saffron, and later annatto, an orange-red dye extracted from the
fruit of a South American tree, were other agents. Today annatto and
other oil-soluble dyes are used for the same purpose, but in the United
States the powerful dairy lobby has seen to it that the colouring of
butter does not have to be confessed on the wrapping. Our distrust of
modern chemical additives makes it worth disguising an ancient
practice.
"Butter is made from crayme," wrote Andrew Boorde in 1542. "It is good
to eat in the mornyng- a lytell porcyon is good for every man in the
mornyng if it be newe made." People commonly believed that butter was
bad for the stomach unless eaten first thing in the day: it was thought
to lie in a layer at the top of the stomach's contents "as
90

the fatness doth swim above in a boiling pot." Everyone agreed, too,
that butter should be eaten as soon as possible after it was churned, -
the ideal being to own your cow and churn your butter daily. The reason
was gastronomic as well as hygienic, and the ideal was possible only if
you lived in the country.
Most city people today seldom see rotten food, but taste fresh food
more rarely still. As far as butter goes, we have almost conquered
rancidity by means of cold storage, careful packaging, and
sterilization. But milk is now factory produced (the trade still calls
it "creamery' milk because of the clean and delicious ring of the
word), which means that it is mixed from the yield of hundreds of cows
raised on standard feed. It is often weeks or even months old before we
get it. We are not provided with a choice of different levels of
cream-ripening. The product we buy is therefore always the same, and we
have almost forgotten what freshly churned butter is like.

UNACCEPTABLE COSMETIC AND MEDICINAL BUTTER

A Greek poem satyrizing a Thracian wedding in the fourth century BC
describes the guests as "butter ophagous gentry' with unkempt hair. The
two attributes amount to the same thing: untidy hair and buttereating
were equally outlandish. Greeks in their own estimation had better
coiffeurs than anything available to Thracians; Greeks preferred olive
oil to barbarous butter.
The word butter comes from bou-tyron, which seems to mean "cowcheese"
in Greek. Some scholars think, however, that the word was borrowed from
the language of the northern and butter ophagous Scythians, who herded
cattle; Greeks lived mostly from sheep and goats whose milk, which they
consumed mainly as cheese, was relatively low in butter (or butyric)
fat. Butter divides the people of northern Europe as radically from the
oil-loving southerners as beer and cider distinguish them from
wine-drinkers. People from Mediterranean lands believed until at least
the eighteenth century that butter was a cause of the leprosy which
seemed to be so prevalent in the north. The Gardinal of Aragon took his
own cook and plenty of olive oil when he visited Holland in
1516 .
Most people, aside from Caucasian northern Europeans and their
descendants and a few nomadic African tribes, are biologically lactose
91

intolerant after their milk-drinking, mammalian infancy. This means
that they are simply unable to stomach raw milk. Human babies are born
with provisions of the enzyme lactase which enables them to digest
lactose or milk sugar. Ability to manufacture the enzyme is soon lost
in lactose-intolerant people, who thereafter cannot drink more than a
cup or so of raw milk without suffering nausea and diarrhoea. The
reason for this is thought to be the evolutionary undesirability of
having adults compete with their own offspring for the milk-source. The
people who began to domesticate cattle about ten thousand years ago
developed lactose tolerance into adulthood: those who could take milk,
on occasion using it as their major food source, survived and handed on
the trait to their children. Lactose helps in the absorption of
calcium; it is, therefore, extra-desirable for the populations who live
in the cold, relatively sunless north, where little vitamin D is
created in the human skin. This may be why the development of the
capacity to keep ingesting plenty of milk is an especially northern
trait. It has been found that cultural acceptance of milk eventually
produces a sufficiency of the enzyme in the population - although an
estimated 16 per cent of people will never be able to take raw milk,
even in our own unprecedentedly milk-loving society.
Greeks, Arabs, and Near-Eastern Jews, whose cultures are resistant to
raw milk, dislike drinking it in spite of a long dairying history. The
indigenous millions of Oceania, the Americas, China, and Japan remain
largely milk intolerant. Butter, cheese, yoghurt, and soured milk like
laban are all low in lactose because the fermenting bacteria use it up
as fuel; these foods are therefore biologically acceptable by
everybody, although non-milk-drinking people may eat them very seldom.
Butter is more extravagant to make, and in its solid form more
difficult to keep, than the other low-lactose milk products, and may
therefore become a rarity and as such either precious or abominable,
depending on the circumstances of the encounter with it.
In the oil-loving European south, butter, being expensive and rela-
tively rare, tends to be perceived as a luxury. In the Middle Ages it
was one of the foods banned during Lent. This was a minor inconvenience
in the south where the normal cooking medium was olive or walnut oil;
it was however a great hardship in the north, where butter was an
everyday necessity. Clever southern businessmen cashed in on Lent by
selling oil to the north during this time. The more cynical northerners
would simply pay their way out of the ban; the magnificent Butter
92 

Tower of Rouen Cathedral was built with money which the Church received
from people who preferred to pay rather than forgo their daily butter.
Not being allowed to eat butter especially enraged the idealistic
Martin Luther. "For at Rome they themselves laugh at the fasts," he
wrote in 1520, "making us foreigners eat the oil with which they would
not grease their shoes, and afterwards selling us liberty to eat
butter...."
In the days before the Japanese came systematically into contact with
the west, butter was practically unknown to them. Those who did meet
Europeans were appalled by their stench: people who seldom touch animal
products are extremely sensitive to the body-odour exuded by eaters of
animal fat. It was butter, the Japanese thought, which made Europeans
so peculiarly rank: bata-kusai they called them (using the English word
for the foul substance): "butter-stinkers."
Fat discourages insects and fat keeps you warm. Many travellers who
have lived among pastoral societies in cold climates, like the Mongols
and Tibetans, have described how these people spent their lives coated
in grease, usually butter, which might turn black and rancid before
anyone seemed to mind. People have always enjoyed oiling their bodies,
and hot water for washing was not commonly available until very re-
cently. Our own fanatical obsession with washing is mostly new and
largely a matter of our own self-esteem: it is a habit which would have
astounded most of our ancestors, including the fastidious and super-
cilious Greeks.
Another very luxurious practice, often available only to the rich, was
coating one's hair in butter or lard. It kept down vermin, helped
preserve order in an elaborate hair-do, and added a gleam for which
even we occasionally yearn, with our "structuring" hair-gel,
brilliantine, and other hair oils. In many societies, including ancient
Egypt and modern Ethiopia, a lump of fatty incense or of perfumed
butter was placed on the head and allowed to melt and drizzle
voluptuously down one's face and body. The connotations of "greasyy'
were with "shinyy' - richness, lubrication, brightness - and not, as we
have it, with nausea, dirt, and "foreigners."
Butter has always been considered to have medicinal properties. Lu-
brication was the key here. Butter was the finest fat for softening the
skin. It was said to relieve burns and babies' rashes, and was often
thought to help children's growing pains and stiffness of the joints in
the old. Pliny wrote that butter "has the properties of oil, and is
used for anointing by all the barbarians- and by us [Romans] in the
case of children." Wounded elephants in first-century India were
treated by
93

being made to swallow butter, or by having their wounds anointed with
it. The Celtic word for butter is from the Indo-European for
"ointment," and the Vikings called butter "cow-smear."
One strange but widely used sixteenth-century European medicine against
pain in the joints was made from butter left to liquefy in the sun for
several days and then drunk; it is thought that the method might have
increased the vitamin D in this rancid concoction, which could thus
have developed anti-rachitic properties (despite the nasty side-effects
which must also have been produced). Butter's "lubricating" effect when
drunk rancid also made it a losefill laxative.

THE SECRET NAME OF BUTTER

Butter can be kept from going rancid by melting it and removing the
milk solids which separate out of it. First the whey proteins, which
gather as froth on the top of hot melted butter, are skimmed off, and
then the middle layer of clarified oil is carefully poured away from
the casein and salt which have sunk to the bottom of the pan. Clarified
butter, the golden liquid which results, will last a year or longer
without refrigeration if no air comes in contact with it, and it
possesses the further advantage of not burning easily when used as a
cooking medium.
In India, clarified butter is called ghee. It is the most precious sub-
stance provided by the most sacred beast on earth, the cow. In Hindu
mythology, Prajapati, Lord of Creatures, created ghee by rubbing or
"churning" his hands together and then poured it into fire to engender
his progeny; whenever the Vedic ritual was performed of pouring ghee
into fire, it was a re-enactment of creation. (Butter in mythologies
the world over is a symbol of semen: churning represents the sexual
act, and also the formation of a child in its mother's womb.)
Later, during the Deluge, continues the Indian myth, the honey-like
elixir of immortality called amrita got lost in the cosmic ocean of
milk. The gods and the demons joined forces to save it by churning the
ocean until various gods and sacred objects solidified out like butter
from the milk: the cow of plenty, the goddess of wine, the moon, the
terrible poison which is twin-liquor to amrita, the coral tree which
perfumes the world, the goddess of beauty holding a lotus; finally the
physician of the gods stepped carefully forward, carrying a milk-white
bowl full of amna.
94 

One of the hymns of the Rg Veda (circa 1500 BC) is in praise of ghee,
and is intended to be accompanied by ritual libations of the golden
substance int~ fir~ The~t ar~ mf f)f th( w~)r

This is the secret name of Butter:
"Tongue of the gods," "navel of immortality."
We will proclaim the name of Butter;
We will sustain it in this sacrifice by bowing low . . .
These waves of Butter flow like gazelles before the hunter . . .
Streams of Butter caress the burning wood.
Agni, the fire, loves them and is satisfied.

Here butter is fertilizing seed, a regenerator of riches: its
sputtering and crackling reawaken Agni himself. It also represents the
pure energy of communal prayer and the inspiration to mysticism and
poetry.
Statues of Vishnu and Krishna are ritually anointed with two intensely
sacred mixtures of five substances, one called pancamrita: milk,
curds,,ghee, honey, and sugar, and the other "the five products of the
cow": milk, curds,,ghee, urine, and dung. Both of these can be used to
purify people who have committed temporarily polluting offenses, or as
antidotes to poison and disease. The lamps that light the holiest
places in Hindu temples are wicks burning in ghee- as are the lamps
swung in circular motions before the images of various deities, or lit
at the great Festival of Lights in honour of Lakshmi and Rama.
Hindus rank food (high to low) as raw, superior cooked, inferior
cooked, and garbage. No one may eat "inferior" foods, like rice and
lentils, which have been touched by someone of a lower caste than
himself; but anything "superior" may be taken from any caste except the
lowest of all. Inferior food cooked in irreproachable,ghee instantly
becomes pakka, "complete" or "superior," and edible even by a Brahmin.
A travelling Brahmin who does not know who has been touching the food
available to him, must receive everything he eats raw and still
unpeeled, unless food vendors can demonstrate that their wares are
cooked in,ghee.
Ghee is expensive and much in demand, because of its exalted status, at
Hindu weddings. Male guests are expected to compete with each other to
see who can eat the most of it: consuming a kilo or more at a sitting
is considered a proof of virility. The occasion and the sexual
connotations of ghee turn the contest into a kind of fertility ritual.
In 1948 one of the last descriptions was made of the Festival of the
95

Butter Gods in Tibet. What Harrison Forman, writing for the Canadian
Geographic, saw was one of the world's most magnificent religious cele-
brations, a particularly splendid example of which took place annually
at the monastery he visited, Kum Bum Gomba. Half a million pilgrims,
representative of the Buddhist world from Siberia to modern Sri Lanka,
and from the Russian Pamirs to the Pacific, took part in the festival
and were themselves part of the pageantry. It continued for many days,
with songs and dancing, masked theatre, a huge market, the Questioning
of the Lamas, chanted prayers, and music accompanied by cymbals, drums,
gongs, flutes, oboes, and brass trumpets up to twenty feet long. The
climax of the whole celebration was the night-long display of the
Butter Gods.
Immense panels of bas-reliefs representing Buddhist deities and myth-
ical subjects had been carved in yak butter by scores of lamas,
supervised by a guild of artists acclaimed as among the finest in the
Buddhist world. They had taken months to make the figures, which were
multicoloured, as much as three metres 10 ft.) tall, and amazingly
intricate, with every hair, every realistic detail of the design on
their "silken" clothes, every bead in their elaborate jewellery
meticulously carved and moulded in butter. Some of the tableaux
included hundreds of lively figures in action. The monks had had to
work in the cold, and often suffered from frozen hands and feet during
the winter weeks of work. Every year the sculptures were entirely
different.
The crowd surged forward to gaze at the butter figures in the flick-
ering light of thousands of yak-butter lamps. As the night passed the
butter began to melt in the heat. By dawn it was all over: the
temporary is intrinsic to the nature of festivals. The sacred occasion
had passed, and the special manifestation of the gods was finished for
that year.

THE BUtTER CULTURES

Tibetan life still revolves around the yak, which this people has
herded and placed at the centre of its culture for at least two
thousand years.  Tibetans are warmed by yak-dung fires and lit by
yak-butter lamps; they eat yak meat and yak blood, butter, cheese, and
yoghurt; they use yaks for transport and weave clothing, blankets,
shelters, and even boats out of yak hair. Their staple dish is tsampa,
made of salted tea pounded together with yak butter, to which toasted
barley flour is added and 96 

mixed by hand before eating. The dependence in so many ways upon their
particular animal herd is typical of pastoralists, the original
"buttereaters," the world over.
Russians in the regions of Uzbek, Bashkir, and Kirgiz still drink
mares' and donkeys' milk and turn it into kumyss, a powerful fermented
liquor or spirit, often served with lumps of butter in it. Kumyss is
mentioned in reports from Christian missionaries in central Siberia in
1253; Marco Polo wrote in 1298 that Genghis Khan kept a stable of ten
thousand white horses for the production of kumyss. This is probably
the same drink as the oxy,gala ("sharp milk") which the ancient Greeks
knew from the horse-riding and "butter ophagous" Scythians. Herodotus
had reported that the Scythians used to blind their slaves and then
make them sit round wooden barrels full of mares' milk and "stir them
round and round; the stuff that rises to the top is skimmed, and
considered more valuable than what sinks to the bottom." The Scythians
ate horse meat and horse butter and drank horse buttermilk and oxygala,
using strainers to remove the scum; many of these strainers of bone,
and kumyss or oxygala jars with sieves built into them, have been found
in Scythian tombs, together, sometimes, with the tattooed bodies of the
Scythians themselves, preserved in the icy soil of central Russia.
In T'ang China, kumyss, clotted cream, and clarified butter were three
stages in a hierarchy of products derived from milk. In Buddhist reli-
gious imagery, each of them symbolized a stage in the transformation of
the soul. Clarified butter represented the ultimate development of the
Bud&a spirit.
The descendants of the Caucasian pastoralists who now people northern
Europe have long been the world's largest consumers of butter. The
Dutch used to be called by the English "buttermouths" and "butterboxes"
after their insistence on carrying their own butter supply with them in
boxes when they travelled. The Irish, it is said, may still eat more
butter than any population on earth. They have always spread and
dolloped it onto their staple foods: porridge, then potatoes and bread.
When poverty forced people to do without butter, the substance simply
became more symbolic than ever of riches and plenty. Giving butter to a
guest or a stranger was Christian hospitality. The obituary of a miser
in 1486 reads "Neidh O'Mulconry, head of the inhospitality of Ireland,
died. It was he who solemnly swore that he would never give bread and
butter together to guests." And the medieval Vision of MacConglinne,
which is supposed to cause the mouth of the Devil
97

himself to drool with greed, places butter squarely into its landscape
of custards, bacon, and glistening fat.
Some of the commonest archaeological finds in Ireland are barrels of
ancient butter, buried in the bogs. The Norsemen, the Finns, the
Icelanders, and the Scots had done the same: they flavoured butter
heavily with garlic, knuckled it into a wooden firkin, and buried it
for years in the bogs - for so long that people were known to plant
trees to mark the butter's burial site. The longer it was left, the
more delicious it became. A further advantage was doubtless the safety
of supplies from robbers, or enemies in wartime. Most of the Irish
archaeological specimens date from the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries. Although some of our sources imply that bog butter turned
red, the firkins in the Irish National Museum contain "a greyish
cheese-like substance, partially hardened, not much like butter, and
quite free from putrefaction" because of the cool, antiseptic,
anaerobic, and acidic properties of peat bogs.
In Morocco, smen is still a delicacy. It is made by kneading butter
with various decoctions of herbs, cinnamon, and other spices; the mix-
ture is then cooked, salted, and strained like ghee. It is poured into
jugs, tightly stoppered, and buried in the ground for months, sometimes
years. Stores of the precious stuff are saved for special feasts. The
smell is considered especially magnificent: a particularly aged pot of
the family smen may be brought out of the cellars for honoured guests
to sniff. The smen represents the riches of the house. The necessity of
"doctoring" a perishable substance in order to save it in hot weather
is in this manner turned into a gastronomic triumph, and hedged about
with tradition and prestige. Other versions of clarified butter, called
samna by nonMoroccan Arabs, are to be found throughout the Middle East.
We ourselves, in the modern industrial system created by Europe and
America, might legitimately lament that "no surprises" is the nearest
we seem to have come to an ideal in consumer satisfaction, and that
there is very little variety in the butter offered for sale. Yet we
cannot forget either that the provision of butter to European cities in
the past was always a chancy and often a criminal enterprise; if you
did not live in the country your butter could be very nasty indeed.
Butter was heavily salted for preservation on its long journey by boat
or cart into town, or in order to last through the winter. One record,
dating to 1305, tells us that one pound of salt was added to every ten
pounds of butter or cheese. Not surprisingly, people usually washed
98 

their butter, kneading it with water then pummelling the liquid out, in
order to remove most of the salt before eating it. Butter was often
sold in a half-liquid state, or was available only rancid; Tobias
Smollett complained in 1748 of some "that tasted of train-oil thickened
with salt." Sometimes butter came from cows which were led through the
cities by vendors and milked in the street. There was no hygiene
control; storage places were often smelly and unventilated, and
produced in butter what was known as a "cowhouse" odour. Butter was
frequently adulterated with lard; if rancid, washed with milk and water
and salted again for sale; or falsely said to be from districts famous
for good butter. A favourite trick was incorporating as much water as
the butter would hold. The cheap nineteenth-century Dutch butter
Londoners called "Bosh," and which may or may not have come from
Holland, contained up to 33 per cent water.
Butter has not always enjoyed the same prestige among the affluent in
western Europe. Medieval recipe books, written mainly for the nobility,
call for relatively little butter. Since supplies of it were plentiful
until late winter in English cities until the seventeenth century,
butter (like oysters) was eaten mainly by the poor, much of it with
bread and cheese or herbs. The little consumed by the rich was used
mostly in cooking. One result of this was vitamin A deficiency in the
richer classes, who suffered commonly from bladder and kidney stones.
People noticed that the Dutch, famous for the quantity of butter they
ate, were less afflicted by such stones than other nations. An old
Dutch proverb went: "Eat butter first, and eat it last, and live till a
hundred years be past." It is not easy to obtain historical information
on the eye disease called xerophthalmia, but during the First World War
we know that the Danes developed this eye disease from vitamin A
deficiency because they were selling most of their butter to the
Germans, who were prepared to pay high prices for it. When a low price
for butter was enforced, more Danes could afford to eat it, and the
number of cases of xerophthalmia became negligible within one year.
Butter and cheese fed the navies of England and Holland from the
sixteenth century onward, on the new long sea voyages. An Elizabethan
seaman's ration was 115 grams (1/4 lb.) of butter per day, in addition
to a bottle of beer, 450 grams (1 lb.) of ship's biscuit, and 225 grams
(1/2 Lb.) of cheese. By 1730 the figures for supplies of butter to
London show 225 grams (1/2 lb.) of butter being consumed per person per
week. The gradual emergence of the middle class from Tudor times onward
99

meant an increasing consumption of butter by wealthier people: butter
slowly rose from the category of "food for the poor." By the eighteenth
century the rich had acquired the habit of eating plenty of it.
England, first into the Industrial Revolution with its attendant rise
in the population and desertion of the country for cities, soon had to
import large amounts of butter from the Continent.
What we now know as French cuisine was one of the great social and
artistic achievements of the nineteenth century. It was based upon
olive oil in the south and butter in the north; and since prestige and
power lay mostly in the north, butter became one of the foundations of
the art and science of the great French chefs - of what is known as
cuisine classique. To this day southern French cooking tends to be
called "hearty" or "robust," and other rustic epithets, even by its
greatest admirers: delicacy and finesse generally involve the use of
butter.
By 1902, English upper-class families were eating three times as much
butter as the rest of the population; it had become one of the ways in
which they demonstrated their superiority. Margarine had already begun
seriously to undermine butter sales, but the passion for butter (in
part because it remained the first choice and the luxury of the rich,
living literally off the fat of the land) was if anything greater than
ever.
Ever since the early years of this century the trend has been gradually
reversing itself. Increasingly, people in wealthy countries, like the
upper classes in pre-seventeenth-century Europe, feel it behoves them
to reduce their intake of visible fat. Then, butter was poor men's food
and despised as such. Now, eating little fat although plenty of it is
available, and managing - through an aristocratic combination of
expense, pride, and self control - not to be fat, has attained the kind
of ineffable prestige which once accrued to soft hands and clean linen.
Our sedentary lives and access to various alternative sources of
calories have induced in us a shudder at the thought of the unctuous
and quivering lumps of fat for which Homer's gods lusted. Most of us do
eat a lot of grease, but less than a third of it is actually seen and
tasted as fat; compound and processed foods effectively disguise the
rest.
Yet the idea of butter, and words like "buttery," "deep-buttered," or
"butterball," retain their enticing power in North American language.
The reason is partly traditional. The English and the Dutch who emi-
grated to the States in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries took the butter habit with them. Foreign travellers commonly
noted that Americans ate absolutely everything- porridge, soup, meat,
100

vegetables, and puddings - swimming in butter. On extended journeys a
cow was often taken along and its milk allowed to churn itself in the
barrels with the lurching of the wagons. The butter was removed,
washed, and salted at night.
When Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote The American
Woman's Home, they complained bitterly about the low standard and the
rancidity of much American butter: they had to "taste 20 firkins" of it
before finding one that was edible. But they incidentally demonstrate
for us how all-pervasively buttery the American diet was. Bad butter,
they wrote, "stands sentinel at the door to bar your way to every other
kind of food. You turn from your dreadful half-slice of bread, which
fills your mouth with bitterness, to your beef-steak, which proves
virulent with the same poison; you think to take refuge in vegetable
diet, and find the butter in the string-beans, and polluting the
innocence of early peas; it is in the corn, in the succotash, in the
squash; the beets swim in it, the onions have it poured over them.
Hungry and miserable, you think to solace yourself in the dessert; but
the pastry is cursed, the cake is acrid with the same plague." The date
was 1869. A French chemist, that very year, was busy inventing
margarine.

SOME BUtTER BELIEFS AND EXPRESSIONS

Right up until the early twentieth century in Europe and America, many
farmers believed that butter, being a magic and mystical substance, was
especially at risk through witchcraft. When cows "went dry" and gave no
milk, or when their milk provided little butter, or when churning
simply did not cause the butter to coagulate, sorcery was at work. A
witch could come into your dairy, cry, "Give no milk!" and the damage
was done; the power and the butter-fat were in all probability
transferred to the witch's own cow. She could bewitch your cream so
that churning was useless.
You could counter-attack by plunging a crooked sixpence or a piece of
red-hot iron, such as a poker or a horse-shoe, into the cream, whip the
tub or tie it up, or fling anti-maledictory salt both into the churn
and into the fire. Prevention of sorcery was achieved by always keeping
handy a piece of the magic mountain ash, rowan, either tied to the
churn or used as a stirring implement; many churns were bought with
rowan-wood handles already provided. In Germany you asked for help
101

in churning from the butter saint, Azeca or Haseka, who had changed
rancid butter into sweet by praying over it. Or you could invoke St.
Brigit of Ireland, whose loving generosity enabled her to feed
strangers on magically renewed stores of butter. The most common
English charm, still used in 1929 and sung as the plunger was thrust up
and down, went:

Come, butter, come, Come, butter, come, Peter stands at the gate
Waiting for a buttered cake, Come, butter, come.

Butter, as we have already seen, often symbolizes sperm or the growth
of a child in the womb. The thrusting of the churn plunger, the in-
vocation to butter to "come," the cosmic creativity of,ghee- uses of
the metaphor range from the superstitious to the sublime. The word
butter is often a euphemism for "excrement" as well, since it too is
formed inside and ejected from the body. Butter is riches, and can
therefore represent very specifically "profit" or "money." An
interesting confirmation, all this, of Freud's claim that we tend to
dream money, excrement, and sperm interchangeably, for butter
represents, as we have seen, all three.
The money-wise "know on which side their bread is buttered," and the
wasteful "butter their bread on both sides." In the Old Testament
butter is used as a hyperbole for luxury, when a rich man "washes his
feet in butter" or "sees torrents of honey and butter." Flattering
words, fine and over-lavish, are used to "butter us up." "Churning" is
working hard and "butter" is the reward, in Jewish, Coptic, and
probably many other proverbs. An English wedding custom was to present
the couple, on their arrival at their new home, with a pot of butter to
presage prosperity and fertility for the future. "Guns will make us
powerful"; said Goering in 1936, "butter will only make us fat": the
statement equates guns with war, and butter with peace.
The French sell butter in a special shop, a cremerie, where one also
buys milk, cream, cheese, and eggs. These are the vital but "innocent"
foodstuffs: animal products, but those not obtained by spilling blood.
Purity is stressed in cremeries, where all is customarily white and
shiny. Most of them employ women servers: the female association with
the idea of a dairy lives on. Butter appears packaged in the now-usual
silver
102 

or gold foil, but often the very best of it is still served from the
motte - a huge shameless tower of unwrapped voluptuousness, with
gleaming facets where chunks of butter have been cut off with a wire to
the specifications of the customer. It is copious and rich, rural and
nostalgic, with charms to be resisted only by the extremely
hygiene-bound or the fat-hating. Butter in a motte is not squared-off,
brand-named, labelled, and "industrialized": it constitutes a
monumental snub to the concept of margarine.

MARGARINE A MELODRAMA IN SEVERAL ACTS

First you took beef fat chopped with sheep's stomachs and cows' udders,
soaked them in milk, and suspended the mixture in water and potash, at
blood heat. (The idea was to "digest" the fat as a cow seems to turn
her body fat into the materials from which butter is derived; the
udders were meant to add the indefinable something which is lacking in
fats which have not passed through a cow's teats.) Next, you pressed
the amalgamation between warmed plates so that liquid fat separated
from solid. The runny part was called "oleine," and what was left,
being hard and white, was "margarine." (Margaron and mar,garites mean
"pearl" in Greek.) The "oleine," which had roughly the same melting
point as butter, was churned and then squeezed, gritty and oleaginous,
into containers and marketed. The product soon received in English the
composite name, "oleomargarine."
The substance was invented on the Imperial Farm at Vincennes, outside
Paris, in 1869. Europe had recently suffered a devastating cattle
plague. Butter was difficult to get, and expensive. The French Emperor
Napoleon III had offered a prize for the invention of something cheap
to take the place of butter. Hippolyte Mege-Mouries, a food chemist who
had already earned two gold medals for making more bread with less
flour, undertook his research with the personal support of the emperor
and won the prize for his new spread. The addition of milk to the suet
was what in fact gave margarine a taste with some chance of
acceptability: the udders and stomachs were soon rejected as un-
necessary. Almost immediately the Franco-Prussian War broke out and
Mege, unable to begin producing his invention, sold the patent to the
Dutch in 1871, and to the Americans and the Prussians soon after the
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war. It was Holland, already a world leader in butter production, which
first developed the French invention.
Holland's best customers for dairy products were the English, now more
deeply enmeshed than any other society on earth in the Industrial
Revolution. England's population was exploding, and the swiftly emp-
tying countryside could supply less and less of the nutritional needs
of the vast urban conglomerates being created by the factories. The
Dutch soon found that margarine was more durable than butter and
therefore simpler to hold for sale and to transport. Margarine was born
from, through, and for the new industrial age.
The substitute spread began as a meat product tied directly to the beef
and dairy industries. In the United States, after the first margarine
plant had opened in the mid 1870S in Manhattan, margarine production
soon became a minor adjunct (for Americans had no trouble getting
enough butter) to the giant meat-packing companies centred in Chicago.
In Europe, where by the late nineteenth century the poor had
increasingly to forgo butter and eat beef tallow and lard instead, the
new industry found it difficult to obtain enough fat, largely because
so many people were eating it "straight." Soon beef suet had to be im-
ported from the United States. But the market for margarine was among
the poor, and buying fat made it more and more difficult to keep the
price of margarine low enough so that the people who ate it could
afford it.
A second dawn for the fortunes of margarine occurred between 1902 and
1915, when a method was discovered and perfected for hardening oil. The
reason why animal fats congeal to spreadable (and harder) consistencies
is that they have sufficient hydrogen molecules in them: they are
"saturated" with hydrogen. Add hydrogen to oil- any oil and it turns
solid.
Liquid vegetable and fish oils, which until then had been unsuitable
for spreading on bread, began to be perceived as raw materials for
margarine. The possibilities were endless, and no time was lost in de-
veloping plantations of oil-bearing crops: oil and coconut palms, cot-
tonseed, sunflowers, soy beans, maize, peanuts, sesame, rapeseed, even
shea butter (the fruit of an African tree), babassu palms from Brazil,
and olive trees. Marine oils came from whales, and from oily fish like
herring, pilchards, and anchovies.
It makes no difference, as far as taste goes, which oil is used, for
all
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individual properties of the raw materials are automatically removed in
the processing. Oil seeds are crushed, heated, moistened, pressed, and
filtered with the help of petroleum-based solvents so that all the
meal, husks, and so on are eliminated. (These are often pressed into
cakes and sold as cattle feed.) The oil is then degummed, and treated
with caustic soda so that unwanted fatty acids are turned into a soapy
substance and drained off. Next the oil is bleached of all colour and
deodorized. It is then hydrogenated with pure hydrogen and a copper
(formerly a nickel) catalyst, filtered, and refined a second time. By
now the medium for the making of margarine has the same tasteless, col-
ourless, uniform consistency no matter where the process began: at this
point the milk bacteria, the aromas, and the colouring are added to
make it as much like butter as possible.
Nearly all of the vegetable oils for margarine came at first from
tropical countries: from places like Nigeria, the Philippines, India,
and Brazil. Welcome sources of income opened up, as the rich
industrialized northern populations began to eat margarine in
ever-increasing amounts. Margarine is a butter substitute, invented by
northern butter-eaters; it has never even tried to taste like anything
except butter. People whose habits do not include the eating of butter
spread on bread do not consume it themselves, but many non-butter
cultures happen to be in tropical zones, precisely the areas where
oil-seed crops grow best.
As aroma scientists enthusiastically got to work unlocking the secrets
of butter's attractions and trying to apply this knowledge to improve-
ments in the palatability of margarine, more and more tropical lands
were turned over to raising lucrative crops for sale to the north. As
time went on, plantations began to crush their own seed, and at least
partly refine the oiL before selling it to the margarine factories,
which always remained close to their customers in Europe and North
America.
The trump cards, however, remained securely in the hands of the buyers.
For margarine oils are entirely interchangeable: there is nothing
infuriatingly unique about any one of them, as there is with
butter-fat. Any oil will do - and therefore the margarine corporations
could buy whatever oil was cheapest. Shortages, special qualities,
colour, taste none of these made the slightest difference; and
alternatives were always available.
As giant food corporations formed and expanded, tropical plantations
fell more and more under their control. Unilever (which began as a
butter- and then a margarine-selling business) is now the world's
largest
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food-processing company; its revenues reached $20 billion in 1983.
Unilever decides in large measure what crops will be grown, and in what
quantities, in many Third World countries, particularly in Africa.
International corporations like Unilever now do their own advertising
(to create and sustain demand), and provide their own transportation,
importing, exporting, research, and development of ideas and products.
They see to it that people who can pay get what they want. The in-
vention of margarine, where raw materials are reduced to complete
neutrality and then given character by means of additives, was a major
factor in the creation of the giant modern systems of food production
and profit.
Meanwhile, back among the people whom margarine was designed to please,
and near the beginning of this century, the battle with butter had
begun in earnest. The ties of the new industrial product with meat and
dairying had snapped, and now margarine began seriously to threaten
butter sales. The reason was mostly that margarine was cheaper than
butter. Butter producers were unwilling to lower prices since they were
selling what they themselves made; margarine producers could cheapen
their wares because the people who actually grew the oil seeds (as
opposed to those who marketed them) could be paid little. But as
prosperity mounted in the industrialized countries, Ernst Engel's law
came into force: expenditure on food does not increase in the same
ratio as income, but becomes relatively lower. People learn to expect
that food will be cheap; money is for spending on other things.
The butter industry had in the beginning two main advantages over
margarine. One was that it was already in place, not struggling for a
foothold. The other was that butter is central to the mythologies of
our culture, bathed as it is in tradition, in prestige, in folldore.
The taste of butter is the ideal which margarine is trying, even now,
to attain. Butter is so entrenched as a basic and preferred food that
margarine never turned aside to become something different from the
original, but has coveted butter's domain all along. Being a child of
our times, however, margarine never accepted that the ancient mystique
pertained to butter alone, and could not believe that butter was
irreplaceable.
On the whole, the producers of butter fought a very dirty fight. The
butter lobby sought to shut out margarine by forcing governments to tax
the rival product till its price was as close as possible to butter's.
Several intensively butter-producing countries, such as Canada and New
106 

Zealand, simply forbade margarine production. (New Zealand still makes
no margarine, although recently, because of margarine's new "health"
weapon, sales of it have been permitted. Canada rescinded its law in
1948, even later in some of the provinces. ) Other countries insisted
that no margarine be sold without an admixture of butter, to protect
their dairy farmers.
The fact that poor people bought most margarine was often used
insidiously to shame those who were trying not to be perceived as poor.
In German towns with more than five thousand inhabitants, buyers had to
go into a food shop by a separate entrance in order to get margarine,
or into a partitioned-off section of the shop which everyone knew was
for those who ate the cheaper stuff. The official reason for this was
that butter sellers might be tempted to "adulterate" their produce with
margarine if the two substances were allowed shelf contact. Margarine
was packaged differently from butter - in cubes rather than bricks -
and bore a tell-tale red stripe to distinguish it, in addition to the
demeaning word margarine on the box.
From the very beginning, nowhere was margarine allowed to be called by
a name remotely resembling the word butter. Fear of the consumers being
fooled was the reason, as well as the jealous guarding by dairy
interests of butter's semi-sacred status. The United States had 180 ap-
plications for butter-substitute patents after margarine first arrived
in the 1870S. The names of some of these were "oleoid," "creamine,"
"butteroid," and "butterine." "Butterine" was the name by which the
product was first known in England. Legislation was passed in the
United States in 1886 forbidding every echo of "butter," and making
"oleomargarine" the generic name - which it remained for sixty-four
years. The British changed "butterine" to "margarine" by law in 1887.
Margarine, being factory made, has always been a brand-name product in
the west, with fierce competition between the brands for the best, that
is the most butter-like, taste. These names like to suggest nostalgia
(Blue Bonnet), the regal (Imperial), the childlike and natural (Stork,
Flora, Country Crock)-whatever might participate in something of the
prestige of butter. Relatively rarely is the modernity of margarine
stressed, as in L'Agenir (The Future) in France.
Handcuffed as it is to the concept of butteriness, margarine launched
in the twenties a long-lasting series of advertisements in many
languages, which showed blindfolded people trying both spreads and
pronouncing,
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"You can't tell the difference," a judgement which no one who heard it
at the time would have thought himself sufficiently insensitive to
make. Butter, forced into publicity which has insisted more and more
neurotically on its own ineffable singularity, has ended up with
slogans as lame as "Only butter is butter." In Russia, where
state-controlled margarine production has grown to surpass butter
production in volume as the country becomes industrialized, there are
two kinds available: kitchen, and better-quality table margarine. The
latter is marked with a cow on its wrapper, "to indicate the product's
uses."
Butter's meanest punches in the battle with the upstart began as early
as 1902 in the United States, even before hydrogenation technology
became available. Margarine was called a "harmful drug," and stores had
to be licensed to sell it. Butter producers primly and cunningly
insisted that, since margarine was not butter, it should be prevented
by every means from resembling butter. Above all, it should be denied
the golden colour which, as butter had good reason to know, proves
irresistible to buyers, no matter what the substance actually tastes
like. Unless it wanted to bear a heavy tax, margarine had to be sold
lardwhite. Five of the states went so far as to have all margarine dyed
pink, presumably so that no one could take it seriously, let alone eat
it as a daily basic food or cook anything in it without turning the
stomachs of their family and guests.
Margarine countered first of all by including in packages a tube, bag,
or tablet with yellow colouring matter in it. You kneaded the dye into
the white fat by hand- often imperfectly, so that the finished product
had a streaky look. The job was accepted as something a man could do in
the kitchen without endangering his self-esteem - like emptying garbage
and sharpening knives. Presumably it did not drag him too inextricably
into the "female" activity of actual cooking.
By the 1920S, when hydrogenated vegetable oil had become almost
exclusively the raw material of American margarine, yellow oils had
become available; if not deprived of all their colour, these could make
margarine "naturally yellow," and the tax had been circumvented. But
the American dairy industry kept fighting, and in 1931 a tax was
slapped on all margarine containing yellow oils; in 1934 it became
illegal to use any kind of unbleached oil in margarine. Meanwhile, the
role of "purity" in the butter myth was turned against it in 1923, when
Congress forbade the addition to butter of any other ingredients,
including those en
108 

hancing spreadability; margarine, less "pure," rushed to embrace
spreadability, which has remained perhaps its greatest advantage (apart
from cost and the cholesterol scare) in consumer preference over
butter.
Further good fortune arrived for the margarine industry when the Second
World War began: war is always bad for butter. During the war millions
of people in Europe were forced to eat margarine rather than butter.
They grumbled, but made the substitution. A butterless world was seen
to be possible.
In 1950 the discriminatory taxes against margarine were lifted in the
United States and the long and greasy word oleomargarine was officially
changed to margarine. (Pronunciation of the g had long been softened in
popular practice - presumably on an analogy with the way in which a
hard g becomes soft in the name Marjorie, a derivative of Margaret. The
British shorten the word to marge, with connotations which include
familiarity, boredom, and contempt.) Margarine, allowed to "float"
freely on the market, swiftly caught up with butter in sales,
especially when the "quality" and higher-priced margarines were first
introduced in 1956.
The taste of margarine began soon after the war to be improved, by
leaps and bounds. Sales grew internationally. Intensive research by
Unilever in the 1950S discovered hundreds of the flavour components of
butter, and ways were found of synthesizing these and adding them to
margarine. Lecithin, which increased plasticity, was added originally
as egg yolk; later, cheaper chemicals were substituted for the egg.
Margarine can now be provided with spreadability at almost any temper-
ature, to order.
All the manipulations to which margarine is subjected make it very
prone to flavour reversion. Soy bean oil, for instance, may quickly
develop an interesting, but in margarine undesirable, smell of freshly
cut green beans. Autoxidation because of exposure to air and light is
common. The precursors of a host of persistent "off-flavours" had to be
pinned down, and anti-oxidant additives devised to block them. This
extraordinarily complex process of analysis and correction is known as
hydro-refining.
Deprivation of butter, in the populations of the north, has always been
known as one of the causes of eye problems, skin diseases, kidney
stones, and rickets. The reason is butter's richness in vitamin A,
which is in short supply if few fresh vegetables and little sun are
available. Vitamins A and D are now added, by law in many countries, to
margarine.
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The colour of butter was endlessly studied, until it was found that the
addition to margarine of an orange-yellow dye with a pink tinge gave a
good approximation. Margarine was often provided in North America with
a pronounced yellow hue-much yellower even than coloured butter. This
is usually the case where the law still prevents margarine from looking
like butter-in Ontario, for instance. When margarine is permitted to
resemble butter it tries to do so - and greatly gains in sales as a
result. Butter generally sticks to paleness, denoting thereby the
fastidious restraint of the Real Thing, which does not need to strive
for effect. Margarine is not entirely defenceless, however, with its
carefully cultivated shiny appearance and the obvious and immediate
consumer-appeal of gold. Many aroma scientists say they are convinced
that margarine is now in no respect inferior to butter, and even that
it surpasses butter in colour, in plasticity, in "lustre," and in
taste. It keeps longer, and it still costs less.
Within the last five years "lightness" has become a gigantic food fad.
Being thin, as we saw earlier, is a status symbol, trailing
connotations of youth, modernity, health, education, and money. Just as
facile and sugary art is "schmalzy" (literally, "fatty"), so being fat
has come to be regarded as too easy, and as in poor taste. A thin body
suggests discipline and competence in the face of a world which is
perceived as ever more complicated and dangerous. The sufferings
undergone by slimmers, the hours of jogging and lifting weights, the
self-denial, and the acquisition of know-how required to "think thin,"
are gladly undergone by the privileged classes: it is aristocratic and
self-centred austerity - an entirely different matter from
abstemiousness imposed by necessity. Those members of the poorer
classes who want to escape their image find that being thin can be an
essential first step.
"One can never be too rich or too thin" is an aphorism attributed to
the Duchess of Windsor. Being both rich and thin is a difficult
enterprise, indeed almost unprecedented as an ideal. Into the paradoxi-
cal gap between the capacity to spend money and the need to eat less
steps a brilliant solution: "light" food. In buying "light" food we can
pay more for what costs less to produce in the first place, eat less
and so measure up to the desired norm, and receive as an added bonus
the suggestion that our behaviour is "enlightened."
So a multi-million dollar business is born: "light" beer, "slimming"
fast-foods and snacks, "diet" pop- and "light-tasting" margarine.
Eyeing always the cost of butter, which must continue to exceed that of
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its rival, the "quality" light-tasting product could increase its price
as consumer demand grew. Only giant corporations with their technology
and machinery for subtracting calories, changing flavours, substituting
materials, and, above all, publicizing the results, can manage the
trick. A cow is incapable of changing its ways to conform to fashion.
Margarine, on the other hand, is versatility itself.
The dairy industry, especially in Europe, has in recent years received
massive support from agricultural programmes. Farmers have been assured
of their livelihoods by being given a guaranteed buyer and a minimum
price for their milk. In this scheme of things butter had played a
large part, since butter uses a great deal of milk and can now be
refrigerated and kept for months on end while some use is being sought
for it. The ludicrous image of vast tonnages of luxury fat going
begging-the "butter mountain" as it is called-has been the result.
Margarine has, of course, played its role in the problem, but margarine
producers can primly point out that margarine is much more adaptable in
every way than butter is - who has heard yet of a margarine mountain?
(Since 1984, the European Economic Community has imposed quotas to
limit the quantity of milk produced; in the United States farmers are
being encouraged to sell their herds to be killed and sold as beef.)
A growing public awareness of the role played by cholesterol in heart
attacks and strokes has given margarine a further boost. Cholesterol
has been studied by chemists and medical researchers for a hundred
years, but only in the last decade has the name become a household
word- with quite a lot of help from the margarine industry. Choles-
terol, a complex alcohol compound, is necessary to the health of all
our body cells. But in atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries,
cholesterol from excess low-density lipo-proteins in the blood forms
mushy plaques which fill up the arteries, eventually block the flow of
blood, and cause heart attacks or strokes. Diet is obviously an
important reason for the original proclivity to the disease-although
since two people may eat the same diet and only one suffer
atherosclerosis, diet is not the only consideration. The condition
appears to arise mainly from high consumption of animal products,
including eggs, milk, and butter. Animal fats, including butter,
contain cholesterol. In addition they are saturated fats, and saturated
fats assist cholesterol formation by the body itself.
Margarine made from vegetable oil does not actually carry cholesterol,
as butter does. Its oils may be saturated, but they may equally well
111

(once the public has been shown that it ought to prefer unsaturated
oils) be chosen for their polyunsaturated or mono-unsaturated char-
acter. Margarine would be liquid were it not hydrogenated. This process
produces saturated-fat-like substances called trans-fatty acids, and
these tend (like saturated fats) to cause the body itself to produce
cholesterol. These are exceedingly complex chemical biological
reactions, and scientists understand as yet little of their nature, let
alone of their ultimate effects. In order that they may be used as a
marketing ploy, however, considerable simplification must occur in the
language used to describe them. Nowadays, margarine loudly proclaims
its polyunsaturatedness, even though, as we shall see in the chapter on
olive oil, polyunsaturatedness may soon become less sought after than
mono-unsaturatedness. The dairy lobby has so far seen to it that
wherever the presence of polyunsaturated oils is announced, the
percentage of saturated oils must be mentioned also. What is still not
included on margarine labels is notification of the presence of
trans-fatty acids (whose effects are similar to those of saturated
fats) in the margarine.
The very latest technology in margarine, immensely complex as it is,
and having been achieved after enormous effort and expense, involves
the thickening of vegetable oils without hydrogenation. The result is a
reduction (though not yet an elimination) of saturated fats in the mix.
The product is advertised as being utterly medicinal in character
("originally sold by doctor's prescription") yet "simply" delicious. It
tries but fails to taste like butter.
The corn oil, the soy bean oil, and the sunflower oil industries (all
of these oils are polyunsaturated) have moved massively into the pro-
duction of margarine, and the public is being assiduously reminded of
the terrors of cholesterol and of saturated fats (but not of
trans-fatty acids), to the extreme discomfiture of the arch-rival,
butter. Palm-kernel oil and coconut oil (both saturated) have suffered
heavily: margarine packages admit only with embarrassment that they
"may contain" one of them. It may be not without significance that palm
kernels and coconuts are tropical Third World produce, whereas corn,
soy beans, and sunflowers are three of the largest crops in the United
States.
In North America, people now eat four times as much margarine as they
eat butter. Most, if forced to consider taste alone, would probably
admit they still prefer butter, but margarine, being more economical,
is used in cooking processes where the fat flavour is least
discernible. Wherever "gourmet" food remains or becomes the ideal,
butter eclipses
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margarine with ease. There still exists an anti-margarine prejudice in
the absolute sense: in Ontario, for example, restaurants are permitted
by law to serve margarine provided they clearly publicize the fact.
Under this threat, almost all of them back down and serve butter. Some
people are prepared to forgo butter because of the cholesterol,
although merely substituting margarine for butter would, of course, be
useless unless the whole nature of one's diet were changed as well; and
if one's diet were healthy a reasonable amount of butter would do most
people no harm.
Too much cholesterol is a condition prevalent in western industrialized
societies where our traditional lust for the luxury of butter plays
only one note in a cacophony of strident and constant calls to consume.
Margarine, butter's fabricated image, is a wonderful mirror of certain
aspects of ourselves. It was invented because we had decided to leave
the countryside and live in cities, with the result that food supplies,
which had to be brought to us from a distance, spoiled and became
expensive. Yet we continued to yearn for butter, which had long been
one of the indisputable marks of well-being. Margarine, factory-made
and longer lasting than butter, was one of the earliest examples of a
food artificially formulated for city living, mass production, long
shelf life, nationwide distribution, and centralized warehousing. Very
few people need to be employed in the manufacture of margarine.
All these characteristics made it impossible for butter to compete in
price. It was forced into the category of "gourmet" eating, and threat-
ened with losing its status as the staple. The price of butter, except
for the special "cultured" variety, is kept low by margarine's
competition; there is very little money to be made these days from the
marketing of butter. Meanwhile, a new elitism is being enthroned: the
market for natural products (butter being only one of these) has begun
to limit itself to those who are able to pay more. A new puzzle has
arisen for those who can afford to be torn, this time between being
Thin and Healthy (eating margarine) and being a Gourmet (eating
butter). Margarine, even in North America, still lacks "class." In
addition, those who want to be Thin and Healthy usually wish to eat
what is Natural, and butter is more "natural" than machine-made
margarine.
The vicious, even ridiculous desperation with which butter has fought
margarine in our own society is in part an index of the anxiety we
experience as we watch ways of life we have loved being killed off,
apparently inexorably. The struggle was - and is - theatrically
symbolic.
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It represents the great oppositions articulated in our culture: the
land versus the city, the farm (despite the extent to which dairy
farming has become mechanized) versus the factory, independent versus
corporately-controlled business, tradition versus
not-necessarily-preferable novelty, nature versus human manipulation,
labour-intensive versus machine-operated industry, uniqueness versus
interchangeability.
The idea of neutralizing oil before "turning it into" something else
had arrived as early as 1883, when Mark Twain, travelling down the
Mississippi, overheard two "oily villains" plotting to kill butter with
margarine and sell the world "cottonseed olive oil." "'You can't tell
it from butter,' said the margarine man, 'by George, an expert
can't.... Butter's had its day - and from this out, butter goes to the
wall."' Twain described the two as "brisk men, energetic of movement
and speech; the dollar their god, how to get it their religion."
Twain enunciated a distaste which has grown increasingly prevalent in
the century since he wrote. We are afraid of the irreparable damage
constantly being wrought by "brisk, energetic" go-getters with narrow
self-interest their only concern and the lowering of standards never
entering their calculations. It is not that the dairy industry is poor
or innocent: it is now largely "agribusiness" just as corn is, and its
steel fist has given it away time and again. But a shiver goes down our
spine, just the same, at the thought of butter "going to the wall." We
are aware, as Twain was not, that it actually could happen. We respect
and admire the expertise that has gone into the making and improving of
margarine; we are grateful because it is cheaper than butter; but it
remains hard to love margarine. To describe pastry, for instance, as
"margariny" still manages to add nothing to its attraction.
Widespread information on the role of cholesterol in heart disease and
the health- and status-conscious preference for "light" food, have both
been used brilliantly by margarine in its battle with butter. Margarine
has already achieved universal (though partial) acceptance in the
kitchens of all industrialized countries, and gone a long way to
closing the flavour gap with its rival. The new cholesterol weapon has
cloaked margarine with much greater stature as the next act in the
drama gets under way. On the other hand, a rising demand in the west
for the epicurean dimensions of eating is a shot in the arm for butter,
the original, the traditional, the natural and "finest." So the drama
continues, intense, unpredictable, and filled with incident. Like the
very best theatre, the struggle is not only formidably balanced, but
archetypal.
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One recent incident in the saga has been the introduction, so far
mainly for restaurant use, of "butter-flavoured" vegetable oil for
cooking: margarine, in other words, but unsolidified. The
advertisements righteously proclaim: "No Cholesterol." One brand of
this product praises its own "honest-to-butter" flavour. "Honesty," to
be sure, is a concept which has been stretched a long way; but the
substitution of butter for God or for goodness in the slogan is
hyperbolic homage indeed- as though imitation were not flattery enough.

115

ChAPTER FOUR

Chicken: From Jungle Fowl to Patties

CARVING UP a whole animal, whether a chicken or an ox, has from time
immemorial expressed not only family feeling and cohesion among the
people sharing that animal, but also hierarchy and difference. In
ancient Greece, for example, an animal eaten in common was a symbol of
the organization of the group, and indeed of society itself, in its
diversity as well as its wholeness. A pig or an ox has only four legs,
one liver, two haunches, and so on: it is impossible for everyone to
receive the same cut of meat. Many traditions have assigned status to
various cuts; it mattered deeply which piece you got, and it usually
fell to the head man to be the carver, who "did the honours" and
assigned to each person his "portion," which could be broadly
representative of his kinship or friendship status, and of his lot in
life. Our society will have none of that - and nothing more directly
expresses our loathing of hierarchy than the pre-cut, pre-coated,
ground-and
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reconstituted portions, often computer-calculated to be equal, which we
get as fast food.
At our meal, which is an old-fashioned home-cooked affair with a whole
roast chicken as the meat portion of its main course, each guest will
state his preference, for drumstick or breast, white or dark meat. We
shall murmur our choices, yet almost always assent to what we are
offered. Older women and men will be consulted first; but a good carver
(the role still tends to be played by a male) will endeavour to save at
least a little breast for everyone.
European settlers brought to North America the tradition that eating
fowl was special- behaviour both ceremonial and festive. Rich families
ate roast chicken, shared out by the knife-wielding chief male of the
family, on Sundays. King Henri IV of France had in the sixteenth
century pronounced the ideal of extending this universally desired
luxury to everybody: "I hope to make France so prosperous that every
peasant will have a chicken in his pot on Sundays." Americans worked
hard to turn the occasional treat into an everyday occurrence, as well
as to make it available to all. In 1928 the Republican Party won an
election in the United States with the help of the slogan, "A chicken
in every pot": even the limitation to periodicity had been broken. As
chicken became increasingly common, the role of the roasted festive
fowl fell more often to the turkey, which was winged, feathered, and
fattened, and could be roasted to an elaborate gold like a chicken, but
which was much more impressive in size, with a larger capacity for
special stuffings. A whole roast chicken can still exude some of its
former stylish glory, however. Indeed, the facts that it is pale meat
and perceived as "light" have recently added to its prestige.
The knife-and-fork revolution which swept Europe in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries never entirely conquered the eating of fowl. Bird
meat is much easier to disengage from the bone with the teeth than with
a knife and fork; drumsticks and wings seem almost made to be held. So
the paradox arose that chicken, which for a long time was made the
centrepiece of meals on special occasions, was quite often the only
meat people were commonly allowed to treat with the utter informality
of handling it at table.
In North America, especially in the southern United States, there arose
a strong preference for fried chicken: fowl cut up in advance instead
of being ceremonially carved before the assembled group. Chicken in
pieces became one of the original American "finger foods," eaten on

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occasions where formality is sacrificed to relaxed conviviality,
together with sandwiched food, corn on the cobb, and food hand-dipped
in sauces. Modern fast foods readily encourage the banishment of knives
and forks: informality as well as speed require it. (An important
secondary consideration, one which is more frequently expressed by
fast-food managers, is that removing cutlery means there is nothing to
steal.)
Fried and crumbed chicken pieces have been marketed as fast foods with
huge success, for poultry, especially modern fast-grown chicken meat,
is bland and acceptable to almost every palate. It can even claim to be
unfattening and a "low-cholesterol" food, because fowl fat (except in
capons) does not marble the meat, but lines the body immediately under
the skin and is contained in pockets, so that it is easily removed.
Yet, in spite of chicken's many strong points in modern schemes of
taste, the poultry industry has produced such enormous amounts of meat
that new ways of eating chicken have been urgently sought in order to
whet demand.
The fact is that the chicken, in order to become absolutely malleable
and modern, has had to escape its intractable shape. What used to be
the source of its symbolism- the differentiation embodied by a whole
trussed fowl- has become an anachronistic defect. Even pre-cut, fried
chicken pieces constitute a somewhat limited answer: choices still have
to be made and distinctions drawn. A deboning process has now been
perfected, and this has opened up a vast new future for the chicken.
Boneless meat is available for chicken sticks, chicken rolls, chicken
frankfurters, and chicken chunks. The beef hamburger, which is still
the centre and focus of the fast-food industry, is being challenged by
a new technological feat: the cheap, light, springy (the word is that
of poultry scientists) chicken pattie with its machine-tooled shape,
square, circular, or oblong. Scientific articles commonly call it
"restructured steak."
Fast-food outlets are cultural institutions dedicated not only to deal-
ing swiftly with mankind's compulsion to eat and drink regularly, but
also to doing battle with his twin and fatal limitations of space and
time. The campaign is waged with the weapons of the industrial and
technological age; its driving force is our own particular and
paradoxical blend of obsessive rationality and relaxed asceticism.
Fast foods are processed and sold by giant industrial complexes which
control every detail of their operations, from the smallest ingredient
to the carefully calculated appearance of every eating place. The goal
is to give an impression of the omnipresence and the invariability of
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McDonald's or of Kentucky Fried: travel as far as you like, and it will
always be as though you were still at home, in the arms of the parent
company. Space loses its ancient association with change and surprise.
You can without difficulty seek out the identical ambience, the very
same taste you knew and liked before you set out.
These parent companies are called "chains." When you travel (and
mobility is another of our cultural institutions), they provide links
which render your route as predictable and as secure, as protective and
as limiting as swaddling bands. It is no accident that both the kind of
food they sell and their marketing methods make a direct appeal to the
infantile in all of us. "Chains" stretch out along the highways, where
they supply food as efficiently and as swiftly as gas from a fuel pump.
They also, by means of their repetitiveness, bind and homogenize city
neighbourhoods. They supply in large measure modern man's apparent need
to obliterate the difference between "this place" and "that," and to
make as irrelevant as possible the distinction between "now" and
"then."
Uniformity, as every chain retailer is aware, makes good economic
sense. Mass sales and ease of packaging and handling merchandise demand
predictability - standard quality being, in the end, only one aspect of
the sameness required. But the uniformity and the sheer volume of food
supplied by fast-food chains are also expressions of our democratic
aspirations. Everybody gets the same list of choices, everywhere. No-
thing is served to which anyone could take exception, unless elitist
notions, such as distaste for sweetness or demands for the personal
touch, intrude. The aim is to please most people, and not to truckle to
the difficult or pretentious few. The tastes of children are catered to
especially. Grown-ups simply eat - and enjoy - what their children
like. Abundant wrappings and boxes proclaim technologically perfected
hygiene and simultaneously suggest a child's party with presents. Taste
blandness also flattens out differences among adults: there are no
strong "weird" flavours creating exclusive group preferences and
societal distinctions.
Speed of service not only attacks the time limitation, it forestalls an
increasingly widespread incapacity to be kept waiting, even if waiting
might be a prerequisite for superior food. Speed also helps make
certain that hierarchical formality cannot arise. Formality stratifies
by organizing space and relationship, and to do this it takes time. It
is true that we are "served" from behind the counter, and that the
preparation and
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"further processing" which any single food item has undergone is
achieved only through the expertise of an army of scientists and
marketing agents and the toil of a host of machine operators - but we
never see any of this. We witness only the swiftly and smartly
performed final step as the food is handed to us, cartoned and wrapped,
crumbed and sandwiched. There is no involvement with the personnel of
the restaurant. Everything is impersonal; the very language used in
ordering and serving may be pre-learned, almost ritualized. The method
prevents timewasting and possibly complex exchanges, and irrelevant
chat. It is all so honed-down, rational, and predictable that it is
difficult to imagine how we could further mechanize the process.

GALLUS GALLUS

In the forests of northern India, through Burma, Thailand, Cambodia,
and down to Sumatra, there lives a wild, shy, and easily angered bird.
It is about one kilogram (2 Lb.) in weight when fully grown, with dark
olive-to-bluish legs, a black breast, and shining reddish-brown back
and tail feathers. It has a distinctive fleshy crest on its head, and
an unnerving cackle and scream. Gallus,gallus, the Red Jungle Fowl, was
identified by Charles Darwin as the originator of the modern domestic
chicken. Other jungle fowl are now thought to have contributed to the
gene stock. But the Red Jungle Fowl, which is still abundant in its
region of origin, looks very like a small and streamlined version of
our own farm poultry.
It is commonly believed that domestication of the chicken occurred long
after human beings had learned to tame and systematically exploit many
other kinds of animals. This is because the shy jungle fowl would never
have voluntarily associated itself with man or scavenged from him as
did the other beasts we first learned to live with and to subjugate:
animals like the dog, the goat, and the sheep. In fact, the earliest
use of the cock for man appears to have been as a focus of religiously
oriented sport. The people of the Indus Valley had domesticated the
jungle fowl by 2000 BC. A seal from Mohenjo Daro, one of the Indus
Valley's twin capital cities, depicts two cocks fighting.
Neither domestic fowl nor hens' eggs became fundamentally important in
human diet until Roman times; indeed for half their recorded history,
and in many places to this day, it has been the male of the
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species which was most valued - for cock-fighting, as a pet alarm
clock, or as a provider of beautiful long tail feathers for sartorial
adornment. The hens' eggs were eaten in small quantities by some and
regarded as abominations by others. Actually eating chicken meat was
usually thought barely worthwhile. The wild jungle fowl does not have a
great deal of flesh on it, and once the aforementioned purposes of the
domesticated chicken had been served for long enough and the bird was
killed, it was tough, dry, and generally unrewarding. Meat-lovers,
until recent times, could easily hunt flesh which was more delicious as
well as more copious.
Throughout the countries of the jungle fowl's origin, and including the
Pacific Islands, Tibet, and Mongolia, the chicken is thought to be a
prophetic bird: divination by means of its bones, and sometimes through
inspection of its intestines or liver, has been a matter of solemn
human concern. Chicken bones have fine perforations in them which vary
from fowl to fowl. Bamboo splinters are inserted into the holes and
project at different angles; directions and distances between splinters
are then measured and made the basis of chicken-bone divination. . (The
bones of intensively bred modern chickens exhibit far smaller
variations in the number and position of the perforations; they make a
much less satisfactory medium for magic than those of birds closer to
the wild.)
Chicken divination has an intense following still among tribes in upper
Burma and in Thailand, and a long history among the tribal populations
of southern China. It is a fascinating fact that in Africa, where
chickens spread sporadically (until a hundred years ago many tribes had
never seen them, but others had cultivated them for centuries),
divination by chicken blood and bones is also practised. Some African
tribes keep cocks to wake them up in the morning, others keep them for
their feathers. Others again use chickens in various sacrificial
rituals. Many refuse on any account to eat chickens or their eggs, or
both, and regard the birds as sacred messengers between us and the
world beyond. These attitudes are extraordinarily similar to those held
in south-east Asia and in ancient Iran. Following the trail of these
customs, we can perhaps see how the Indian fowl reached and then
travelled through Africa, via the chicken-divining regions of Ethiopia,
the Sudan, and Uganda.
The reasons why Africans from many tribes refuse to eat chicken flesh,
or deny it to sections of their societal groups, are various. Hens
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for instance, may be considered promiscuous and careless about family
structures ("they lay their eggs here and there"), and generally
incapable of important distinctions ("they eat whatever they come
across: worms, bugs, excrement, anything"). African women may therefore
be warned against eating them, for fear of taking on the
characteristics of what they consume. In much the same way chickens are
thought unclean by high-caste Indian Hindus because the creatures show
no discrimination in their eating habits: a Brahmin should take a
purificatory bath after touching a chicken. Loathing of chickens serves
also to distinguish Hindus from Moslems, who eat a great deal of
poultry. Buddhists are nauseated by domestic fowl because they eat
living worms and bugs; in Tibet, chickens are loathed for their claws
which resemble those of the vultures which pick at corpses. Food always
symbolically underpins societal categories; foods are often forbidden
because they are perceived as violations of the system. It is not
necessary to be consciously aware of a structural violation; one reacts
simply and directly with avoidance and abhorrence.
Eggs, the world over, are symbols of fertility and of pure and un-
differentiated power, of a force which is as yet unharnessed and un-
directed. In the nineteenth century a German explorer in Africa was
murdered because he horrified his hosts by devouring unspeakable eggs.
In Pakistan, south-east Asia, the Pacific Islands, and in parts of
Africa (again that insistent and surprising similarity) eggs are often
thought to be delicacies - provided that the inside has turned visibly
and palpably into a chicken fetus: potentiality must have committed
itself before it can be found delectable. Eggs, for women, are sexy and
therefore dangerous, or fertility-replacing (eating them might fool her
body into not producing offspring itself ), and strictly forbidden.
Eggs may be thought of as hens' excrement and rejected as unclean.
When the Aryans invaded northern India in the second millennium BC,
they quickly learned to admire the jungle fowl and decided that it was
sacred; by about 1000 BC they had forbidden the eating of its flesh.
Meanwhile the Sumerians had come into contact with domestic fowl
through their distant trade with the Indus Valley. Chickens, from 2000
BC onward, have been exceedingly useful on long sea voyages: they lay
eggs on board, perpetuate themselves, and grow quickly to an edible
size. The Chinese have cultivated chickens since the second millennium
BC. They bred huge fowl with dark heavy bones, black skin, thickly
feathered legs, pink combs, and almost no ability to fly. The first of
122 

these Cochin or Shanghai chickens to reach Britain arrived as a present
for the royal family in 1835; they caused a sensation, with tens of
thousands of people fighting to get a glimpse of them. The event
started a century-long devotion to the hobby and business of breeding
different varieties of chickens in Europe and America.
For a long time it was thought that the ancient Egyptians had no
knowledge of the chicken until Hellenistic times. That idea was shat-
tered in 1923, when a limestone sherd from 1350 BC was found in a tomb
in the Valley of the Kings near Thebes. It bears a swiftly but
confidently drawn cock. The Egyptians appear not to have been concerned
thereafter with chickens in their art and writing, until their
incubators became the wonder of the Mediterranean world a thousand
years later. Maybe they kept a very few chickens for mere amusement.
Perhaps cocks were associated with the sun-religion of Akhnaton, and
exterminated after the death of Tutankhamen. (Akhnaton's Hymn to the
Sun of the fourteenth century BC celebrates a chick breaking out of its
shell; but we do not know whether the bird is of the species Gallus
gallus or not.) What is certain is that for food the Egyptians, as
their art abundantly shows us, raised quails, as well as ducks, geese,
and other non-gallinaceous birds.
The Theban pot-sherd ruins a previously clear and obvious picture of a
Mediterranean world ignorant of chickens until Greeks encountered
Persians. There are no chickens in the Old Testament, and none in Homer
or Hesiod. An eighth century BC Assyrian cylinder seal does depict a
cock-fight, but Assyria was next door to Iran. After the Persian Wars,
Greek literature begins to abound in references to chickens (which the
Greeks often called "Persian birds"), and Greek art pours out rep-
resentations of them on coins, sculpture, and pottery.
The Persians had been obsessed with chickens, and especially with
cocks, from the moment they began to import domestic fowl from India.
The two sacred animals in Zoroastrian religion were the dog and the
cock. The dog guarded households and flocks; the cock had a special
relationship with fire and light which made his cry a terror to
darkness and evil. Persians, who so honoured the light of the sun that
they prayed and ritually bathed themselves at every sunrise, never per-
mitted themselves to be separated from the sacred power of the cock.
The long-fingered yellow demon of sleep, Bashyacta, would overcome
everything if it were not for the challenge he daily receives from the
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Chickens spread north from Persia as well as west: they were taken up
by the Scythians who adorned their coffins with images of cocks; they
became favourites of the Celts, the Gauls, and the ancient Britons.
When Julius Caesar arrived in Britain in the first century BC the
natives were already breeding cocks and hens. "They think it unlawful
to feed upon hares, chickens or geese," he wrote, "yet they breed them
up for their amusement and pleasures": once more we find the fowl being
reared for sport and its flesh forbidden as food. Cocks' powerfully
spurred leg-bones have been found at sites of the Roman period in
Britain; they confirm that cock-fighting, for which Britain was to be
famous many centuries later, had already become popular.
The Romans, adopting and perfecting the technology of the Hellenistic
Greeks, raised domestic fowl for eating, and especially for their eggs.
The Romans learned the science of incubation from the Greeks and the
Egyptians, and from the Greeks they learned how to castrate cocks to
produce fat capons. They kept capons, which they called "halfmales,"
semimares, in battery cages as they did dormice and other table
delicacies, and they sometimes forbade killing chickens for meat, not
as the result of a taboo but because their eggs were too valuable.
Roman writers on agriculture devote long passages to the correct
raising and care of fowl; descriptions of Roman dinner-parties include
among the courses gargantuan quantities of chicken and eggs.
The Romans had their own version of chicken-divination, which they
called auspicium ex tripudiis. They took the auspices by throwing
chickenfeed to a flock of sacred fowls. If the birds ate so greedily
that the grain fell to the ground from their beaks and rhythmically
bounced (the tripudium was a triple-step in a warlike dance), then the
battle would be won; if not, it should not be undertaken. On one famous
occasion during the First Punic War an exasperated Roman admiral named
P. Claudius Pulcher, who wanted badly to attack the Carthaginians even
though the chickens refused their feed, seized the sacred fowl and
threw them overboard. "If they will not eat," he cried, "let them
drink!"and lost the battle.
Gallus is the Roman word for the bird; some have thought that the name
refers to France, Gallia, which may have been one early introducer of
chickens to the Italian peninsula, Greek Sicily being the other. It is
much more likely, however, that,gallus comes from the same root as the
word "poultry." This root is the Hindu word pil, which becomes pullus
and gallus (Latin), pollo (Italian),poulet (French), and puUet (En
124 

glish). Another widely-used stem for words designating chickens is
thought also to originate in India: it is kuk, Sanskrit kukata, Latin
cucuno, kuku in many African languages, Kuchlein (German), coq
(French), kieken (Dutch), cock and chicken in English.
The Portuguese first landed in Brazil on April 22, 1500. Within thirty
years of that date chickens were described as common in South America.
The newcomers would probably have brought some chickens on board ship
with them, since sailors usually did this, but a thirty-year period
seems unprecedentedly short for the extensive spreading of know-
ledgeable acquaintance with an entirely new domestic creature. Was
there some kind of indigenous South American Jungle Fowl? Did the
indefatigable Polynesians, who undoubtedly got their chickens origi-
nally from Asia, carry the domestic fowl across the ocean long before
the Europeans arrived?
The Indians of South America are described by the early European
settlers as keeping their chickens for their feathers and for
cockfighting they would seldom eat either the birds or their eggs. This
behaviour did not follow European example, except for the pleasure in
cockfighting; indeed it seems strangely reminiscent of Asian practice,
and of that of the African tribes who are believed to have received
chickens ultimately from Asia. Another strange fact is that the last
supreme Inca of Peru was named Atahualpa, and his uncle was called
Hualpa. Hualpa, in the Quechua language, means "chicken." Did the Incas
call chickens (newly arrived from Europe) after their ruler, or were
the supreme Inca and his uncle named after chickens (already well known
in Peru) ?
There exists in South America today a race of chicken which looks very
similar to certain Asiatic breeds. They are called Araucanas, after the
Chilean Indian mountain tribe which raised them, and which had almost
no contact with Europeans until the end of the nineteenth century.
Pure-bred Araucanas are black-skinned and rumpless (lacking the final
segments of the spinal column), with ear puffs, pea combs, and
"sillcy'' or hair-like feathers; all of these are characteristics of
Asian fowl rather than of European breeds. They also, uniquely in the
poultry world, lay green and blue eggs. If the Polynesians brought
chickens to South America from the east before the Europeans arrived,
it means that the voyagers travelled fast, because chickens need water,
and could not have survived a long, slow, drifting journey.
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THE FIGHTING COCK

Ever since the first domestication of the jungle fowl, cocks have been
raised and appreciated for a great deal more than their final fate in
the family cooking pot. They were potent expressions of power and para-
dox, and symbols of masculine courage and prestige.
The domestic cock greets light with sound. This daily miracle has led
him to be considered a sacred bird, a boundary marker, both link and
distinction between sight and sound, light and dark, life and death,
here and the beyond. The weird association of light with the cock's
crow made him a chaser of darkness and, with that, of evil; he awoke
men from the death of sleep and so symbolized the Messianic Age for
Jews and the Resurrection for Christians. The steeples of many churches
are topped for this reason with the figure of a cock.
The crowing cock frightened away ghosts, as Horatio in Hamlet explains
he has heard it said; and the fourth-century hymn of St. Ambrose greets
the singing dawn rooster who returns hope to the sick and to
travellers, releases them from the fear of robbers, and restores faith
to doubters. An Italian boy-child born with the crowing of the cock was
often named Galeazzo, so that he would remember this lucky concurrence
of events all his life. Among the Germans, the cock was associated in
folldore and magic with fire; his comb in particular was symbolic of
flames.
Gods associated with light loved the cock: Helios, Ahura Mazda,
Mithras, and Osiris, to whom, in Hellenistic times, black or variegated
cocks and white cocks were sacrificed, because he was a dying-and -
rising god, one who knew both the underworld and the light of the sun.
The cock has been called upon symbolically to participate in mysteries
concerned with immortality. He was sacred to Asclepius, the Greek god
of healing, whose mythology concerned dying and restoring to life. The
philosopher Socrates asked on his deathbed for a cock to be sacrificed
on his behalf in honour of Asclepius, for he believed he was not dying
but recovering and awakening to a more abundant life. In Mohammedan
legend, the Prophet saw in the First Heaven a vast cock whose crest
brushed the boundary of the Second Heaven. It is the crowing of this
cosmic fowl which awakens every living creature except man; and when it
ceases to crow the Day of Judgement will be at hand.
A cooked cock. in several medieval stories, stood up and crowed in
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his dish, thereby revealing a crime which till then had remained
hidden; a living hen and cock are still kept in memory of such a legend
in a church on the pilgrimage route to Compostela in northern Spain.
Sometimes people have avoided keeping cocks because of their crowing:
the Kikuyu of Kenya because they did not want their whereabouts given
away to their enemies or their victims, the ancient Greek Sybarites
(allegedly) because they liked sleeping late in the mornings.
The magnificent cocks on the silver coins of Himera, a Greek city in
Sicily, are puns on the city's name: Himera suggests both "day" and
"sexual desire." The cock has always been a byword for its lust - to
the point where, in many languages besides English, cock is synonymous
with the male sexual organ itself. It was for this reason that in
Victorian, and especially in nineteenth-century North American usage
the word rooster was substituted as the bird's name. Cocks' combs and
cocks' testicles have seemed from time immemorial powerful
aphrodisiacs. In ancient Greece a cock was a gift with specific sexual
connotations from an older male to a young boy. The cock expressed the
sheer maleness of the couple, their virile aggressivity and energy.
(The alternative gift, a hare, referred to the joys of the chase: the
boy's unwillingness and flight being considered to be as erotically
enticing as a woman's "playing hard to get.")
Men have always found in the cock a model of pugnacity and courage. It
is the bird's instinct to be easily aroused to rage, to fly at his
opponent, and to fight till one or both of them drop dead; while a cock
can crawl - no matter how battered and mutilated he is - he will fight
on. The sight of cock facing cock has inspired men with battle-lust
(the Greek general Themistocles was said to have roused his men to
emulate fighting cocks), has urged them to fling themselves into
competitive exploits (the goddess Athene appears together with a cock
on vases won as prizes for athletic victories), and has encouraged them
to strut in the panoplies of male pride. Does not the cock wear a
crested "helmet, spurs and plumes, and wattles which in many languages
are known as "beards"? The hybristic swagger of the cock has found its
way into many English expressions. A coxcomb means an insolent upstart;
a man may be as cocky as a rooster with crest erect and looking for
trouble. The cocksure are bound someday to get what is coming to them,
and when they do they must expect to be crestfallen.
Cockfighting is thought by some to be the oldest living sport. The joy
men took in watching cockfights almost certainly led to the do
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mestication of the bird in the first place; and the sacred status of
cocks from earliest times must have meant that this sport, like so many
others, was imbued in the beginning with religious significance. There
is no doubt that cockfighting even today is profoundly theatrical; the
audience invest the combatants with symbolic roles, so that they act
out the aggressions and struggles for power of the gamblers and betters
standing (or rather, "shouting, bawling, pounding, and vociferating
like a very Babel") in a ring around the padded cockpit. The process
can have a complex societal role, letting off emotional steam in a
manner harmless to the spectators.
In the first century BC, cockfights were held annually in the Athenian
theatre sacred to the phallic, orgiastic, and gorgeously costumed god
Dionysus; a cockfight is carved on the marble throne of the god's
priest, with the winged boy Agon, the personification of contest,
setting the cocks ready to fight. In Aristophanes' comedy, Clouds,
where "Right" and "wrong" do battle with words, the two actors may well
have been dressed as fighting cocks. An early use for the sport may
have been as a decision-making device: an impossibly difficult choice
found dramatic resolution through the impersonation by fighting cocks
of the two possibilities, one being "killed off" by the other. Cocks
are equals and alike; from earliest times a fighting pair of them has
been made to represent the relentless savagery of civil war. The cocks'
wounds and death may on occasion have constituted a kind of ritual
scapegoats' sacrifice to avert man's own violence and prevent it from
destroying his society. In any event, it was commonly felt that a
cockfight was not only simple fun to watch, but also a drama with
several messages, and that the lessons needed to be drawn, witnessed,
and endlessly repeated.
Cocks, like men, are armed for battle with lethal metal swords. The
cock's natural spurs are removed from its legs and on to the stumps are
bound one of two kinds of metal spur: sword-like slashing blades are
traditional in the east, and sharp points in the west. The method helps
to equalize the combatants since natural spurs vary a good deal in
length and strength. The metal weapons are designed to draw blood and
so increase the excitement, and, in fact, a single blow from one of
these weapons often kills. "Naked-heel" fighting, with natural spurs
and no metal weapons, is preferred in India and in some other eastern
countries; in this form of the sport endurance is valued more highly
than speed or agility. A naked-heel fight can last a whole day. This
devotion to taking one's time over one's pleasures is completely
different
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from the typical western enjoyment of short and violent sensations,
timed by the stop-watch. Cocks in some places are "dubbed" before a
fight: their wattles and crest are cut off, much as a soldier used to
remove his beard before battle in case an enemy snatched and held it.
The birds may wear hoods into the fray, like fighting airplane pilots.
Before the fight, cocks live a glorious life. They are massaged, ex-
ercised, petted, and admired: bathed, shampooed, and fed on delicacies.
Exercising one's rooster meant jogging behind him to keep him running,
and every now and then presenting him with an ordinary cock (which had
to be carried under the owner's arm for protection) to encourage his
irritability and aggression. In ancient Greece and Egypt, garlic or
bread sopped in wine was considered especially fortifying for cocks;
South Americans like to give them hot chili-peppers; in eight-
eenth-century England we hear of them being given pastries made of
wheaten flour, eggs, and large quantities of butter. An owner had
personally to find and supply the varieties of living grubs and insects
which his game cock particularly fancied. A man "fed like a fighting
cock" was uncommonly sleek.
The master of a cock, in many societies, has been found to identify
himself, and especially his sexual prowess, closely with his bird.
Clifford Geertz, the anthropologist, can describe fighting cocks as
being for the Balinese "ambulant genitals with a life of their own." In
ancient Greek art the cock was often made explicitly to resemble a
male's sexual organs. All kinds of more or less overt sexual symbolism
surrounds the care given to cocks before and during the fight. They are
caressed, fed sexually stimulating food, ceremonially bathed in scented
water or in urine. During the fight, a bleeding cock has its wounds
licked by his master - who might be moved actually to put the chicken's
whole head into his mouth, sucking and blowing, in order to revive it.
The method is used all over the world, although it is often considered
a rather affected gesture. Spurs may be dramatically licked before the
fight begins, to prove that they have not been poisoned. Cockfighting
is like wrestling: a celebration of rampant virility, with melodramatic
flourishes, extravagant displays of resolution, honour, arrogance, and
excess, huge stylized gestures, and a violent climax where inseparably
interwoven Chance and Design are seen irresistibly to have taken
effect.
Men from widely different social backgrounds have always met and mixed
at cockfighting bouts. It seems clear that the discovery of a
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common base-line fellowship among lords, workers, peasants, and bour-
geois males is part of the essence of the exercise. The outlawing of
cockfighting, which began to be effected in England in 1834, was a
symptom of deep-seated changes in society. A general increase in social
equality would reduce society's need dramatically to express the
natural similarity among men in a system where class rules were rigid
and waived only on special occasions. There would be less flaunting of
bloodlust from then on; cruelty was to take a new, less colourful and
individualistic, more concealed and more efficient turn, as human
beings conceived and perfected factory farming.
Yet the ancient sport lives on. It is widespread in South and Central
America and in the Caribbean countries, and it also exists in spite of
the non-violence of religions like Buddhism and Hinduism in India and
south-east Asia, the lands where the birds originated. Today the Phil-
ippine Islands are probably the world centre for cocking; international
"mains" (large cockfighting contests) take place there from time to
time. In the United States and Europe, where it is forbidden by law,
cockfighting continues to flourish illegally. All the traditions, the
lore, the breeds, and the intricate rules are maintained and handed on,
a furtive survival of an ancient passion in a world which, officially
at least, has little room and less sympathy for strutting and
flamboyant masculinity or for violence accorded gaudy enjoyment and
studied respect.

MOTHER HEn

Light rouses the cock to crow, and it is light which passes through the
hen's eye, activates the pituitary gland at the base of her skull to
secrete certain hormones in her body, and starts her ovary working to
lay eggs. Every baby hen hatches with five or six thousand microscopic
egg-germs already awaiting completion in her body. She is ready to
begin creating and laying from this vast store when she is about six
months old.
The hen's ovary is a very large organ, because although she is a big
bird, her eggs are enormous in relation to her body size-they are so
big that she can carry only one egg to completion in her body at a
time. Hens, like all female vertebrates, begin with paired ovaries; but
in her case the right ovary withers away so that only one egg needs to
be given space. Only a tiny fraction of the egg-germs she carries will
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eventually end up as eggs; what it is that makes these privileged few
do so is unknown. Quite naturally, scientists would dearly like to un-
derstand and then draw profit from knowledge of the mechanism.
The female hormone estrogen is partly responsible for the hen's be-
haviour both in making her submissive to the cock at coition, and in
causing her to seek and prepare a nest in which to lay her eggs. It
apparently even causes her to emit a pre-laying call. Nest-preparation
is so biologically necessary as part of the laying process that caged
battery hens will often cry out and struggle to obey this part of
nature's demand.
Hens lay according to the length of daylight; when days are short (in
winter when it is too cold to raise chicks) there is not enough light,
under natural conditions, to rouse the hen's ovary to mature eggs
within her body. Once light has triggered intense hormonal activity in
the hen, ovulation occurs about six or eight hours later. She will now
begin laying eggs, usually one every twenty-five hours. In ovulation,
the yolk erupts from the ovary's constraining membranes and is drawn
down the oviduct into the hen's infundibulum. At this point the yolk
rests for fifteen minutes in its journey, and it is during this pause
that fertilization may occur, whether directly or by male sperm stored
in the hen's body. After these fifteen minutes the yolk will move on
and then begin to be surrounded by white, by its two membranes, and by
the shell: sperm penetration is rendered impossible. It is a common
misapprehension that fertilization is required for an egg to be
produced; this is not the case. The vast majority of hens' eggs are now
marketed unfertilized so that they will not develop into chicks. Even
the presence of a minute blood spot such as occurs in fertilized eggs
(without harming them nutritionally in any way), revolts many people in
our culture, and such eggs are not kosher in the Jewish tradition. A
tiny haemorrhage sometimes occurs at ovulation, producing a little
blood on the surface of the yolk, again harmlessly.
The yolk is moved from the hen's infundibulum, again by muscular
contractions, into the magnum, where it rotates and is swathed in egg-
white, which twists at the long ends like a candy wrapper: the white's
end-knots are easily found when an egg is cracked open. The membranes
are added during the hour the egg takes to pass down the isthmus of the
oviduct; the two membranes are in contact with each other over the
whole surface of the egg white, except at the egg's blunt end, where
they part company to form the air sac. In the uterus or shell gland the
egg waits eighteen to twenty hours as calcium salts from the tissue of
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this cavity create the shell, and the hen's body gently kneads the egg
into its oval (literally, "eggy") shape. Again, what it is that prompts
the hen to lay her egg is not completely understood. The act takes only
a few seconds and it is often greeted by the hen with a cackle of
triumph.
When she has laid a number of eggs, another hormonal change takes place
in her body. One of the hormones involved is prolactin, a substance
named after its effect in mammals, which is to make the female breast
produce milk. It causes instinctual maternal behaviour in all
vertebrate creatures: amphibians return to water in order to lay eggs,
the female fowl anxiously gathers her chicks together when night falls.
Prolactin also makes hens "broody," that is, intent upon setting on the
eggs they have laid and keeping them warm till they hatch. (Broodiness
is a thorough nuisance in battery or factory layers: one reason for the
preference for White Leghorns over all others in factory farming is
that, with the help of careful breeding, they are chickens lacking an
intense brooding instinct.)
A broody hen fluffs up her feathers until she is almost twice her
normal size. Her tail feathers rise and spread. She stays that way all
through brooding, hatching, and raising her young. The reason for the
physical change is that with these feathers she keeps her eggs warm,
and also finds room under them for the hatched chicks. As soon as her
chicks are ready for independence, the hen's feathers subside, she sud-
denly and totally ignores her offspring, and they just as unconcernedly
abandon her. Part of this transformation is due to the subsidence of
the hen's feathers: the chicks have known her by her ballooning size
and shape, by her maternal clucks, and her general motherly concern.
Her diminished size as her feathers lie down, and her loss of the moth-
ering urge, combine to make her simply unrecognizable to her chickens -
and out of sight is out of mind. So nature, at precisely the right
moment, painlessly severs the close and vital tie between mother and
babies.
During the three weeks it takes a hen to hatch her eggs, her tem-
perature rises and she needs very little to eat. She sits tight on the
nest and refuses to move, except for about fifteen minutes a day when
she rushes off to grab enough food and drink for survival, before
hurrying back to her duty. (So closely calculated is nature's provision
for the welfare of hen and eggs that artificial incubators have
regularly to be cooled for fifteen minutes to allow for this
rest-period in a hen's day.) Three times daily the hen must turn every
egg in her nest with her
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beak, in order to ensure that they are warmed all over, and to prevent
the embryos inside from sticking to the shells.
Although the eggs were laid over a period of up to three weeks before
the hen began to brood over them, all the chicks hatch, after an in-
cubation period of approximately twenty-one days, within forty-eight
hours of each other. Forty-eight hours is the amount of time a hen can
stay on her nest without leaving and the length of time a chick just
out of its shell can survive without food or water. (The latter fact is
of enormous importance for modern hatcheries, which use the bonus in
time for the transport of baby chicks from incubating firms to
fatteners.) The first-born chick begins peeping in its shell
twenty-four hours before it hatches; the others soon take up the cry,
thus notifying each other and their mother that zero-hour is
approaching. Experiments with turkeys have shown that a chick's
cheeping is a matter of life and death to it. If a mother turkey hears
no sound from her nestling (the experimenters deafened a turkey hen to
see what would happen), she immediately pecks it to death, taking it
for a nest enemy. In a turkey's brain the sight of a chick is not
enough; the sound must complete the picture.
When its time comes, the chick saws its way out of the shell with a
rough piece of its bill which is called an "egg tooth"; this
specialized piece of anatomy disappears after use. The mother hen has
to concentrate as, one by one, underneath her and out of her sight, the
chicks struggle out of their shells and lie down, exhausted and faintly
cheeping, to recover from their ordeal. One false move and the hen may
trample some of her brood to death, or smother them. Once the chick's
down is dry, it begins peeping loudly, largely to help the mother know
where it is. The muffled cheeps in the shells also keep her informed of
how much longer she needs to stay on the nest.
When the whole brood is hatched, the hen sallies forth with her
chickens, who are ready immediately to feed themselves. What they
continue to need is their mother's warmth and it is again through their
cheeps that the chicks let her know their need. The hen will suddenly
(without any warning discernible to us) squat down on the ground, and
the chicks will rush under her outspread wings and feathers and stay
there until they are warmed through, after which they will set off
again on their perpetually exciting quest for bugs, grubs, and seeds.
133

MAN'S EYE VIEW

In spite of the fact that chickens have seldom roused people's
affections-they are too scratchy, self-absorbed, un-mammalian, and,
above all, too edible for that - the cock, the hen, and their chicks
have always lived close to their owners' houses. They need protection,
especially at night, from the predators which are constantly after
their eggs and their flesh; they are kept close by for feeding
purposes; and their nests need constantly to be checked for their
contents. The care of barnyard animals - rabbits, chickens, ducks, and
the rest - has always been women's work, "house" work, along with
everything concerned with milk and dairying. Constantly under the eye
of their human owners, chickens have been in all societies the subjects
of speculation, moralizing, fable-telling, and mythologizing.
Cocks have always delighted us with their pride, their dignified and
angry flamboyance, their sexual vigour, and their courage. A cock may
almost achieve the status of a pet, not only because of his useful
crow, but also because he is perceived as the walking achievement of a
swaggering and self-confident macho ideal. We have already remarked
that men may see cocks as actually embodying their own sexual prowess,
and allow the sight of a bloody cockfight to spur them to battle.
The Greek god Hermes had a great deal in common with cocks.
Similarities include his winged, intensely masculine and phallic
nature; his role as psychopomp or leader of the souls across the
boundary separating life from death; and his patronage of eloquence.
The cock crows, and people listen: this was conclusive proof that
public eloquence was a quintessentially male virtue. The hen's modest
cluck showed that women should keep their words short and low, and
attuned to domestic concerns. The rooster was thought to symbolize the
church preacher, warning and rousing his flock; it followed that
holding forth, in women and hens, was inappropriate and ridiculous. The
cock "rules the roost," and protects his womenfolk from other cocks and
from foreign marauders. His manner of "possessing" a hen sexually is
violent and imperious; she simply, silently, and apparently without
pleasure, submits. The cock has provided a richly suggestive model for
the maintenance of masculine prestige. It was not a model meant to be a
Christian ideal, however. The only time chickens get into the New
Testament, aside from the dawn crow of the cock when Peter had denied
knowing Jesus three times, is when Jesus compared himself not to a
rooster but to a
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mother hen, longing to gather the children of Jerusalem like chickens
under his wings.
Barnyard fowl (not game-cocks and their cock-breeding spouses, whose
symbolism is entirely different) have in our own culture, and until our
own day, been thought the easiest of creatures to feed. There was
nothing "scientific" about it; hens foraged for food and were grateful
for scraps. People marvelled at how generously productive the homely
and easily pleased hen could be. (In different cultures, the hen, as
mentioned earlier, is an abomination precisely because she eats any-
thing: her behaviour denotes promiscuity and lack of discrimination in
the female, whose role is to embody the idea of purity itself.)
Chickens have one of the toughest digestive tracts on earth; if they
habitually eat hard objects they solve the problem simply by swallowing
stones which lodge in their gizzards and help in the grinding process.
The "corn cycle," which used to operate on many American farms, began
with the feeding of whole kernels to cattle. Unchewed corn passed
through the cows and into their excrement. Hogs scavenged in the dung,
and ate the corn they found in it; sharp-eyed chickens were then
allowed to hunt through the pigs' manure for particles of undigested
corn. European visitors were amazed at American ingenuity and at the
saving of waste and labour. There was no grinding of corn and no need
for feed containers. The hen took refuse and turned it into gold. She
was a modest, hard-working, and submissive wife, as irreproachably
fecund and maternally devoted as she was thrifty. She was a model for
nineteenth-century Protestant womanhood.
Her mate the cock (or rather, rooster) was a gentleman, and punctual
with his crowing. He looked after his family; it was his duty, because
he was stronger and cleverer than they, to show them where they could
find food, and people often claimed they had witnessed his fatherly
concern. Because he was a bird he could afford openly to have many
wives whereas a modicum of discretion was required when a Victorian
gentleman kept mistresses or pursued his female servants. The cock made
quite certain, of course, that he alone was in charge of his household
by keeping upstart roosters fiercely at bay. His womenfolk could be
very difficult at times - but he kept them in order through his
patience and his effortless masculine prestige. "It belongs to their
very nature," wrote a nineteenth-century authority on hens, "to be
marshalled by one of the stronger sex, who is a kind, though a strict
master, and a considerate, though stern disciplinarian."
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In 1922, a Norwegian psychologist called T. Schjelderup-Ebbe officially
demonstrated that hens themselves observed what he called a "pecking
order." One hen dominates the rest and demands signs of submission, in
particular a cowering demeanour and lowered head; she pecks any
insufficiently humble hen into subordination. The hens lower in
prestige than herself similarly browbeat others, and so on down until
one poor creature is constantly set upon by the rest, being pecked by
all the others and having no one herself to peck. Especially fierce
battles result if newcomers are introduced into an established order.
Cocks easily rule over all hens; it is a very sorry specimen of rooster
that allows himself to be "hen-pecked."
The discovery of the pecking order in chickens was received less as a
revelation than as confirmation of what everyone knew to be the case.
Some chickens (and people, of course) are better and stronger than
others; it is sensible - and it was now "proved" to be natural as well
to reinforce this state of affairs with any means at our disposal. It
was considered especially fascinating to discover that women (that is,
hens) are guilty of this behaviour among themselves, with the extremely
poignant proviso that any male could impose his authority over his wom-
enfolk at any time. Fewer reflections have been inspired by the fact
that pecking order develops only when chickens are kept in confinement;
the fierce territorial instinct of the birds, ensuring as it does that
each family has enough land on which to feed, has positive value and
less violent effects when they live uncaged.
Sex roles, after all, had been confirmed by chickendom since ancient
times. Aelian tells us that cocks were kept in the temple of Herakles,
while his wife Hebe had hens. Between the temples flowed "a never-
failing channel of clear water." Hens absolutely never went into the
temple of Herakles, whereas cocks at mating time flew over the stream
to choose their mates. When, after fertilizing the hens, they returned
to their home, they were "cleansed by the water that separates the
sexes." A cock sometimes helps a hen to hatch eggs, Aelian avers
elsewhere, and when he does so he ceases to be able to crow: "I fancy
he is conscious that he is then doing the work of a female and not of a
male."
When a hen produced a small malformed egg, as happens sometimes at a
first laying, the unsuccessful object used to be called a "cock's egg"
or "cokeney" in early English. The word was often used of a foolish or
spoilt child, the pride of its doting mother; and then by country
people to put down soft and ignorant city-dwellers. The expression was
taken
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over by Londoners and used with pride: it is the origin of the name
Cockney.
A hen sometimes develops spurs, a masculine trait. Such a bird has
always been destined for the pot, or at any rate for death, because
people believed she could not be a good layer and in any case was
liable to pierce any eggs she produced with her spurs. It is a fact
which cannot escape the notice of even the most unwilling witness that
hens quite often crow. Such an event has always been considered
sinister - an omen of war, of a death in the family, of a breakdown in
society. The separation of male and female roles has until recently
formed the basis of societal structure, to the extent that any
tampering with the categories suggested the collapse of order. Cocks
and hens had to conform to the roles we projected onto them, and to
confirm for us the moulds we forced upon each other.
"The barnyard rooster," according to a recent history of European and
American food economics, "is now a figment of the urbanite's
imagination." As increasing equality between men and women gives us
entirely new spectacles through which to view the social scene, the
cock and his mate automatically lose their secondary and literary use
as an Aesopian representation of our sexual roles and a proof of wisdom
in our organization of human relationships. At almost the same moment,
the whole flock of barnyard fowl has disappeared from our view, to be
locked away, forced to conform to a utilitarian scheme, deprived of as
many of their natural behavioral patterns as are thought inconvenient,
and pressured ever more relentlessly to produce. Let us hope that the
suspicion does not become even more insistent that once again we might
be thrusting upon chickens a role which is a kind of prophetic model, a
metaphor for the general direction of present human goals, and for the
price we are prepared to pay, and to make others pay, in order to
satisfy what we perceive to be our needs.

MODERN METHODS OF KEEPING AND lULLING POULTRY

In 1934, a Californian businessman called John Kimber seized upon the
growing realization among chicken farmers that eggs were one thing and
chicken meat another, and that the production of each would be more
profitable if undertaken separately. He put this insight into practice,
and revolutionized modern chicken farming.
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From this time on chickens were intensively bred for egg-laying power,
an effort which culminated, in North America, in the hybrid White
Leghorn hen and chickens related to her. She lays white eggs, and most
North Americans prefer eggs white; there are pockets of brown-egg
fanciers in the eastern United States and Canada, and most Europeans
respond more warmly to brown eggs. The colour of the shell bears no
relation to the quality of the egg, but consumers are adamant on this
point. The White Leghorn is the world's most prolific egg-layer: she
will give 230 to 300 eggs during her most fertile two year laying
period - after which she is slaughtered. This compares with the very
few and sporadic clutches, about thirty eggs a year, laid by chickens
in the wild, before men began selecting and breeding them.
It was also in the 1930s that systematic use began to be made of the
ancient farmers' lore that hens lay more eggs when there is more light:
more during long summer days, for example, than in winter. As we now
know, light stimulates the pituitary gland at the base of a hen's
brain, and this causes a greater flow of the hormone which in turn
rouses the hen's ovary to activity. Nature's built-in rest-period for
the hen, the months after her fall moulting during which she would nor-
mally lay no eggs, was now brought to an unceremonious end. It was
found that depriving a hen of food and water for four or five days
could induce moulting, and that after a much briefer time than is
naturally provided she could be made to start laying eggs again.
Laying chickens, kept in what is called in England the battery system,
live in small cages made of wire so that their droppings fall through
the cage floor and can be removed from below with little difficulty;
chicken-manure can cause disease to spread among chickens in con-
finement. They live under bright light for up to seventeen or sometimes
more hours out of every twenty-four, depending on the amount of light
the hens can bear and still keep laying eggs. They poke their heads out
of their cages in order to feed on grain, heavily dosed with egg-en-
couraging additives and antibiotics, moving by them on conveyor belts.
Cage floors are slanted so that the eggs, as they are laid, roll down
onto another conveyor belt passing in front of them. On this the eggs
are carried to machines which grade, clean, and pack them. If a hen's
eggs are constantly removed so that she never manages to provide
herself with a clutch of eggs to brood on, she will be further
stimulated to keep laying.
difficult problem for poultrymen: hens which

Shell-thickness is
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produce eggs non-stop all their lives often manage to supply only thin-
shelled eggs, and mechanical collection and packaging requires shell
strength. A great deal of research is continually done on feed and
additives to increase calcium delivery and its conversion into tougher
shells.
Hens are caged in groups of about four, to economize on the high heat
which encourages egg-laying; they can sit or stand, but never run about
- or even turn round. Each bird has only ten centimetres (4 ins.) of
cage width to spare, though its wing span is about seventy-six centi-
metres (30 ins.). The British Protection of BirdsAct reads:

If any person keeps or confines any bird whatsoever in any cage or
other receptacle which is not sufficient in height, length or breadth
to permit the bird to stretch its wings freely, he shall be guilty of
an offense against the Act, and be liable to a special penalty....
Provided that this subsection shall not apply to poultry.

In close confinement, chickens often peck and worry each other; they
are therefore routinely declawed and debeaked. More than half the upper
beak and some of the lower is cut off; this leaves enough beak for
feeding, but it is more difficult for the hen to peck at feathers. The
pecking order which naturally operates among hens can still mean that a
chicken helplessly caged with enemies may be tortured to death by them.
The response of scientists has been to breed more docile hens. But
cannibalism, even with debeaking, continues to kill off battery
chickens. The economics of chicken factory farming simply takes losses
into account: mortality must threaten profitability before concern is
aroused.
Hens only are required in hatcheries, for laying; cocks are retained
merely to breed replacements for "spent" hens. Cocks are allowed to
keep their beaks, because holding a hen by the nape of her neck with
his beak is indispensable to a cock's mating performance. New batches
of chickens are regularly hatched and sexed; nine out of ten baby cocks
are suffocated or incinerated, or crushed to death and then fed to
hogs. Thousands of male chicks may be destroyed on a single day in a
large hatchery. Sexing tiny chickens is a highly skilled job, and one
of the few in the field which have not been mechanized. (Another is the
impregnating of turkeys: the huge modern breeds of turkey have almost
no sexual prowess left; coition has to be replaced by human
intervention.) Raising and slaughtering chickens for their meat is an
entirely dif
139

ferent business enterprise, though it too begins, of course, with the
laying of hens' eggs. Chickens especially bred to lay eggs for human
consumption do not make good enough eating to be considered marketable.
Fowls have therefore been bred by modern geneticists especially for
meat production. These birds must grow as fast as possible on the least
feed feasible. They must have the largest conceivable ratio of flesh to
bone and muscle. Many broilers these days are crosses of White Cornish
cocks and white Plymouth Rock hens. (Specialization is such that a firm
may produce only males which are used to cross with females produced by
another company.) Whiteness is important because dark feathers may
leave a speckled appearance in a chicken's skin when it has been
plucked. Feathering must be plentiful, since crowded conditions mean,
as one poultry scientist says, that "poorly feathered birds are subject
to tears and scratches" which downgrade the product in the eyes of the
consumer.
In order to keep down costs, scientists wage perpetual war on char-
acteristics which may be natural in chickens, but which are poorly
adapted to the business scene. Broodiness and fierceness are redundant
in a battery cage: these traits are as far as possible genetically
excised. Chickens take up space, and "scientifically fortified"
chickenfeed is expensive. The undaunted ingenuity of the geneticists
has come up with an answer: the Mini Mother. This is a specially bred
dwarf female chicken, to be used for breeding broiler fowl; she does
not hand on her small size to her offspring. Mini Mothers eat less and
take up less space than normal hens. They may even be kept in cages,
whereas up till now hens which breed broilers have lived relatively
free lives on deep litter.
The deep-litter method is used not only to breed broilers but also to
raise them for the table. Concrete flooring is covered with dried rice
hulls, peanut shells, and maize cobs to soak up moisture from
droppings. Chickens raised by modern methods produce enormous
quantities of droppings-200 million tons a year in the United States
alone; seven and a half kilograms (17 lb.) per broiler chicken (each of
which is dead at the age of eight weeks), and forty-one kilograms (90
lb.) per year per laying fowl. As each flock of birds is killed and
before the replacements arrive, the litter is removed and living
quarters fumigated.
In the past, chicken manure was considered a highly valuable
fertilizer. As late as 1948 in England, laying fowl were kept in
portable hen-houses with fenced runs attached. These were moved daily
over grassland so
140 

that the hens manured the ground. In these days of petroleum-based soil
additives, however, there is no use for the manure which is created in
such vast quantities by confining and fattening processes. This is true
not only for chickens but for other animals as well. Chicken manure has
become a troublesome noxious waste.
One ray of hope for this problem lies in recent research, being carried
out mainly in Third World countries. It is suggested that deep litter
from intensive chicken-farming might become a component of cattle feed.
The litter - droppings, bedding, and all - is disinfected of all patho-
genic organisms, dehydrated, and then provided as 15 per cent of the
fodder for cattle and goats. Chicken droppings and litter provide
fibre, crude protein, calcium, and phosphorus for cows, and in this
manner it is converted into human food. The rest of the nitrogen-rich
litter can be used as fertilizer, and the problem of poultry waste is
reduced. One of the remaining problems is the heavily chemical
composition of chickenfeed: all the additives and antibiotics, which
are accepted now as normal in chicken meat, would pass in
uncontrollable amounts into the cows' milk. It is being suggested that,
where litter is re-used, chickenfeed might have to be modified.
The antibiotics which all factory-farmed creatures must consume in
large quantities in order to curb the disease and stress arising from
their confinement, have turned out simultaneously to accelerate flesh
production. The reason for this is not fully known, but it is thought
that killing off bacteria in the gut of an animal leaves more food
energy to go into weight gain. Offsetting this bonus to the business is
the necessity to keep up research into disease control, as bacteria
keep breeding resistance to each successive antibiotic treatment. These
antibiotics are ingested by people eating chicken. The consequences
could include human immunity to antibiotic treatment of our own
diseases.
A hen's laying time, even when she is producing meat-chickens, is
considered far too valuable for her to spend it hatching eggs and
raising her brood. Incubators, which hatch and warm baby chicks
artificially, were known in Ptolemaic Egypt, but the knowledge appears
to have been lost in the west after the fall of Rome. The technique did
survive, however, until the eighteenth century in a small Egyptian
village called Berma in the Nile Delta, where thirty thousand chickens
were raised at a time - a huge number by pre-Industrial Revolution
standards. Most extraordinary of all, the birds were hatched in all
seasons of the year.
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Berma's methods were fiercely kept secrets, handed down with strict
rules from fathers to sons in the village.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Grand Duke of Tuscany
organized a coup whereby a native of this village was brought (by
bribery or force?) to Florence, and he divulged the secret to the
Duke's entourage. The news reached the ears of the brilliant and
versatile French scientist, Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur, who in 1747
addressed the Paris Academy on the subject of chicken incubators. He
claimed that a lamb's fleece, together with artificial heat, could warm
chickens as effectively as a hen could with her protective wings. Two
years later he published a book on the subject which was quickly
translated into English. For the first time since antiquity, Europeans
could eat the same amount of chicken and eggs, and pay the same price
for them, all year round.
In the fattening process meat fowl are crowded together in close
confinement, for running about encourages muscle where tenderness is
all. They are kept very warm and in semi-darkness because light and
cool air makes chickens lively, and they are fed as much as they will
eat with the aid of appetite-stimulating additives. The allotment of
space is so finely calculated that by the time they are fat enough for
slaughter the broilerhouse is one tight mass of chickens; movement is
almost impossible. Light is further dimmed to reduce the birds' energy
levels to the absolute minimum.
The combination of breeding for fast growth and of the production and
mixing of quick-fattening feed has resulted in what is called a "feed-
conversion ratio" which is regarded as an economic triumph by the
chicken industry. About 2.2 kilograms (5 lb.) of grain are needed to
achieve each kilogram (2.2 Lb.) of chicken in the seven weeks of what
the business calls "grow-out"; in the 1950S it took 6 kilograms (13
Lb.) of feed and sixteen weeks to produce a 1.5 kilogram (3.3 lb.)
bird. It is a fact much less stressed by the industry that a chicken
must be bled, gutted, defeathered, decapitated, and have its feet cut
off; only 44 per cent of it is, in fact, edible. This means that it
takes more like 9 to 10 kilograms (20 to 22 Lb.) of grain to produce a
kilogram of chicken meat. We should bear in mind that poultry farming
is the most efficient way of converting grain into flesh; other meat
industries consume much more agricultural produce. A new growth-hormone
to be added to chickenfeed can speed up the growth-rate by a further 15
per cent. The
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only problem with its application is fear of the public revulsion which
occasionally manifests itself against hormones injected into foods.
Chicken has a special problem because, as we shall see, its attraction
as food involves connotations of mildness, innocence, and healing
power.
It is the feed companies which continue to call the economic shots:
chicken prices are so low (because poultry farmers can now fatten birds
for the required size without feeding them long), and feed so expensive
that poultry keepers may consider even a few days' delay in their op-
erations a disaster; a million or more chickens can quickly consume a
fattening company's profits. And studies have shown that the public
simply will not buy chickens which are larger (and therefore older and
with a stronger taste) than expected. Today's North American and
British consumer has been found to require tenderness and pale flesh
above every other consideration, and swift growth and early killing
provide both at a low cost. Nigeria, which now imports dressed poultry
from North America, still prefers a pronounced chicken taste. The
industry has to keep broilers longer than the usual seven or eight
weeks, especially for a market prepared to pay more because of its
quirk in taste.
At exactly the right date, then, the chicken "catchers" go out from the
meat-packing company to bring in the birds for slaughter. They do this
at night, since, as chicken-raisers have known for thousands of years,
drowsy fowl are easier to handle than cackling, flapping, awake ones;
absence of light renders chickens very easy to manage. The trucks, each
bearing several thousand chickens, return to the slaughterhouse with
the greatest dispatch, to minimize "shrinkage." This is the trade's
name for the loss of weight and the death of some of the chickens,
which takes place between collecting and loading fowl and slaughtering
them. Factors which cause "shrinkage" are cages even more crowded on
the trucks than in the chicken sheds, lack of air (chickens need three
times as much air as human beings do, yet they are commonly crated for
transport as though they needed none), rough handling, struggle, and
excretion during the change. Chickens are given heavy fibre diets to
discourage diarrhoea just before they are collected. They are cus-
tomarily starved for some hours before slaughter.
When the working day begins at the slaughterhouse, the birds are hung
upside down by their feet on moving conveyor belts and passed through a
vat full of an electrically charged salt solution, where most - though
not all - are shocked senseless. (The electric voltage could be
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turned up to ensure the death of all the fowl, but the aim is only to
relax them, since killing them before their throats are cut makes
bleeding less satisfactory.) In the past, the chickens' heads were
pierced instead with a needle to paralyse the brain; this made feathers
easier to remove. The automatic picker or plucker has made this
practice obsolete.
The line moves without stopping to the Kill Room where automatic blades
slit throats. A human "back-up killer" has the job of finishing off any
chickens that the automatic blades fail to dispatch completely. The
file of bodies passes into the Bleed Tunnel, where most of the blood is
vacuum-sucked out of the birds in fifty seconds or less. This step
ensures the keeping quality of the meat; furthermore, an insufficiently
bled fowl will have a blotchy appearance which is unacceptable to
shoppers. As we shall see, blood is not part of the chicken-meat myth.
Next, the procession moves on to the Scalding Tank, where hot water
loosens the feathers. Plucking is done mechanically. Rubber fingers
protrude from the sides of a tunnel through which the chickens travel.
The fingers revolve and vibrate over the bodies as they pass slowly by.
The chickens are singed to remove any remaining body hair; their heads
are jerked away and their feet chopped off, automatically; and poly-
phosphates are then injected to prolong shelf life.
After mechanical drawing - removal of the viscera - hearts, gizzards,
livers, and necks are sorted from the rest, packaged in paper and
replaced inside the chickens' bodies. Government inspectors pass and
grade each "finished" bird, and finally the chickens are packaged and
frozen, or taken in chilled trucks to supermarkets to be sold fresh.
Frozen birds have to be checked for "freezer burn," which causes
unattractive discolouration of the skin together with desiccation and
loss of tenderness. The chickens which have not made the grade- because
of skin bruises, tears, or blisters, broken bones, or bluish flesh
owing to insufficient fat beneath the skin - are turned over for use in
pet food, canned chicken soup and bouillon cubes, or are emulsified in
such products as frankfurters, bologna, and summer sausage. The feet
are exported in huge numbers to the Orient, where chicken feet are
considered delicious, not sinister or too reminiscent of a living
creature, as they are for many of us. Feathers are processed and
included in chicken feed mixes.
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WHO CARES?

Human beings are touchy about cannibalism. For one thing, they are
nauseated by the thought of eating (or, of course, being eaten by)
anyone they know. For this reason, and also because it seems to confirm
our potential for empathy and kindness, we carefully dissociate
ourselves from animals we want to eat: many of us prefer not to be
acquainted with them beforehand. When we give a pet a name - especially
a human name - we automatically confer upon it immunity from being
killed by us and eaten. We go to considerable lengths to assure
ourselves that animals are very different from us, and that they
therefore do not suffer from treatment we would hate. We generally
avoid actually killing what we eat ourselves, and do everything we can
to prevent ourselves from realizing that a death has occurred at all.
Of all edible creatures (with the exception of insects, which are still
nutritious and popular complements to the diets of many people) do-
mestic fowl are probably least likely to arouse affection in us.
Chickens are almost without exception mean-tempered, cowardly, and
stupid in our folk-tales and idioms. We rarely give them pet names. We
think of them as slightly demonic (demons in folklore often have
chickens' feet) and often downright eerie (they run around when their
heads are chopped off-which shows how inadequate their brains are, and
how different from ours).
All of which is extremely useful to us, since chickens make delicious,
versatile, and delicate meat, which we can easily eat without a shred
of compunction to mar our pleasure. A cow has melting brown eyes with
lashes, a pig is hairless and curvaceous like a human being (and,
largely for this reason, has been popular for thousands of years as a
substitute for human sacrifices), a sheep is woolly, and lambs are
innocent. All of them are mammals, and the death of any one of them has
at least some chance of evoking human sympathy. People have never been
able to drum up much of that for chickens. Poultry scientists go so far
as to think of chickens less as bird-life than as vegetable matter or
as manufactured goods: they habitually speak of chicken meat as a
"crop" which, with the help of machinery, they "harvest," and they call
the cutting up of chickens by factory workers "the disassembly line."
Yet today there is an increasing - though not overwhelming - revulsion
being expressed about the lot of battery and broiler chickens, as well
as about factory-farming methods in general. One reason is the
145

inhuman nature of this treatment of animals. People have almost no
physical contact at all with factory-farmed creatures. They just push
buttons most of the time: one man can look after tens of thousands of
birds. Factory farming inevitably smells quite infernally bad, and
people today are particularly disgusted by the idea of anything
stinking.
There is another uncomfortable point. Overcrowded conditions, im-
prisonment, and being subjected to mechanical, bureaucratic, and anony-
mous controls are peculiarly twentieth-century nightmares. We suffer
these ourselves and we force other people to suffer them. Modern
chicken farming reminds us of penitentiaries and concentration camps.
The ruthless efficiency, the relegation to a place out of sight, the
sordid and undramatic lining up for mass slaughter; these are things we
recognize only too well-when we think of them. And we prefer not to
think of them for long.
Meanwhile, the spread of factory farming is accelerating. We are
selling our expertise everywhere, and Third World countries- India,
Bangladesh, Africa, the Middle East, Malaysia- are buying it with en-
thusiasm. It is part of "becoming modern"; the technology glitters with
prestige. Chicken, in many of these countries once the food of feasts
and the privilege of the rich, can now be mass-produced. The promise is
enticing - who would be untempted? Yet battery- and broiler-chicken
farming does not arrive free from conditions and hidden hooks. Coun-
tries which do not grow large surpluses of grain for human consumption
embark on schemes to feed what little they have to chickens - nine or
ten kilos of grain for each kilo of meat. Even more ominously, they
engage to pay for and import "scientific" chickenfeed. The initial
capital outlay for the machinery and plant can be huge; and almost no
extra work is provided for the unemployed. In fact, concentrating
chickens into huge batteries and fattening sheds destroys small
marketing initiatives, earns money for those who already have it, and
in poor countries uses grain which could feed the poor in order to
produce food only for the rich.
Not all Third World countries are taken in; they frequently refuse the
full mechanical package and try methods somewhat less "rationalized"
and more sensibly adapted to existing conditions. A group of American
agricultural scientists on a recent tour of China expressed surprise at
how "technologically far behind" the Chinese are; farmed flocks are
small (a few hundred to sixteen thousand birds), and chickens there
still have "access to outdoor runs." The backwardness was attrib
146 

uted partly to the "insufficient" and "unscientific" feed supplies made
available for chickens, and to a resistance to change which was
explained by "a relative abundance of labor" in China.
In some places attempts are being made to find more humane methods of
raising chickens. Dr. Agostino Volanti's poultry houses, which allow
natural ventilation and light, are being tried on a small scale in
France, England, Spain, Belgium, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Some people
are prepared, in Canada and the United States, to seek out operations
allowing chickens free range, and to pay slightly more for their eggs
if they come from free-ranging chickens. ("Free range," though, turns
out seldom to mean any longer that the chickens have been kept at night
in a henhouse, allowed out in the daytime to roam in a fencedin area,
and fed no chemicals whatever. It is much more likely to designate
birds raised indoors on corn or soy, with either no antibiotics and
colorants, or only those which remain in the chickens' intestines and
are removed when the birds are eviscerated. ) In England and West
Germany there are increasingly vocal movements to fight chicken bat-
teries, and factory farming of all kinds. But on the whole,
imprisonment of animals and cruel disregard for their happiness is
enormously on the increase world-wide.
When people actually confront the facts about their treatment of
animals in order to provide themselves with cheap meat, they are often
shocked and concerned. Those facts are not faced often, partly because
the facts are not insistently publicized, but partly also because
people are happier not knowing and not thinking. Battery and broiler
farming is treated, of course, as a fait accompli, and therefore a
permanent necessity. The cholesterol scare, for instance, has made the
public in rich countries think that they might now be eating too many
eggs. As a result, egg markets are falling. The reaction is not to stop
or decrease battery farming but rather to institute expensive research
into removing cholesterol from eggs, so that, with the help of even
more technological manipulation, we may keep battery farming afloat.
In the end, claim what we may about the innocence of our motives and
the humanity of our intentions, the only things which protect factory
farm animals from being subjected to greater and greater degrees of
cruelty are the limits of necessity and the extent of our own self-
interest. Broilers are raised on deep litter and not in batteries
because wire causes fowls' breasts to blister, and we like to sit down
at table to unblistered breast. A laying fowl may not survive
twenty-four hours a
147

day of bright lights forcing her to keep producing eggs. Consumers do
not like the look of bruised flesh and torn skin, broken bones or de-
formed backs: they just will not buy those chickens, so trouble is
taken to keep the fowl whole until they are slaughtered. Recent
experiments on poultry have involved scientists screaming at chickens
and otherwise irritating them. It has in this manner been discovered
that chickens which are gently sung and spoken to and touched daily are
more resistant to diseases than birds which are ignored, harrassed, or
shouted at. This kind of demonstration might seem to the layman proof
positive of the obvious, but for the moment it is a chicken's only
hope.

THE FLEXIBLE CHICKEN

The nature of modern chicken farming has made several instructions
which are customarily found in old recipes obsolete. We no longer need
to truss our chickens closely for roasting, protecting the breast with
the legs: modern chickens are bred for huge breasts which are in little
danger of drying out. (Turkey breasts became so large at one point that
the birds could hardly stand without toppling over, and the genetics of
the thing had to be readjusted.) Modern chickens are very young when
slaughtered and, therefore, cook very quickly. Part of the reason for
trussing a bird (aside from a desire to reduce the leggy, winged shape
of the creature to something more like a chaste football form) was that
chickens killed when old would take a long time to cook and needed to
conserve their juices. It is now more sensible to let the chicken's
legs spread in the oven (perhaps tying them loosely so that the skin
does not tear) in order to allow the upper inner thighs to cook through
by the time the rest of the chicken is ready. Factory-farmed chickens
have plenty of fat, so French recipes which demand slathers of butter,
to moisten the flesh of lean free-range chickens, need to be adapted to
altered circumstance: much less butter-though enough to flavour and
lubricate the bird - is required. Basting a factory broiler is largely
a waste of time.
Four hundred million battery broilers are raised and slaughtered in
Britain every year. The figure for the United States is five billion.
The industry's phenomenal growth has created problems of its own.
Market analysts speak of an inexplicable "chicken fatigue" which
overtakes people who eat chicken several times a week- the very same
people who
148 

will happily eat beef every day of the year. Chicken farming, in spite
of its expertise, remains a risky business because of fierce
competition and the fact that it "mass-produces a perishablc item." In
other words, chickens kept in concentration-camp confinement can easily
catch diseases; may die en masse if mistakes, such as incorrect changes
in temperature, are made; may turn into a vast economic liability if
calculations in timing and volume of demand fail, or if a new virus
suddenly strikes. As one chicken tycoon recently put it: "Sell 'em or
smell 'em." Everything humanly possible is done to avoid these dangers,
but the risks remain, and the threat of overproduction is constant.
Chicken saturation at home (a human being eats only a certain amount of
chicken) naturally causes businessmen to look abroad to untapped Third
World markets for their machinery, their know-how, and their formula
feed.
One way out of problems is onward and upward. The ingenuity being
expended on making chicken meat ever more enticing, and on fitting it
ever more closely into people's "lifestyles," is awe-inspiring.
Chickens now come "self-basting" (liquid, fats, and stabilizers are in-
jected under the skin so that they ooze outwards as the birds roast),
pre-marinaded (with injections of flavours and tenderizers),
ready-coated in various batters, pre-cooked in pieces (needing heat for
three minutes only before eating), stuffed or rolled, either whole or
in parts.
Much fast-food chicken is broiled at the slaughterers'. The trick is in
the timing. Rigor mortis sets in twenty to thirty minutes after a
chicken dies - much faster than in a beef animal. After that, the bird
must wait at least eight and preferably twenty-four hours before its
muscles relax and it can be cooked or frozen. Otherwise the bird will
be formidably and irredeemably tough. Given the extremely tight
schedule of meat production ("time is money"), even eight hours is far
too long to wait. There is only one alternative: the birds must be
plucked, singed, drawn, cooked, and stripped from the bone within
twenty minutes (some say that should be six minutes) of death.
Deboned meat, including the millions of breasts required for fast
foods, now accounts for huge tonnages of chicken - as much as 70 per
cent of what is sold in some parts of the United States. In the
deboning process, after breasts, wings, and drumstick meat have been
removed, the chicken's carcass is crushed and the bones extruded. Tiny
bits of bone are then sucked and screened out. What is left is a paste,
which can be added to frankfurters, bologna, or canned soup. This paste
has to be further processed or frozen very quickly; it cannot be stored
long
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without losing its flavour and having its colour darken. Redness from
the haemoglobin which escapes from cracked bones intensifies the latter
effect. Textured soybean protein is often added to make up for the loss
of protein when the meat is heated for serving.
One of the most impressive achievements of deboning is that it returns
utility to parts of the chicken that arc devalued by many consumers.
Nearly a billion pounds of necks and giblets reach American kitchens
every year. Research has shown that half the buyers take out of the
cavity of their chicken the carefully wrapped heart, gizzard, and liver
and simply feed it to the cat; they usually throw the neck away. When
chicken meat is reduced to a homogeneous paste, however, hearts and
gizzards can be used, and the boniness of the neck is simply elim-
inated. Unfortunately, North Americans in general dislike the taste of
liver, so that the makers of sausages and other processed meats feel
they cannot use the livers. Some of these are sold to the minority of
liverlovers in a breaded "finger-food" form, as are wings, pre-cooked
to deep-fry or bake in three minutes, and marketed under such
appellations as "Wing Dings."
Most North Americans want nothing but breast, although there is a
strong following for drumsticks in the southern States. Fast-food
chunks and "planks" are mostly breast. What do we do with thighs,
backs, and the rest? Deboning provides the answer. Thigh meat is a
darker colour than breast, and this relatively unpopular trait can be
used actually to improve the appearance of turkey and poultry "ham"
rolls. Furthermore, there is the question of what to do with the
egg-laying hens, two and a half years old when they die - nearly twenty
times as old as the broilers we buy whole in our supermarkets. These,
too, can now be turned to good account, particularly since the
chicken-taste of a fowl's flesh increases with age, and the flavour of
a broiler, which is light to begin with, does suffer in the crushing
and bone-screening process. Adding older fowl is called "improving the
chicken note."
A market researcher said recently about chicken: "People don't want the
bones. They just want to take it out of the package, plunk it in the
microwave and serve it." The restructured chicken steak (paste, bits,
soy, and additives) supplies this dream- but at a price. A further-pro-
cessed equivalent of a whole chicken can cost three times the price of
a raw dressed bird. The cost in taste lies of course at the discretion
of the buyer; and the billions of chickens slaughtered every year will
not complain. The only conceivable saving for us is in time and effort.
We
150 

have apparently not yet discovered whether there are any limits to what
we will do, pay, and put up with in order not to have to wait and not
to have to cook.

EATING WHITE, EATING GOLD

Blancmange, a medieval European favourite inherited from early Arab
cookery, was a "standing" pottage (you could stand your spoon up in it)
made of capon flesh "teased small with a pin," whole boiled rice,
almond milk, and plenty of sweetening. (Meat and sweet things were not
habitually separated in European cooking until recent times.)
Blancmange could also be made with fish, and a meatless version (milk,
almonds, egg whites, sugar, and hartshorn jelly) appeared in the
seventeenth century. When arrowroot starch began to be imported into
Britain in the 1820S it was used to thicken the opaque, white, and
unquestionably meatless confection we now know as "blancmange"; this
was the precursor of all our modern cornstarch instant puddings. But
the original blancmange consisted of almonds, chicken-flesh, and sugar,
with various white additions.
Chicken is pale meat, and this fact has always sharply differentiated
it in men's minds from the red and bloody flesh of mammals. Chicken
blancmange was a light, fortifying pudding which was eaten as a first
or second course at a large dinner party to set off the heavy meat
courses. White food in general, associated as it is in our minds with
mildness and soothing innocence, has often been thought especially
appropriate for sick people, children, and women.
Chicken soup is an almost universal panacca. It is "Jewish penicillin,"
dished out in hot loving bowlfuls to people with colds or fevers. A
scientific experiment has actually established that the aroma of
chicken soup speeds the flow of mucous through nasal passages; the
velocity of the passage of mucous increased 33 per cent in the noses of
the volunteers. In China, women in childbed are given a diet of chicken
soup, chicken, and eggs; a customary gift to the family with a new-born
baby is a chicken, to- feed the mother. Old people and the sick in
China are also thought to digest eggs and chicken best. In Italy or
France people who suffer from their "livers" arc told by their doctors
to "eat white" until they recover: apples and rice, and chicken as
their condition begins to improve. Chicken, according to the
seventeenth-century Eng
151

lish writer on health, Thomas Muffett, is a meat of "thin and light
substance, engendering thin and fine blood, fit for fine complexions,
idle citizens, tender persons, and such as are upon recovery out of
some great sickness."
People today often categorize what they eat on a scale which ranges
from the impossibly "strong" (cach other, or named pets like dogs or
horses, or carnivores because they themselves eat meat) to the
"weakest" and most generally acceptable (fruit, cercals, leaf and root
vegetables.) The strictest vegetarians will eat only the "weakest,"
least "aggressive" foods. They differentiate themselves by name
(calling themselves vegans) from vegetarians who, although they refuse
to eat meat, will permit themselves to consume animal products: eggs,
milk, and cheese.
Meat is nearly always eaten cooked, whereas cheese, milk, and veg-
etables do not necessarily require the mediation of fire (that
masculine, powerful, and technological element) to make them acceptable
to "civilized" people. Methods of cooking meat have a hierarchy of
their own, which in our culture ranges from boiling and steaming (low),
through stewing, frying, grilling or broiling, and finally roasting
(the highest). Meats themselves are placed on a ladder of power ranging
from fish (the lowest rung and the most "female" of meats), through
poultry, to the "strongest," red meat. (Pork is less "masculine" than
beef partly because it is pinker when raw and cooks to a pale colour.)
The meat eaten by the heroes of ancient Greece was spitted, roasted,
and red, with plenty of glistening fat. Homer does not picture his
heroes eating vegetables, fish, or fowl, says the second/third-century
scholar Athenaeus, "because eating these is a sign of greed, and also
because it was judged unseemly, and beneath the level of heroic and
godlike deeds, to spend time preparing these for table." The
shish-kebabs preferred by the Greek heroes were fast foods, far removed
from lowly simmered pottages and stews, and from small bony fish and
fowl.
The "white meats," fish and poultry, are mild and non-aggressive within
the overall category of flesh. Certain kinds of fish may, however, be
granted special prestige because of their scarcity. Today, for example,
shellfish has become expensive and relatively rare. Oysters and
lobsters, poor men's fare till the late nineteenth century, have now
become exceedingly chic. But fish has traditionally been so low on the
scale that it was commonly permitted in such religious strategies as
Lenten abstinence or the Catholic institution of "fish on Fridays."
Lowering one's sights from meat to fish was an exercise in humility,
and designed to
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raise consciousness by elected self-restraint, and by forcing oneself
to remember.
Chicken was not much higher on this scale than fish; it was commonly
considered to be a compromise abstention from meat during Lent for
children and invalids. Birds are classified with fish in the Book of
Genesis, where both are born from the waters on a different day from
the earth-born four-footed beasts. The widely influential text of St.
Benedict's Rule (sixth century) laid down that monks should be
vegetarians except during illness, with fish permitted where available.
In Chapter 39, however, Benedict mentions abstention by all except the
very weak and the sick from "the flesh of quadrupeds." It did not take
long for the monks to interpret these words as allowing them to eat
chicken.
Poultry is still thought fit for restrained and mild eating. It is for
people who eat lightly and have "refined" tastes (Muffett, we recall,
said it was for "fine" blood): it is delicate enough to give pleasure
to those who can afford to keep food in proper perspective. Chicken may
be seen as offering the opposite of what Roland Barthes called the
"bulllike strength" believed to be imparted by full-blooded beefsteak.
A Frenchman may justify almost any aggressive human behaviour by saying
that a man is "defending his beefsteak"; no one would be silly enough
to make huge gestures in order to save his chicken. Traditionally,
women in our society would tend to choose chicken, white wine, and
salad from a restaurant menu, whereas men would go for steak, red wine,
and potatoes.
Today's further-processed chicken, such as chunks and fried parts,
often comes heavily crumbed. The pieces are thus rounded out and
cloaked, turned into abstract shapes (the advertisements like to borrow
the mystique of modern architecture and call them "functional forms")
which effectively distance us from the idea of animals, carving, and
slaughter. Many companies selling crumbed and frozen chicken and fish
openly claim that they have "created" fish or "invented" chicken: we
are being offered, not cod or poultry, but something else again, a
thing utterly reshaped and "refined." Steak, on the other hand, even
the circular hamburger pattie, comes seared with the marks of fire, and
is nakedly meaty. Anglo-Saxons generally prefer meat cooked brown all
through, but a gesture towards the bloodiness so dear to the French is
made with gouts of tomato sauce in a thick, sweet, and stagey red.
Since chicken is "light" eating, its flesh must be as pale as possible;
this is an important reason for the careful de-blooding of the factory
153

dressed chicken and for the public's overwhelming preference for
breastmeat. As we saw with "light-tasting" margarine, our heavily-fed
civilization grants special prestige to eating "light." Most fish has
been much neglected in North America because of traditional eating
habits: bones are considered a nuisance, and the relatively affluent
North Americans have been able to confine themselves to eating
prestigious foods only. But since fish and chicken are "light," low in
cholesterol, and relatively non-fattening, they are set to achieve a
new kind of allure they are now beginning to denote health, slimness,
and the social aura which goes with them. Chicken flesh has
traditionally been classified as "restrained": now that restraint in
one's eating habits has acquired socially admired consequences, this
meat is obviously changing its "lowly" image.
But paleness has always in some degree mitigated the humble status of
chicken, in spite of the power denoted by red meat. In fact, as
mentioned earlier, a whole roast fowl carved before the guests has long
been a first choice for festive occasions in our culture. If properly
treated, chicken obligingly turns golden. For centuries Europeans
adored gold for festive dishes. From the Middle Ages on they doused
food in saffron and marigold sauces, daubed egg-yolks over meats,
yellowed their pastries, and even gilded joints of meat and large
pieces of confectionary. Gold is still high in our mythology; its
appeal has been brilliantly harnessed by the marketing of crumbed
chicken chunks under the word nuggets. Many modern factory-farmers use
xanthophyll additives in order to induce in poultry flesh and legs the
desired yellowish hue. Where chickens are sold with the feet still
attached, the public insists that they should be a definite yellow, in
spite of the fact that customers will almost invariably discard the
feet or ask the butcher to remove them before the sale.
Our reactions to the chicken still range from contempt to reverence.
Nothing could express the contradiction more neatly than Proust's de-
scription of his narrator's servant Francoise killing and serving a
chicken:

When I went in, I saw her in the scullery which opened on to the back
yard, in the process of killing a chicken which, by its desperate and
quite natural resistance, accompanied by Francoise, beside herself with
rage as she attempted to slit its throat beneath the ear, with shrill
cries of "Filthy creature! Filthy creature!" made the saintly meekness
and unction of our servant rather less prominent
154 

than it would do, next day at dinner, when it made its appearance in a
skin gold-embroidered like a chasuble, and its precious juice was
poured out drop by drop as from a pyx. When it was dead, Francoise
collected its streaming blood, which did not, however, drown her
rancour, for she gave vent to another burst of rage, and gazing down at
the carcass of her enemy, uttered a final "Filthy creature!"

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CHAPTER FIVE

Rice: The Tyrant with a Soul

RICE as the starchy staple of our dinner, is a comforting partner to
chicken: filling, fat-and-juice absorbing, bland enough not to
overwhelm the delicate flavour of the meat. Rice, in our own world
view, is usually perceived as a simple, useful, unassuming cereal. It
is something for which we feel grateful if we think about it at all,
but it is nothing to arouse the passions. If our supplies of it were
cut off for one reason or another, we should be irritated, but we could
eat potatoes instead, or pasta, or more bread, or some of the many
other grains available, such as millet and barley, or leguminous seeds
like lentils or white beans: all of these alternatives, even the
relatively recently introduced potato, are more traditional staples in
the European diet than is rice.
It is easy, therefore, for us to forget the enormous importance of rice
to the human race. This grain is the main sustenance of half the popu-
lation of the earth. If at this minute some catastrophe were to kill
off
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all the rice crops of the world, at least a billion and a half human
beings would suffer acute hunger, and millions would die of starvation
before anything could be done to save them. Growing rice occupies the
entire lives of over a billion people; it constitutes the only source
of buying power for as many millions. Sixty-five kilos (145 Lb.) of
rice are milled annually for every person on earth, although eating
habits vary enormously: a Frenchman, for example, eats an average of 2
kilos (4 Lb.) of rice per year, while an inhabitant of a country like
Burma, Bangladesh, or Malagasy happily consumes 150 kilos (330 Lb.) of
rice annually, and more if circumstances allow or require it.
Even if one could comprehend the quantity of rice which people grow and
eat and the centrality of its place in the biological welfare of the
race, it still remains to conceive the extent of a second role of rice,
as a creator and controller of human society. Where rice reigns, it
governs power structures, technological prowess, population figures,
interpersonal relationships, religious custom. Once human beings agree
to grow rice as a staple crop, they are caught in a web of consequences
from which they cannot escape - if only because from that moment on
rice dictates to them not only what they must do, but also what they
prefer.

PADDY

Paddy is a Malaysian word meaning rice growing in deep water; it may
also refer to rice grains in the husk, harvested but as yet unmilled. A
paddy field is surrounded by dykes and designed so that it can be
flooded
and drained at appropriate times, and so that water levels may be
controlled as closely as possible. Much rice still depends entirely on
monsoon rain water and on the seasonal flooding of rivers; but over
millennia man has learned to channel water to rice, at the cost of
enormous and never-ending labour. Flooded rice produces far more
grains than rice grown on dry land or gathered in the wild, and the
yield of artificially irrigated rice can increase by more than a third
again.
Watered paddies make rice grow so fast that two crops can be harvested
each year from the same soil-with one, two, or even three vegetable
crops added between rice harvests in some circumstances. Water-borne
nutrients are constantly replenished as fields are flooded, and dykes
or
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"bunds" prevent soil erosion. In tropical lands a paddy field can be
producing food all year round, and it need never lie fallow.
But rice began as a dry-land plant (it is still often grown in dry
fields), and it retains the characteristics of any cereal: rice, like
wheat, is a grass, and it evolved in the same dry valleys of central
Asia as wheat did. Rice grains grow from the top of the plant on an
inflorescence called a panicle, which has five or more radiating ribs,
with grains hanging along each rib. These grains are edible fruit with
tough brown husks, like the fruit of wheat or oats. In common with all
grasses, rice has stems with nodes, and long narrow leaves with
parallel, not branched, veins.
Unlike other cereals, rice has the capacity, which it must have evolved
in tropical flood plains, to grow in water: it takes advantage of the
nutrients which come with water, but is not drowned by it. (Only the
tuber taro, among major food crops, can also flourish in water; another
exception is the American barley which is called "wild rice" because of
this characteristic.) Once a rice seed which is submerged in water ger-
minates, the plant shoots up quickly: it needs to break through the
water's surface into the air. The roots of rice, because of its
dry-land origin, require plenty of oxygen, and that is available only
from the air and, to a certain extent, from even slightly moving water.
Rice, unlike other dry-land plants, does not drown because it has
evolved a "breathing" mechanism. It sucks in air through pores in its
above-surface leaves; a cushion of air soon covers the plant's stalks
and leaves under water, and this provides a second source of air.
Carbon dioxide emitted by the plant dissolves in water much more
quickly than oxygen does; this causes a lowering of pressure which
drags in more air to feed the plant.
In some kinds of rice the stalks between the nodes can elongate at an
astonishing rate-up to twenty-five centimetres (10 in.) per day when
flood waters are rising. The plant keeps pace with the water's depth,
holding its top leaves above the surface and receiving air. The stalk
can reach as much as five metres (16 ft.) in length if it is required
to do so, but what causes it to "judge" how long it needs to grow is
little understood. Emergency roots at the top of the plant are provided
so that if the moving waters uproot it the rice can float and live by
its adventitious roots until it touches bottom again as the waters
recede, and simply reestablishes itself in its new home. If the rice
ripens before the waters recede, farmers may harvest it from the
water's surface by boat.
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Most varieties of rice do best in water ten centimetres (4 in.) deep.
The seed sends its primary shoot straight up, after which branches,
called tillers, grow from the base. Each tiller can produce a panicle
of rice. The plant's topmost leaf, its "flag," is largely responsible
for reacting to sunlight by photosynthesis, a process which governs the
total number of rice grains the plant will bear.
Paddy rice can be grown in widely differing climatic conditions: from
ten thousand feet high in the Himalayas to river deltas and mangrove
swamps by the sea; from as far north as Czechoslovakia to as far south
as Argentina and New Zealand; and in temperatures dropping from those
of Egypt and Australia to those of France and Hungary
Tens of thousands of kinds of rice have been officially counted. They
vary in taste, scent, size, and colour (pink rice, blue rice, purple,
yellow, and striped, as well as gradations from cream to white). A
traditional rice farmer is expected to use the accumulated lore handed
down to him by his ancestors in order to juggle types and times, light
and rainfall, soil and the slope of the ground, tastes and market
prices, in order to know what to plant, when and where.
As the plant grows and its fruit ripens, predators must be kept at bay.
Just as traditional maize growers have always had to contend with rats
and parrots, rice farmers must frighten rodents and birds from the
paddy with slingshots and mud pellets or noisemakers and twirlers.
Crabs must be hunted and caught before they devastate the rice-stalks
under water. Elephants were once, in south-east Asia, a major fear: a
passing herd unless headed off could crush an entire farm in five
minutes, houses and all.
When the rice is ready the paddy must be drained and left to dry, while
the grain goes on ripening, until the ground is easy to walk on. The
moment for harvesting is critical: rice which is too dry may crack in
the husking. The stalks are cut, traditionally with a knife or snapped
off by hand; in parts of Africa a certain type of snail shell makes a
sharp harvest tool. The cut rice is often stacked for further drying,
and then the grain must be removed. Traditional threshing methods
include treading the stalks, beating them with flails, whipping them
against a stationary object, drawing bundles of panicles across forked
spikes, and walking water-buffaloes in a circle over the heap,
sometimes dragging heavy wooden platforms behind them: the grains fall
through the stalks to the bottom while the straws protect the grain
from the animal'.s
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hoofs. Today small gasoline-powered threshers are practical, reasonably
priced, and becoming common.
Next the grain is husked, and typically winnowed by being shaken in
flat trays; this is usually a woman's job. It takes years of practice
to learn how to toss the rice correctly, so that the light husks
separate out from the grains; they must then be jerked over to the edge
of the tray and lifted to the wind so that the clean grains fall to a
mat on the ground and the chaff is carried off into the air. The feat
is commonly accompanied by songs and yodelled entreaties to encourage
the wind.
Almost immediately after the harvest, dykes have to be repaired and
strengthened and the paddy field cleared, levelled, ploughed, and fer-
tilized in readiness for a new crop. If there is to be a second round
of rice, the farmer (or rather, his wife and children: planting is
usually "female" work) may plant seed in holes drilled in the dry
ground; the field is flooded only when plants have reached a secure
height. Alternatively, forty-day-old seedlings from a nursery are
transplanted to the flooded paddy. This is labour-intensive and
back-breaking work, but it usually gives much better yields than other
methods. It saves precious time and even more precious space during the
first stages of growth, and the young plants can be boosted in advance
with fertilizing manure to make them grow faster. The earth has to be
watered and smoothed or "puddled" till it is in a soupy mud condition
before transplanting takes place. This layer of mud seals the ground
surface and prevents water percolating through the soil. The other
traditional method of planting is to broadcast seed, scattering it into
the dust of the field before the rains come or the nearby river floods.

RICE AND CIVILIZATION

None of this brief description of rice cultivation has taken into
account the intricacies and the heavy discipline of water. Water has to
be found, collected, guided, and channelled to the paddies. Fields must
be meticulously levelled and slightly graded for water flow and
retention behind low dykes. The presence of water in mountainous areas
may give rise to the growing of rice on terraces so that the water can
be made to descend from field to field down the mountainside. This in-
volves gigantic earthworks and walls, all the labour of cutting away
the
 160 

slopes, and chiselling the mountain into flat fields with walls to hold
water. The two-thousand-year-old terraces of the Ifugao of Luzon in the
northern Philippines are one of the world's wonders. They cover an area
over four hundred kilometers (250 miles) square, and reach, in
undulating levelled sections, from the floor of the valley to a height
of over a thousand metres (1100 yds.). More than twenty thousand kilo-
meters (12,500 miles) of stone walls retain the paddy waters; they were
built without the aid of either machinery or draft animals.
Aqueducts, bamboo pipes, drains, pumps, and sluices have all to be
devised. Water may have to be raised from wells or from reservoirs, or
lifted to paddies on higher ground by means of pedal-pumps and hy-
draulic systems of different kinds. People dependent on flooding rivers
and monsoon rains have to understand seasons and weather, and be able
to dam floodwaters, divert them, or adapt to their flow.
In other words, paddy rice requires hard and incessant work, and a
fiendishly difficult combination of both flexibility and organization.
It succeeds only if it is controlled by a society of people ready to
pull together, to synchronize with nature, to obey the rules they have
invented, and above all to keep at it: everything must be in good
repair and in good supply, always. Large-scale works (canals, terraces,
reservoirs) have to be planned with the future in mind and with
technological expertise. Then they must be built with labour freed,
through the cooperation of everyone, from day-to-day farming.
Everything has subsequently to be maintained in good order. Intensive
rice cultivation needs many hands.
But an assurance of a constant, good food supply in turn gives rise to
a concentration of people. The earliest Chinese civilization did not
grow rice, but founded its prosperity on wheat, millet, and sorghum -
and to this day northern China is not fixated on rice. Aquatic rice
farming reached southern China from India or from the "Golden Triangle"
(an area which includes Burma, Thailand, Laos, southern China, and
Vietnam) probably in the early second millennium BC The practice of
artificial irrigation was established much later, from the fifth to the
first centuries BC (the first extant mention of it is in the Book of
Poetry of the Chou Dynasty, about 780 BC) Intensive rice cultivation
was fully in place south of the Yangtze River only when early-maturing
rice, imported from the Champa people of what is now Vietnam, had been
mastered and spread, enabling the Chinese to grow two crops a year on a
single plot. The date was as late as the eleventh century AD By
161

the fourteenth century there were three times as many people in the
south as in the north of China, whereas the T'ang Census of 754 AD had
shown 75 per cent of the Chinese living north of the Yangtze.
Rice, in short, is a major cause of the crowding together of huge
populations-for which reason damage to rice farming can result in human
catastrophe. And any dislocation in society means that rice growing
will surely suffer. When people decide to take upon themselves the
discipline of raising paddy rice, they commit themselves to nothing
less than life-long labour, and also to unending control both
internalized and political.
But rice, as we recall, does not have to grow in water at all. On dry
land it behaves like any cereal. The slash-and-burn method which is
still used for maize in the forests of South America will work very
well for rice in the mountains of Thailand or Vietnam. Paddy rice is
raised in the valleys where water gathers and on terraces carved out on
wellwatered hill slopes; dry rice, which will grow anywhere, feeds the
people who are prepared to live frugally but lazily, up in the
mountains. (Dry rice is frequently called "upland" rice, even though it
can be grown at low altitudes.) Dry-land rice is also the only
small-grained cereal which can be grown in low-lying tropical rain
forests, which are too humid for the proper ripening of other cereals.
Dry-rice people need to move on every year in order to find unused
land, leaving the clearing they have made gradually to return to the
forest; it cannot be used for rice again for between three and ten, and
sometimes as much as twenty years. But aside from this nuisance and
anxiety, life for them is relatively easy: no standing knee-deep in
mud, bent and steaming in the sun, no ploughing and dyke-repairing, no
hierarchy dispensing rules and management, no hydraulics. And also, no
crowds: upland rice growers have to be few, for the land cannot support
many like them, even though their cultures are delicate and complex,
and they maintain themselves by living lightly on the earth. Depending
on soil and climatic conditions, slash-and-burn rice can support only
between 13 and 52 people per square kilometer (35 to 130 per square
mile).
Water for the paddy-fields and their enormous hard-working populations
brings with it organic matter and minerals from the soil it has passed
over, nutrients which the leaves of the forests supply for upland rice.
Water, with the help of various micro-organisms, also fixes nitrogen
for the plants. It keeps temperature and environment steady in regions
162 

where extreme conditions often succeed one another. A great many weeds,
as rampant as rice in the tropics but unable to survive in water, are
eliminated. Water-weeds thrive, however, and have still to be rooted
out. In traditional China this was done by hand, the farmer simulta-
neously smoothing and stirring the soil as he worked. Weeds were never
wasted, but kept and fermented for fertilizer, or pushed back under the
soil as soon as they were found, to provide precious "green
manure"-phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium for the rice. Hands were
often armed with metal or bamboo claws to help in this work.
Green manure is supplemented with animal dung wherever possible. In
China, where there is no taboo against using human waste on the fields,
and where animal dung is scarce, a close symbiosis grew up between town
and country: the town not only bought rice and sold the farmer his
tools, wood, and oil, but it also provided the needed fertilizer. The
relationship is utterly different from the fierce differentiation which
we ourselves make between city and rural life. The Chinese had their
own opposition which they used in categorizing the world: there were
the many paddy-rice men settled in the narrow, spatially constricted
valleys, and there were the few dry-rice nomads in the mountains.
Dry-land cereal growers also lived in the broad and comparatively empty
northern plains.
The considerable advantages of irrigated rice are gained only through
the human energy expended in controlling nature's cycle. Brute force is
rarely the kind of energy that is required: alert sensitivity, co-oper-
ation, precision, and persistence are far more valuable. A household
cannot manage without at least sporadic help from neighbours, and water
supplies must eventually depend on laws to ensure equitable
distribution, and on the structure of society as a whole.
A spectacular modern example of such a structure is on the island of
Bali, where a network of temples co-ordinates farming activities. All
the farmers using water from a common canal form a group called a
tempek. They are neighbours who know each other well and help each
other out; they regularly perform religious rice rituals together at a
small shrine in the fields. All the tempeks using a common dam form one
subak; a subak has two temples, one near the dam and one in the fields.
The temples house a ritual calendar which regulates planting and
harvesting for all the tempeks, keeping time-tables staggered but
regular. One mountain temple co-ordinates all subak temple rituals
(there are about thirteen hundred subaks in all), while two lake
temples near the
163

centre of the island govern farming for the whole area, one for western
Bali and the other for northern, southern, and eastern Bali. Every 210
days a festival is held at the lake temples when delegations from the
subak temples meet each other. Theatrical performances and religious
ceremonies support and enliven the whole orderly and highly sophis-
ticated system, where time and space are made constantly to reflect
each other, and society is simultaneously knit closely together and
made aware of its own independent parts.
In general, leaving the uplands for the valleys and for paddy rice
means a change in diet: far more rice but also far less meat, and
(until a degree of extreme sophistication is reached) far less variety.
Technology and control result in increasing dependence upon the product
controlled. In the uplands, people can hunt all kinds of animals and
birds and collect wild fruits and berries in addition to their crops of
vegetables and dry-land rice. Down among the paddies there are very
soon hardly any trees at all, and wild animals other than rats become
rare. Every inch of space is used to grow rice; animal herding is far
too wasteful of land. In traditional China, peasants raised chickens
and pigs, but space was so scarce even for these barnyard scavengers,
that methods of confining animals were invented which prefigure factory
farming. The water buffalo, which can thrive in mud and wet, was used
for ploughing and transport-both of which were, however, commonly
achieved by human effort alone. Paddy rice growers eat rice with vege-
tables and a little fish. This is not to say that they are sorry. On
the contrary, rice has a weird drawing power: the more people eat it
the more they like it.
Rice paddies largely denude the land of wood and even of bamboo, making
fuel scarce and precious. One brilliant southern Chinese adaptation to
this restriction was the invention of the cuisine of the wok, where a
minute or two of fierce heat was all that was required to cook the
vegetables, eels, fish, frogs, edible rats, and dried oysters which
accompanied the main dish of rice. True, the rice still needed to be
boiled, but large quantities of rice can be cooked at a time: rice
reheats well and can be eaten cold. Often it would be prepared in the
village and brought out in lots every two or three days to the fields,
where workers lived in temporary huts from the spring to the fall.
Again we notice the typically Chinese interaction between town and
country.
Chopping things small helped the Chinese to use as little fuel as
possible, even when they boiled, stewed, steamed, or roasted their
food;
164 

and bite-sized pieces made knives at table unnecessary. The Italian
traveller Francesco Carletti wrote at the beginning of the seventeenth
century that the Chinese ate with "two slim sticks made in a round
shape and blunted, the length of a man's hand and as thick as a quill
for writing...." Europeans at this date still usually ate with their
fingers and their knives; the fork had become common only in a few
upperclass circles. "They can pick up anything, no matter how tiny it
is, very cleanly and without soiling their hands. For that reason they
do not use tablecloths or napkins or even knives, as everything comes
to the table minutely cut up.... When they want to eat it, they bring
the bowl it is in close to their mouth and then, with those two sticks,
are able to fill their mouth with marvellous agility and swiftness."
Chopsticks had been in use in China since artificially irrigated rice
had made its way there around the fourth century BC
"The meat [of a man who wants to sacrifice to the ancestors],"
Confucius counselled in about 500 BC "must at the very most not be
enough to make his breath smell of meat rather than of rice." Rice was
really the food one ate: the rest was merely relish. There are
innumerable proverbs still working to instil the important principle in
children's minds: it is rude, shameful, and unacceptable to expect a
quantity of relish disproportionate to the amount of rice in one's
bowl. Relish is ts'ai in modern Chinese; rice is fan - a word which can
be synonymous with food in general. No meal is considered filling
unless it includes rice, in fact, no eating-session counts as a meal
unless rice is part of it. For a greeting equivalent to "How do you
do?" the Chinese ask, "Have you eaten until you feel you have had
enough?"-a question which implies a hope that the addressee has had
plenty of rice. A wellwisher at the Chinese New Year will pray "that
your rice may never burn." In China, upsetting one's rice-bowl - like
upsetting the salt-cellar in our own soCIety- was an extremely bad
omen, and wilfully to invert a fellow-guest's rice bowl was an insult
so deadly that it could lead to bloodshed. An "iron rice bowl" is a
modern Chinese expression for job security, while being unemployed is
"breaking the rice bowl."
Fan is part of the ancient and elaborate system of yang versus yin by
which traditional Chinese thinking divides up the universe. rin (drink)
nourishes its opposite in man, the yang in him; eating, which is yang
feeds the yin, perceived as the other great Opposite which helps con-
stitute the cosmos in general and man in particular. Fan is the most
important example of things eaten (shih). Among the Five Elements
165

which make up the physical world (Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth),
fan is related to Earth. Ts'ai or relish, on the other hand, is
associated with Fire. But Earth and Fire, within the overall category
of things nourishing they are in, are as different as could be. This
perception, coloured by different cooking methods for fan and ts'ai,
once went so far as to govern the kinds of pots from which one could
serve one's food. Ts'ai dishes could not be made of bronze because Fire
and Metal are never harmonious; relish had to be served in wood,
basketry, or pottery. Metal containers were used only for "earthy" fan,
and for drinks made of rice or other grains.
The Chinese, like people everywhere, have always used food to make
societal distinctions. The rich gourmet was endlessly finicky about
rice types, provenances, aromas, and cooking styles; the poor had to be
content with brown rice or gruel (conjee). The Chinese of the south
could disparage the northerners for eating dry-land grains instead of
prestigious rice. The north retaliated by mocking the southerners' par-
tiality for frogs from the paddies; the Anglo-Saxon dismissal of
Frenchmen by calling them frogs is very similar.
Foreigners ate differently from Chinese; but in Chinese minds there
were degrees of savagery, just as there were more and less horrible
deviations from the norm. Meat, for instance, had always to be cooked
with Fire; and all Chinese had to eat at least some grain food. There
were stories in China of barbarians who ate raw meat with fan, and of
others who ate cooked meat but no fan. These luckless people were
utterly un-Chinese. And then there were monsters who, men said, ate raw
meat and no rice or grain at all; they proved by this that they were
scarcely human. In all cases, rice was most distinctive of Chinese
culture. Only relatively recently had the Chinese learned intensive
rice-growing in paddy fields, and pride in the technological mastery
which this represented made any other staple look primitive in
comparison.
The intoxicating joy which the Chinese felt in preparing and cooking
shih and fan is captured for us in a poem, "Sheng Min," from the Book
of Poetry of the Chou period (eighth century BC)

We pound the grain, we bale it out.
We sift, we tread,
We wash it- soak, soak;
We boil it all steamy . . .
As soon as the smell rises
166 

God on high is very pleased: "What smell is this, so strong and good?"

THE SOUL OF RICE

The god Anta was a poor little god: he had no arms and no legs. He was
long but narrow, like a snake. One day the great god Batara Guru built
a magnificent new temple for himself, and asked all the other gods for
offerings. Every one of them was proud to bring something to show his
or her worth- all except Anta, who had nothing to bring, and could not
even get himself to the celebration. Anta in his loneliness wept three
tears, and each of them turned into an egg; Anta was delighted. But an
eagle swept down and, cruelly mocking Anta's weakness, forced him to
break the eggs, one by one. Before he could be made to crack the third
egg, however (for Anta put up a heroic fight against his persecutor),
it hatched, and out of it came a beautiful female baby.
Her name was Samyam Sri, and she was so lovely that Uma, Batara Guru's
wife, agreed to breast-feed her since Anta had no woman. When she grew
up Batara desired intensely to sleep with her- but this would have been
incest, because of the breast-feeding. Batara was furious with his wife
for having unwittingly foiled his lust, and tried every means to rape
Samyam Sri. The other gods were horrified, and eventually found no
other recourse but to kill Sri, in order to save her from Batara. They
buried her, lamenting dreadfully. But in a very short time a miracle
occurred: out of the body of the dead maiden grew rice (from her eyes),
sticky rice (from her chest), the palm-tree (from her vulva), and many
other trees and grasses. All these Batara gave to man to nourish him.
For this reason we often say that rice is Samyam Sri.

This story is the Indonesian version of a myth common in its essentials
throughout the islands of the Indochina seas, including Japan. Rice in
this part of the world is everywhere a woman. She is tender, beautiful,
and timid, and she dislikes being handled by men. The inviolability of
sex roles is heavily underlined by the preferences of rice: men can
prepare the land, level it, plough it, repair dykes, and attend to
irrigation, but women should plant rice, especially if the planting is
done from the nursery when the seedlings are already quite big. Women
also should weed, winnow, and cook.
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Never is rice to be more carefully treated than at budding time. The
Thais say that at this stage she is like a pregnant woman, with a
craving for bitter and sour tastes like limes or lemons. She likes
offerings to be brought to her in the fields - mirrors, perfumes, and
scented powders as well as food, for she is very vain. Men must keep
well away at this time, because a man would not be able to withstand
the attraction of her beauty, and would be tempted to ravish her-which
would, of course, ruin the crop.
When reaping time comes rice will lose her soul. For this reason a
woman of the house must go secretly into the fields before the harvest
and gather rice panicles in a special ceremonial manner, and make them
into a rice doll. The tiny figure - about a hand's span in length - is
laid in a basket, and the soul of rice is invoked and asked to inhabit
the doll. Carried home and installed in the family's granary, the rice
soul will ensure that fertile seed is available for the coming year. It
is still good manners for a purchaser of rice to give back to the
farmer a handful of grain: the plant's soul, to impregnate next year's
crop. The act is an elegant sign of co-operation and good will.
It is very important that any crushing, threshing, and cooking should
be done well away from a standing paddy: rice must be protected as long
as possible from the knowledge that one day she must be done to death
in order to feed people. The theme is common wherever grain is raised
as a staple food. People feel grief that the grain must die; a tragedy,
inevitable and cruel, takes place with every harvest.
Rice is like mother's milk, white and pure nourishment from maternal
womanhood. Every grain of it is part of the body of the Thai Rice
Goddess, Maeae Posop, and it contains a bit of her khwan or indes-
tructible reincarnated soul-stuff. The khwan in a person is nourished
by his or her mother before birth, by her milk after birth, and by rice
thereafter; there is in this way no break in female nurture throughout
human life.
The Thai, Malay, and Burmese myths all insist on the delicate nature of
rice. Whether it is a baby or a shy young girl, it is always easily
offended or hurt. It must be treated, the Malays say, "as though one
were carrying a flat-bottomed shallow tray brimful of cooking oil."
Rice, in other words, displays what is considered acceptable public
demeanour by the people themselves. The ideal is to be unassuming,
gentle, and sensitive. They feel deep shame when harsh words are used,
and their feelings are easily offended by inconsiderate or ill-mannered
168 

behaviour. They concentrate on not letting unwanted violence erupt:
there is no room for emotions getting out of hand. Rice is like
themselves - and they have taken on these characteristics through their
age-long devotion to rice and their adaptation to the crowded condi-
tions which rice creates. The people have needed to cultivate the co-
operative traits which suit rice best: sensitivity to wind, water, and
weather, reciprocal neighbourliness, amenability to authority,
patience, endurance, and the capacity to deal intelligently but
ruthlessly with their own violent propensities. Cockfighting, as we
saw, is a ritual dear to the rice-growing Balinese and the Philippine
islanders: men can project onto the cocks their own aggression and let
the cocks, not the men, bleed for it.
Once upon a time, the Malaysians say, rice never had to be harvested
from the fields: it is man's own fault that he now has to eat rice, as
he eats bread, by the sweat of his brow. Every day, the story goes, a
single rice grain would appear in the farmer's house and make its way
into the cooking pot. The housewife knew that she had to cook the grain
without ever opening the lid; if she kept the taboo intact the pot
would be ready by the afternoon, full of cooked rice. But one of her
children ignored her warnings one day, and peeked into the pot. It is
said that what the child saw was a small girl crouching inside- and the
damage was done. The girl was angry at having been seen, and from that
day onward, rice for man has meant back-breaking labour and careful
propitiations of the offended sensitivities of the goddess. This tale
resembles the Greek story of Pandora's Box, where curiosity, which was
also part of the crime of Eve in the Biblical story, brought misery to
the human race.
Another common series of rice myths expresses the pride and fear which
are apparently indissociable from technological prowess. A human being
(a male this time) undertakes a heroic quest when people are starving:
he travels to heaven, steals rice from the gods, and carries It back to
plant in the paddies. The Indonesian version of this story has the
culture-hero hide the seed in a wound in his leg. Man was a hopeless
creature - ill-adapted to the earth and weak, unlike the animals who
manifestly know what they are and how to look after themselves. A
Promethean hero has saved man: fitted him with a god-like intelligence
and the knowledge of how to raise rice. Man can now live, forever
infected with divinity, in spite of the will of the gods. The price is
heavy: toil, self-control, endless vigilance, and- if he is wise -
humility
169

even in the face of his success. Above all, he must never let slip his
respect and his gratitude for rice.
Use is commonly made of some pivotally important food crop as a timing
and measuring device. Like beer in many African cultures, rice (vary)
on the island of Madagascar expresses man's understanding of time and
space. "The time it takes to cook rice" (indray mahamasa-vary in
Malagasy) means "about half an hour." A distance may be given as "twice
the time it takes to cook rice," meaning that it is about an hour's
walk. Instead of months, they have the seasons at which rice is
different heights and at different stages: mena vary, "when the rice is
gold," is an especially significant time-referent. All measures of
volume and weight use rice-measures as a standard, the basic unit being
called vary iray, "a rice." Rice was money in the time before
Madagascar came into contact with Europeans. When the Malagasis first
got metal money, they simply chopped up the coins and made the value of
the pieces equivalent to their weight in rice.
Everywhere rice is a symbol of fecundity. In Hindu marriage ceremonies
the couple have to stand in a shallow basket while rice is poured over
their heads- a blessing for the pourer as well as for the married pair.
In our own society, a long way outside the area where rice reigns, the
white grains (pure as well as plentiful) are traditionally flung at
newly wed couples as they leave church. (Confetti means sugar-coated
candies or "comfits" which Italians substituted for rice; confetti made
of paper punched into circles has become for us a technologically pro-
duced and lighter version of rice.) A great length of time and many
happy events are imagined by the guests throwing rice, in addition to
fertility. Fortune (in this case good fortune) has always, in the west,
been pictured as bouncing particles, random and plentiful.
In Sri Lanka, geomaneers (earth-magicians) and astrologers are con-
sulted when rice is planted. Everything is meticulously prescribed by
the seers, down to the clothing that must be worn by the sewer. When
droughts or pests devour the rice, the goddess Pattini must be propi-
tiated. The men of the village stand in lines about thirty metres (100
ft.) apart; they toss coconuts back and forth, and try to smash them
with coconuts held in their hands. The coconut fights go on for days,
and are followed by a feast. One purpose of the ritual game is in a
highly controlled fashion to release frustrations, and in so doing to
encourage fertility; the rain of colliding rice-grains flung by the
crowd
170 

at our weddings may have a similar aggressive aspect. Our own ancestors
many centuries ago felt it was worth stoning a specially designated
victim in order to help the crops to grow.
A Japanese saying makes rice the most sacred thing on earth, second
only to the Emperor. In Buddhism, the world is categorized into ten
parts, the first of which is Buddha and the tenth Hell; Rice is second.
(The name of Buddha's father was Suddhodana, "Pure Rice.") In China,
Tou, the Rice Measure, was the eighth of the twenty-eight constella-
tions. It symbolized the "full measure" of justice, mercy, and virtue
which every human being should receive from others regardless of his
station. The character Tou, originally a simple square like the
four-sided rice measure, represented the Chinese Empire. The Taoist
goddess Tou Mu, "Mother of the Rice Measure," was a virgin and a deity
of the sea. Her image was carried on every Chinese junk, sometimes
together with those of her useful twin attendants, Thousand Mile Eyes
and Fair Wind Ears.
Just as every year the supreme Inca of Peru ceremonially ploughed the
earth with gold and so began the planting of corn, the Chinese Emperor
had to use an ancient ornamental plough annually to prepare a sacred
field so that his empire could receive the blessing of rice. The
immensely complex ritual of the emperor's First Ploughing, every Feb-
ruary fifth, ended when earth from the field was distributed for scat-
tering on the plots of the farmers attending the festival. Good crops
were inconceivable without this rite. Animal sacrifice has until recent
times been widely used to induce fertility in the rice fields: blood is
more powerful even than the paddy waters. There was a time when the
sacrificial victim had been human, and perhaps that victim was once the
king himself. The Inca and the Chinese Emperor, with their power for
ensuring good crops, were perhaps recalling by their actions the more
desperate and violent methods of their ancestors.
For centuries the rice paddies of Indochina have been yielding the kind
of abundance which only modern chemically fertilized fields are able to
surpass. The miracle of the paddies is now known to have been caused in
large part by a tiny floating water fern which lives in symbiotic
relationship with assorted blue-green algae. These work together to
convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia and soluble nitrates, and so
to "fix" it in a form that the plant can use to boost its growth. The
blue-green algae and their ferns, named azolla after azote, the French
chemist Lavoisier's term for nitrogen, are at present the subject of
171

intense research at the world's most advanced centres for rice science.
Understanding the minute snake-like alga anabaena azollae, and azolla
itself, might eventually enable rice farmers in Asia to cut down on the
increasingly expensive and often dangerous chemical fertilizers they
are now using in order to augment their crops. Azolla gets its energy
from sunlight and is ecologically safe.
Once, sometime in the eleventh century AD in North Vietnam, a giant
Buddhist monk called Khong Minh Khong was carrying a yoke on his
shoulders as he travelled through the rice paddies of the Red River
Delta. From each end of his yoke hung enormous baskets full of azolla,
and as the giant monk jogged along, clumps of the tiny ferns fell out
of the baskets and onto the paddies of the three villages of La Van,
Bung, and Bich Du. The rice prospered amazingly, but the three villages
told no one the secret of their miraculous harvests. By the seventeenth
century, however, the inhabitants of the three villages were busy
raising azolla in nurseries during the summer; they collected the
fern's spores and sold them to other farmers, who would scatter them
every January over their transplanted winter rice seedlings. To this
day a temple stands in the Delta, honouring Khong Minh Khong as the
founder of the azolla technique.

RICE AND MODERN MIRACLES

Rice in North America is raised by methods utterly different from
anything we have looked at so far; and the methods are indissociable
from attitudes of mind. First the enormous fields are levelled with the
aid of laser beams, which are intercepted and processed by computers
mounted on mechanical earthmoving machines drawn by tractors. The land
is flattened to a very slight slope (one or two parts per thousand) to
facilitate water dispersal. Dykes, called "levees" in the United
States, are constructed by special twin-disk ploughs which as they move
forward automatically pile up earth behind them into continuous mounds
two to three feet high. One man can very quickly bank up soil around a
field hundreds of metres wide. The land is then gone over again with
another precision leveller.
The next step is the mechanical injection of nitrogen fertilizer,
whether liquid or solid, at precisely three inches below the surface,
which is the depth most accessible to rice roots, and also below the
zone of soil
172 

which will oxidize in contact with the water. Rice seeds are soaked
first in fungicide, then in water for twenty-four hours. The fields are
flooded and then sown by airplanes, which scatter the rice over the
water's surface; the heavy water-sodden seed quickly sinks and
germinates. One man can sow 500 kilograms (1200 Lb.) of presoaked rice
in an hour, or 200 hectares (500ø acres) in an eight-hour day. Water
levels are automatically controlled. Weeds are killed off by several
types of herbicides sprayed from planes; government regulations attempt
to control the amount of poisons used, because the water is recycled
when the fields are drained for the harvest. The mature rice is
gathered by huge combines fitted with tracks to help them move through
the mud. The rest of the drying, threshing, milling and packaging is
done mechanically. Another method of rice-growing used in the United
States involves drilling the seed into the prepared dry fields, which
are subsequently dyked and flooded; always the system is wholly
mechanized.
The United States grows less than 2 per cent of the world's total rice
crop. Yet it is also the largest exporter of rice on earth; it sells up
to 60 per cent of its yield abroad. Few hands are needed to grow the
rice, and Americans consume very little of it-a mere five kilos (11
lb.) per head per year, one-thirtieth of the amount which the poor in
southeast Asia eat when they can get it. In North America, rice is even
less tyrannical than it is soulful.
On one matter Americans are adamant, however: rice must be longgrained,
very white, and what English-speaking people call "fluffy." That is,
every grain must be separate and rather dry. The sticky and the
glutinous in this culture are held for the most part in abhorrence:
these properties attack our socially-conditioned preferences for what
is clear and clean, free, equal, and individually self-contained. Even
rice pudding revolts some of us because of its glutinous quality,
especially when it emerges as a compact mass; we all know the answer to
the question in A. A. Milne's poem:

And it's lovely rice pudding for dinner again! What is the matter with
Mary Jane?

The Japanese and others, on the other hand, actually prefer their rice
to stick together in lumps; they like the consistency and sweetish
taste of sticky rice. Eating it with chopsticks is easy. When it is
white, the Japanese want rice to be as white and glossy as it can be -
a thin coating of glucose is spread over the grains with the aid of
what is called a
173

trumble machine, which also dusts talc over the sticky surface. There
have been fears expressed that this practice may cause cancer, but most
people now think that whiting rice is harmless.
Americans and most Europeans prefer the kind of rice which is grown in
tropical heat; it is typically sensitive to temperature but not to
light, and it is native to the Indian subcontinent-whence its name,
indica. The most prestigious of indica rices, and a great favourite in
the west, is Basmati, grown in northern India and Pakistan; its
aromatic, long, and slender grains double in length with the cooking, a
process which is still a subject of scientific puzzlement. Sticky rice,
on the other hand, called japonica outside China (where it is known as
sinica), has short wide grains which stick together during cooking, is
relatively resistant to temperature changes while growing, but
responsive to the duration of sunlight. It has a sweeter and altogether
stronger taste than most indica, which tends to blandness. The softest
and stickiest type of japonica, the true "glutinous rice," is
especially prized in Laos and northeastern Thailand; in other countries
it is reserved for making cakes, soups, and sauces. Congee, sticky rice
boiled for three hours in about twelve times as much water as rice, is
turned, in China and Japan, into sweet and savoury snacks, or eaten
sugared for breakfast as the equivalent of porridge in northern Europe.
In most poor countries of the world, the water in which rice is cooked
is cooled, often fermented slightly, and drunk, so that the nutrients
which escape into rice water are not wasted.
The different characteristics of the two main types of rice, japonica
and indica, form the basis of modern genetics in riziculture. Indica
rice grows very tall (160 to 200 centimetres, or over 5 ft. in height)
and has a tendency to "lodge," or fall over with its heavy head of
grains in the mud. Lodging is always undesirable, but not a very great
problem when harvesting is done by hand. When mechanized farming takes
over, indica (despite western taste preference for it) is a very
difficult crop indeed. Indica has excellent drought tolerance, however,
and better resistance to insects and diseases than glutinous varieties
display. Japonica rice is shorter and therefore less liable to lodge.
It has a further advantage which makes it extremely acceptable to
modern farming methods, in spite of its stickiness and attraction for
diseases and pests: japonica loves chemical fertilizers, whereas indica
dies if too many of them are applied.
The trick then, for rice œgeneticists was to marry the two types in
174 

such a way as to combine the desirable traits and eliminate the
difficult ones. In 1959 the Rockefeller and the Ford foundations united
to fund the International Rice Research Institute, with headquarters at
Los Banos, sixty-seven kilometres (42 miles) south of Manila in the
Philippines. The IRRI (with initials which neatly recall the triumphs
possible through irrigation) was founded in order to do for rice what
scientists had achieved for wheat: the great food staple of the western
world had seen its yield increase vastly, thanks to "genetic
engineering" coupled with the application of petroleum-based
fertilizers.
It did not take long- a mere seven years - for the International Rice
Research Institute to present the world with what was quickly nicknamed
"Miracle Rice," IR8, the eighth hybrid to come out of IRRI, and the
instigator of a revolution in world riziculture. IR8 had a short
stature, thanks to japonica genes reinforced by those of a strange
semi-dwarf wild variety from Taiwan. This unique and once highly
localized Taiwanese rice, named Dee Geo Woo Gen, has in consequence of
this "Green Revolution" provided some of the most widely used rice
genes in existence.
Short stems made the new rice resistant to lodging, even when powerful
fertilizers caused the plant to shoot up quickly; IR8 took only 125
days to grow instead of the previous record of 150 days. (The newest
hybrids grow in 100 days or less.) Shortness also ensured that energy
went into grain-production and not into stem height. The new rice had
stiffstrong straws and large ears which detached themselves easily from
the plant, rendering it perfect for machine harvesting. Sensitivity to
length of daylight was bred out so that it could be used for off-season
cropping anywhere; but it was also amenable, like japonica, to heavy
doses of yield-increasing fertilizer.
The new rice was disseminated extremely quickly throughout the world;
more than eighty countries planted it. Average yields of rice rose
about 30 per cent between 1968 and 1981, beginning with the arrival of
IR8. Organizing the "Green Revolution" in rice meant education for new
techniques of sowing and irrigating, the introduction of fertilizers
and heavy machinery, the building of all the paraphernalia required to
harvest, transport, and mill the new crops. Dry-land rice is not
amenable to the modern techniques, with the result that about 10 per
cent more land than formerly was brought under irrigation.
After the first euphoria (and far more quickly in the case of rice than
for the other cereals), certain unpleasant side-effects of the "Green
175

Revolution" began to haunt the rice-eating populations of the world,
who nevertheless continued gratefully to plant "high-yield" rice. The
enormous cost of importing chemical fertilizers hit hard, in spite of
all the crop gains, in poor countries. Heavy machinery involved the de-
struction of tiny fields: what had been an economizing skill came,
overnight, to be considered antiquated and not economically viable.
Everyone planted the same rice everywhere, and used the same pesti-
cides. Since people eat so much rice where rice is the staple, there is
a great danger of pesticide build-up in human bodies. Rice-protecting
poisons immediately kill the denizens of rice paddies: fish, often the
main source of protein, died off, with the sadly ironic result that
"more rice" could mean "worse nutrition." "Miracle rice has led to
miracle locusts," became a gloomy aphorism in Pakistan as insects
swiftly adapted themselves and overcame the poisons designed to control
them. In traditional cultures, the periodic drying of the rice paddies
and the planting of garden vegetables had tended to interrupt the
reproductive cycle of the brown plant-hopper, one of the most
devastating plagues of rice; but "miracle" rice now filled the paddies
non-stop. The pests rejoiced and vastly multiplied.
And when all was said and done people did not like IR8 much: it was
chalky, tended to break easily in the milling, and there were com-
plaints that it tasted odd. It was also always the same. Rice eaters
are intensely knowledgeable about varieties of flavour and aroma in
their favourite food; they may be used to eating little, but they care
a great deal whether that little is good. Scientists bemoaned the
ingratitude of those who, far more easily than ever before, could fill
their stomachs with rice; why couldn't they just eat up and forget the
taste?
There is always a way out of these kinds of dilemmas - back to the
drawing-board. A new kind of rice was devised, then another, then
another. IR20 was armed against a disease called tungro, but was van-
quished by grassy-stunt virus and brown plant-hoppers. (The heavy and
compact tillering of the new semi-dwarf rices modifies the microclimate
around the plants and actually increases their attraction for insects.)
IR26 finally overcame the disease and the new wave of pests, but was
easily flattened by wind. Researchers went to Taiwan for a special type
of wind-resistant rice, but found it had vanished: the Taiwanese had
not thought that kind of rice was worth growing any more, since
everyone was raising "miracles." (All wild rices on Taiwan have now
been officially declared extinct.) When IR36 came out, 65 per cent
176 

of Philippine and 60 per cent of Indonesian paddy fields were sown with
the new marvel. The brown plant-hopper was nonplussed for four whole
years. It finally did rise to the challenge, however, and destroyed the
hopes of IR36. By 1982, IRRI was ready to throw IR56 into the breach.
And so the dance goes on. No "new rice" can hope to last more than four
years; most are useless in less than two.
Many scientists are now saying that hybrid rice, grown uniformly on
millions of hectares, presents too great a risk from pest hordes; a
wide variety of rice-types should be grown in order to keep
depradations down. The rice farmers of Thailand, for instance, have
grown modern hybrids only in the dry season on 10 per cent of their
planted land; hundreds of traditional varieties were raised in the
rainy season on most of the fields. As a result Thailand has suffered
no major epidemics during the past twenty years, and has also managed
to maintain its position as part of what is called "the rice-bowl of
Asia." Many rice-growing countries have found that their soil and water
becomes contaminated by the new pesticides. Ever since 1976, work has
been done on finding easily degradable versions of pest-killers, and
many now realize that even these should be used only when crops are
actually in danger.
Another most important realization is that everything must be done to
save rice varieties which are being threatened with replacement and
extinction because of the very success of the "high-yield" hybrids. The
example of the disappearance of the wind-resistant Taiwanese rice shows
how serious the loss of a rice variety can be. Another wild Taiwanese
rice was incorporated into hybrid stock and helped save "miracle" rice
from a flare-up of ragged stunt virus in India in 1977. This genetic
material, completely lost to its natural habitat because of
concentration by the Taiwanese on "miracle" rice, was available only
because it had been artificially preserved at the International Rice
Germplasm Centre (associated with IRRI) in the Philippines.
This, the largest of the word's germ-plasm "libraries," was established
in 1961. It brought together samples of rice types from national
collections all over the world; for the first time there was money and
technology available to keep seeds alive and in storage for up to fifty
years. Before that, plant stocks had to be grown every year or so in
order to survive; mixtures, duplications, mislabelling, and irreparable
losses had become increasingly common. Today, repeatedly renewed
exploration campaigns send botanists out to find previously uncollected
samples of rice varieties. It is estimated that about half the world's
living range of
177

rice varieties is now packaged and stored at the IRGC at Los Ba*os, and
at other rice "banks." Organization and emergency action has saved rice
from possible genetic disaster. Also, concentrating varieties in these
centres has facilitated further genetic experimentation.
Yet, for the less optimistic among us, half a dozen public institutions
seem perilously slender threads on which to hang the future of half the
world's food staple. Absolutely nothing must ever go wrong with a giant
modern plant "library." A war, power failures, lack of funding,
incompetence, or plain laziness could at any point destroy forever
whole expanses of nature's abundance. Man's first decision, many
centuries ago, to take control of rice made him endlessly dependent,
for his cultural as well as his biological well-being, on rice. Today
we have to learn to control our own prowess before the devices we have
cleverly invented turn into traps. The extent to which we hold the
power of rice genetics in our hands is the extent to which we must
respect it. The word "hybrid," after all, is commonly thought to derive
from the idea of vigour contained in the Greek term "hybris." The word
has other connotations, more tragic and maybe even more germane.

THE ORIGINS AND SPREAD OF RICE

Bulu is a cousin of japonica rice with wider, hairy leaves and
hair-like awns on the grains (bulu means "bearded"). It is a rapidly
disappearing species and has never been found anywhere but in the very
ancient Philippine rice terraces, Java and Bali, and the mountains of
Madagascar. Bulu is a rare clue to one route which rice took as it
spread over the world; it is a living proof of early historical
connections between these far-flung islands. A few centuries before
Christ, at the latest, canoes from Java made the
fifty-six-hundred-kilometre (3500-mile) journey to Madagascar bearing
rice and bananas. The Malagasy still use outrigger canoes and Javanese
musical instruments such as the marimba; they also cultivate paddy rice
on terraces with intensive irrigation - a method which seems never to
have crossed the three-hundred-kilometre (200 mile) distance which
separates the island from mainland Africa.
The earliest origins of rice are so ancient and so little understood
that scientists become lyrical in their speculations. One theory has
rice beginning on the ancient supercontinent of Gondwanaland, before it
split up to form Africa, Antarctica, Australia, South America, and
south
78 

and south-east Asia. For rice has been found in what appears to be an
indigenous state in all parts of the earth except Europe, North
America, northern Asia, and the Arctic.
The earliest wild-rice gatherers known to us were the negroid Hoa-
binhians who lived in southern China and North Vietnam (they are named
after a North Vietnamese archaeological site) about ten to four
thousand years before Christ. Theirs was a Neolithic culture older than
that of the Middle East. The race is now confined to the Melanesian
islands; but their ancestral home, lying between the two great rice
centres of India and China, is usually believed to be where the
cultivation of rice began.
Irrigated rice came relatively very late to India, China, and southeast
Asia. That is because a high degree of civilization is presupposed by
the necessary technology. The easy-going tubers, such as taro and yams,
provide adequate nourishment for people with one-third or less of the
labour which rice requires. In Luzon in the northern Philippines tubers
are still planted, largely symbolically, among the rice; this is
perhaps a traditional memory of the relatively recent arrival of rice
cultivation, and of the time before rice supplanted the older crops.
Many scientists believe that rice agriculture really only arrives when
stocks of wild animals have been depleted to such an extent that there
are not enough left to complement a diet of tubers. Others think that
the original systematic cultivation of rice was triggered off in the
early second millennium BC by contact with the margins of the ancient
wheat and barley-growing cultures which lay to the west of India;
complex historical reasons were responsible for the spread of rice to
the rest of the world.
Our word rice derives from the Aramaic term ourouzza; it was probably
from its usage at Babylon, in modern Iraq, that both Greek (oryzon) and
Arabic (arozz) took their names for rice, and these two languages
handed on the term to the various tongues of Europe. It was the
Persians, yet again, who had bridged east and west, carrying rice cul-
tivation from India to the Euphrates. For the Greeks and Romans the
plant remained fairly rare, and was therefore used semi-medicinally.
The Arabs, and the Turks when they settled in Asia Minor, took rice
very seriously indeed. The Arabs called rice aish ("life") just like
wheat, because for them it often rivals bread in importance, and they
planted it widely in their Spanish territories. The Spanish word for
"rice" is taken directly from Arabic arozz, and the international word
pilaf (de
179

noting boiled rice with meat), derived from Persian, became the Spanish
paella.
Rice took many centuries to induce Europeans other than Spaniards to be
interested in it. During the Middle Ages rice would arrive in England
on spice ships from the Orient, and was stored carefully away in the
locked spice-cupboards of British mansions. The grains were precious,
and thought of in the plural. "Take rice," say the early recipes, "and
wash them clean...." Rice was nearly everywhere considered an
ingredient for puddings, and eaten very sparingly, with sugar and pow-
dered spice. (Four tablespoons of rice are enough to make an excellent
rice pudding for a modern family.) "If you boyle rice in milk adding
thereto sugar and cinnamon, it will provouke into venerie," says a late
Elizabethan profferer of good advice. As late as 1873, Alexandre
Dumas's Dictionnaire of cuisine lists almost nothing but desserts under
the entry riz.
Rice was soft, sugary, eaten with milk and cream, fed to babies, and
easily thought of as infantile; it sustained racial prejudices as well.
Nietzsche thought that eating rice caused one to become addicted to
opium; the gourmet Brillat-Savarin warned that eating such food made
people soft and cowardly, like the rice-eating Indians who could be
conquered by anyone who thought it worth the effort. Montesquieu, on
the other hand (De l'esprit des lois, 1748), had noted that rice
induces hard work, the co-operative virtues, and justice.
When Vasco da Gama returned from India in 1499, the spices and other
food discoveries which he presented to King Manoel the Fortunate of
Portugal set off a new interest in rice cultivation in his native
country. From Portugal the fashion spread to Piedmont in Italy, where
rice had been grown on a small scale since the tenth century. Intensive
rice farming in the Po Valley began in 1522, with the aid of water
diverted from mountain streams and the building of a complex canal
system. The consequences for Italian cuisine were immense. Excellent
fish were raised in rice irrigation water, and rane dorate, skinned
frogs dipped in flour and fried in olive oil, became a famous delicacy.
Italian rice is round, with an opaque pearly middle; alone among
western cooking traditions, the Italian preference is for short-grained
rice eaten sticky, with a binding of sauce and cheese. "Rice," the
Italians say, "is born in water and dies in wine."
Thomas Jefferson was visiting Italy in 1787, having been sent to Europe
as America's first Ambassador to France. During the American
180 

Revolution, the British in South Carolina had depleted both the crops
of America's rice and the seed which was needed for replanting. In
spite of Italian laws jealously guarding Piedmont rice seed, Jefferson
managed to get his hands on a few sacks of it, and smuggled it out of
the country, breaking the Italian monopoly and replenishing the North
American rice-fields. Long-grain rice took over from the round variety,
and rice itself was supplanted by cotton in the Carolinas in the
nineteenth century, but the name "Carolina rice" survives as the
appellation for a crop now grown mostly in California, Texas, and
Arkansas.
South Carolina rice farming had begun with seed brought on ships from
Madagascar in the 1680S and '90s. Slaves from north-west Africa were
soon being shipped in to work the rice fields; they came with ancient
expertise in the technology of rice, knowledge which their English
masters mostly lacked. Many North American practices in the early years
of rice cultivation were similar to those used in Africa. Threshing,
for instance, was done with flails, and husking with mortars and
pestles.
Many of the slaves for North America's cotton and sugar-cane plan-
tations came from the south-west African coast. On the long journey
out, American ships called in at the Windward Coast (stretching from
Sierra Leone to the Ivory Coast) where they loaded up with African rice
for the rest of the trip; payment was largely in Brazilian tobacco and
New England rum. On the Windward and Gold coasts they also found slaves
who could work rice plantations back home. There is increasing evidence
that slave traders were choosy about their merchandise: they knew that
Africans could supply not only brawn but specific know-how, so they
looked for men with the skills required.
Most varieties of rice eaten in the world today, including both indica
and japonica, are of the species Oryza sativa. There are other kinds of
rice, however, and many of them survive in Africa. The most important
of these is Oryza,glabewima, which may be indigenous to north Africa,
or may have been introduced there from the Orient by the Arabs. Oryza
,glabewima was central to the prosperity of an African rice kingdom
which flourished on the flood-plains of the Niger River, near Timbuktu
in modern Mali, in the sixteenth century. Rice is still grown in tradi-
tional ways in Mali, where weeds are suffocated by being cut off below
the water's surface by workers standing waist- and even neck-deep in
water. Seedlings are grown in calabashes, then transplanted into the
river beds, or seeds are sown broadcast over the water. It is necessary
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to protect the rice from phytophagous (plant-eating) fish, seed-eating
birds, and locust swarms.
Rice is also grown intensively in the tropical rain forests of the
Guinea Coast, and in mangrove swamps on the seaboard of Guinea-Conakry.
When the Portuguese introduced Oryza sativa to the Guinea Coast in the
early sixteenth century, they found the Africans there already prac-
tising complex rice-irrigation methods, and dealing with the salinity
of the seaside soil. They had built dykes to keep out the sea-water,
and sluice-gates of hollowed tree-trunks to allow rain and river water
to leach out the salt. Where the salination was most serious, they grew
their rice on raised soil ridges.
Oryza sativa grows very successfully in Africa: it caught on and spread
quickly after its introduction by the Arabs down Africa's east coast,
and by the Portuguese who called in at the north-west seaboard on their
return journeys from expeditions to India. The rice which the Portu-
guese ships carried may have been taken on board at East African
landing points and transported by them to the west, via the toe of the
African continent.
Today the populations of Africa demand more and more rice. The cereal
very easily becomes a top favourite wherever people are accustomed to
designing their meals around one main staple. Rice is easily digestible
and easily stored. People never tire of eating it, even as a daily food
and often at consecutive meals, over a lifetime: rice is one of the
most consistently palatable items of the human diet. Almost nobody is
constitutionally incapable of assimilating it.
Vast irrigation projects are under way in Africa to increase rice
yields. The Chinese are naturally in the forefront of the supply of
expertise in the field. The upheaval in African eating habits is
profound. Millet and sorghum, the ancient African staples, and cassava,
yams, and even maize seem increasingly less prestigious and "modern" as
items for human consumption, especially in large African cities. Rice
is particularly amenable to the large-scale agricultural engineering
projects which are thought necessary for the raising of all the food so
urgently needed in Africa. Modern technology, in turn, makes rice seem
chic and alluring.
With rice, the "Green Revolution" arrives. Its attendant problems can
be particularly exacerbated and dangerous in Africa. Rice phases out
the traditional crops which respond poorly to petroleum-based
fertilizers: in any case, none of them can compete in yield with
irrigated
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rice. The result can be, as we have seen in previous discussions of
technological agriculture, loss of alternatives, loss of traditional
know-
how, and far-reaching changes in taste and social custom. Expensive
heavy machinery must be imported, and fuel costs are high. Mechanized
ploughing needs extremely careful controls if it is not to ruin the
pre-
carious balance of Africa's fragile soil surfaces. Erosion, and the
leaching
of nutrients where rainfall is heavy, are common results of overdoing
cultivation, especially where the long labour of terracing and walling
fields (which incidentally prevents soil erosion) is not part of the
strategy. Living lightly on the land and taking advantage of wide space
and
wild animal life are characteristic of many African traditions; the
close,
tight, intensely regimented life of rice growers is often foreign
indeed.
The consequences of adapting to it must be immense, if unforeseeable.

SICKNESS AND HEALTH

Standing water has always been known mysteriously to cause disease:
agues and the recurring sickness called quartan or tertian fever. The
cause seemed to be bad air (which is the literal meaning of the word
malaria) exhaled from certain bodies of water - and some of these were
undoubtedly rice paddies. The problem was particularly bad in southern
Europe. In the fourteenth century the Crown of Aragon forbade rice
cultivation altogether in Valencia, and as late as 1860 a Spanish
decree ordered that no trees were to be grown in areas planted to rice,
so that the "bad air" could easily blow away.
When rice paddies were abandoned, malaria could strike with particular
malevolence. The Siamese attacked the Cambodian capital, Angkor, in the
fifteenth century. The damage they did was great, but its most
devastating effect was the interruption of irrigation schemes in the
rice fields. Water stood still, paddies were not properly drained, and
malaria struck, wiping out a whole civilization.
Virulent malaria became rife in South Carolina in the eighteenth
century, partly because African slaves were imported in large numbers
to work the rice fields, and with them arrived a new species of malaria
carrying mosquito. It is believed that the American Indians knew that
foreigners could bring fever with them, and that this accounts for some
of their ferocity in fighting off newcomers in swampy south-eastern
North America. It is certainly true that where populations are
sedentary
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and visitors few, people suffer relatively little from malaria. A great
deal also depends on the type of the local mosquito and its breeding
habits: Malaysia, for instance, in spite of its fields of standing
water, has never suffered from malarial fever as southern Europe or
parts of Africa have done, because Malaysian mosquitoes do not breed
freely in muddy, sediment-carrying rice paddies.
The anopheles mosquito (the blood-drinking female of which is the
vector for malaria) depends on stagnant water for breeding; therefore
the constantly recurring drainage of rice fields, and a slight movement
of the water through the paddies, act as important controls on malaria.
This explains why it is that malaria can become epidemic as soon as
incessant work on rice-paddies stops for whatever reason. Larvicide
oils spread over the water's surface or poisons dissolved in paddy
water have been quite successful in reducing the mosquito population.
The "miracle drug," DDT, which did a great deal to fight mosquitoes
after its launching world-wide in 1946, was banned in 1964 because it
is so dangerous to birds, fish, and insects beneficial to man, and
because people were consuming it in their food. In any case, mosquitoes
evolved resistance to it.
One ecologically safe method of fighting mosquitoes in rice paddies is
the propagation in them of the tiny North American fish called
gambusia. It loves eating mosquito larvae, and adapts easily to
different kinds of water conditions. Gambusia was introduced with
success into paddy waters in Spain, Greece, Italy, and Russia in the
1920s and '30s. The fish, which reduced but could not eradicate malaria
(fish populations, unlike human populations, never destroy a useful
food source), was mostly dropped as a malaria fighter after the
introduction of DDT.
Malaria has never been eradicated from the earth, as scientists until
quite recently believed it could be; in fact the incidence of the
disease has increased world-wide. Human travel and the upheavals of war
are the reasons, as is also the spread of rice cultivation in
previously nonrice-eating countries. Now scientists think that the most
we can hope to do is control malarial outbreaks as best we can with
drugs, routine checks, and general health measures. The price is
constant (that is, often tedious and repetitive) vigilance, and a
preparedness to spend money protecting people.
"Polishing" rice-removing its bran and germ entirely-gives the grain
long shelf-life, whereas rice encased in fat-containing bran may turn
rancid, especially in hot humid weather. Milled rice is quick-cook
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ing, soft, and easily digestible; in addition, polishing (the very word
suggests refinement) brings out the prized colour, white. Eating brown
rice often has a social stigma attached to it, much as brown bread once
had in the west: brown rice has not been treated to the extra trouble
and expense of milling. Also, if rice with a lot of bran is eaten as
almost all one's nourishment, it can cause serious digestive problems.
Polishing rice, however, rids the grain of its protein and nearly all
of its vitamins, which are mostly of the b-complex and reside in the
bran. The rice grain is naturally wrinkled, and the tight bran skin es-
pouses its scored surface; for this reason it has hardly ever been
possible, until recent times, to remove absolutely all of the bran.
Modern machinery, of course, can handle the most deeply imbedded bran
with no difficulty. Undermilling is still frequent in the tropics,
however, and this insufficiency has been an enormous aid to nutrition.
The "brown" rice available in health-food stores in Europe and North
America is lightly milled; it retains 8 per cent of the protein, plus a
little fat, and a few vitamins and minerals. It takes longer to cook
than white rice, and retains a chewy consistency.
In 1886, the Dutch colonial service sent a commission of inquiry out to
Indonesia to find the cause of an epidemic of beri-beri which was
devastating the native population. A germ was discovered which the
commissioned professors thought must be the culprit. A young Army
doctor called Christian Eijkman was left behind in Indonesia to
continue researches into the new "find." After making little progress
for two years, Eijkman happened to notice that his hospital
laboratory's chickens, which were kept for experimental purposes,
appeared to be showing some of the symptoms of beri-beri: general
muscular weakness and an inability to walk. The doctor thought they had
caught his "germ"until suddenly the chickens recovered their health.
The essential insight came with Eijkman's realization that the recovery
coincided with a change in the birds' diet. The chickens were
discovered to have been temporarily fed on left-over rice from the
bowls of the hospital staff and patients: it was white rice which had
given the chickens beri-beri, and a return to their customary brown
rice cured them. Beriberi, as Eijkman and his successor Gerrit Grijns
saw, was caused by deficiency and not germs; there was something in the
bran which polished rice lacked; without it, people and animals living
largely on rice became seriously debilitated. Beri-beri had been a rare
disease until the
185

mid-nineteenth century, when the super-efficient truncated-cone rice
mill was invented.
In 1912, Frederick Hopkins demonstrated that what he called "accessory
factors of the diet" were absolutely essential to human health, but
that these factors were something entirely different from fats, car-
bohydrates, or minerals. Casimir Funk coined a word for the mysterious
life-enhancing substances: he called them "vitamines" from vita, mean-
ing "life"; and once they were given a name (the "e" was eventually
dropped) research began in earnest. The anti-beri-beri factor was
finally isolated by Robert R. Williams in the United States; it was
vitamin B;, now commonly called thiamine. Williams and his team of
assistants managed, after years of hard work, to find the components
and chemical connections which comprise the substance, and, in 1936,
thiamine was artificially synthesized. It is now routinely added to
commercially processed rice and wheat products.
For thousands of years the peoples of India have been parboiling their
rice. It has recently been found that this preparation in fact pre-
serves vitamins in the grain: it makes possible the removal of the bran
without destroying most of the nutritional value of rice. Parboiled
rice is cleaned and soaked, steamed, dried, and only then it is milled.
In the process it becomes yellowish in colour and hardens. This
increases its imperviousness to insects, and also renders later
overmilling unlikely. Foreign matter is washed and steamed away so that
storage becomes safer; cracks and stresses in the grain are repaired in
the steaming process, making the rice less likely to break. Most
importantly of all, parboiling drives the vitamins in rice bran into
the core of the grain and so stores them for human consumption. The
process avoids the problem of"enriched" rice, where vitamins are coated
onto the grains and a lot of the goodness tends to wash off in the
cooking.
The word parboiled often confuses shoppers: it sounds as if the product
is pre-cooked or "quick-cooking," whereas parboiled rice in fact takes
about ten minutes longer to cook than raw white rice does. (Strictly
speaking, parboiled rice "hydrates.") The American product, converted
rice, is usually a modification of the method which includes freezing
the rice slowly so that ice crystals create a porous and
"quick-cooking" structure for the gelatinized starch. The precooked
"instant" rices on the market may have been puffed so that holes are
introduced into the ToTrain into which hot water can readily penetrate.
186 

INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

In the 1890S a group of German physicists discovered a method of making
starch easier to study under a microscope: they heated rice in a test
tube until the grains expanded. Publication of these experiments
attracted the attention of an American biochemist named Alexander P.
Anderson, who was looking for ways of increasing the digestibility of
starch. He travelled to Munich in 1895, to see the new technique for
himself. His German colleagues warned him not to seal the end of the
test tube during the heating process, or the steam pressure would ex-
plode it.
Anderson, still in Munich, could hardly wait to try heating rice in a
sealed tube. The tube shattered, sprayed glass all over the laboratory,
and out came puffed rice more than eight times the size of the raw
grain - "as good a puffed rice as was ever puffed anywhere," Anderson
declared. After his return to America, he began years of exceedingly
dangerous experiments. "It's a wonder that he didn't blow himself up,"
his friends said, and in 1902 workers refused to go near his workshop
after a huge blast had torn out the floor. He eventually tried stuffing
his rice into an old cannon left over from the Spanish-American War
-and a modern brainwave was born.
The public first got a view of Quaker Puffed Rice at the World's Fair
of 1904, when eight bronze cannons exploded rice over the heads of a
huge crowd. A cousin of the Mikado of Japan was present, to report back
home on a possible new market for rice. Today, puffed rice and puffed
wheat are still exploded in a machine which, in spite of safety devices
and its huge size, is still essentially a gun, from which puffed grain
erupts with a roar. The steam pressure causes an estimated 125 million
explosions within each grain of rice.
In the early days, puffed rice was coated in caramel and sold like
popcorn. It was a long time before the product was marketed as a
breakfast cereal, with the slogan "Shot from Guns" and a picture in the
publicity material of "Prof. A. P. Anderson," whose craggy professorial
face, broad forehead, and octogon-shaped rimless glasses turned out to
be an ad-man's dream: the combination of Science and the Spectacular
proved one of the great winners in advertising history. At the New York
World's Fair in 1965 a man-and-wife circus team had themselves shot out
of a cannon four times daily to provide publicity for Puffed Rice and
its brother-product, Puffed Wheat.
187

Oven-crisped puffed rice is much more popular than the plain type these
days. Breakfast cereals, which now quite often mix rice with other
grains, constitute a large proportion of the market for rice in North
America. The American brewing industry increasingly uses rice and corn
instead of malted barley for making beer, especially since "light" food
has begun to be promoted as healthy. Rice and corn are, of course, much
cheaper and easier to mechanize than barley malt; and manufacturers say
they are good for "stability and uniformity in the product." They also
give beer the bland taste and the pale colour which the concept of
"lightness" suggests.
But by far the most important use for rice in the western world is as
baby food. There is hardly one of us alive who has not depended on rice
during the months in which we were weaned from milk to solids. As we
have seen, rice is mild, bland, easily-digestible, and nonallergenic.
Ever since baby foods began to be prepared commercially in the United
States in 1921, rice has been an ingredient of almost every package and
jar of them. In fact, rice is thought to have been the very first
infant food on earth: women may have learned to shorten their
two-to-four-year nursing period by inventing rice gruel and feeding it
to their babies.
It was women, too, almost certainly who discovered how to turn rice
into alcohol, probably by chewing slightly and spitting out the grains,
as is still commonly done to induce the fermentation of cereals in many
parts of the world. Since cereals can be used to make alcohol while
tubers like taro cannot, the arrival of a taste for strong drinks is
another of the momentous societal changes which take place when there
is a switch from root to cereal crops.
Rice wine, some form of which is drunk wherever rice is grown, is
called sake in Japan. The word is an abbreviation of sakae,
"prosperity," which is associated in men's minds with the "merry
feeling" induced by the brew. Sake is the object of extremely careful
handling, as are alcoholic drinks in most cultures. At the gate of
every Zen Buddhist temple in Japan, inscriptions on a stone pillar warn
that garlic and wine are never to be admitted over the threshold;
Eison, the great pioneer of Zen, did everything he could to spread
tea-drinking as an alternative to taking sake in Japan. Sake has,
however, been called the sacramental wine of the much older Shinto
religion. Shinto has a number of sake gods, and most weddings in Japan
are celebrated according to Shinto rites, where the exchange and
drinking of cups of sake seal the marriage
188 

contract. Many kinds of occasion require the drinking of sake in Japan,
from the Dolls' Festival every March third to the solemn Viewing of the
Full Moon in autumn, which is accompanied by the consumption of pale
gold sake and moon-shaped white dumplings, together with the recital of
one's own specially-composed poetry.
Rice wine is really a still beer. The first step in making it is the
creation of a starter for sake yeast. A carefully mixed culture of
yellow-green Aspergillus ogyzae spores is scattered onto steamed rice,
and this creates koji, the equivalent of malt for beer. This is added
to more steamed rice and fermented for about twenty days. What types
and blends of rice are used, when and at what stages to add the koji,
and at what temperature, are all crucial elements of the art of sake
brewing, where various fragrances and complex tastes can be created by
skilful practitioners. Pale yellow or white liquid sake is then
filtered out of the dense mash and put away, carefully shielded from
sunlight, to mature. Sake does not improve with keeping beyond a year,
and light can darken the liquid and ruin its taste. It is best drunk
warm, as close as possible to 50ø C. (122ø F.)-a circumstance which
reduces the drink's original alcohol level, which is between 14 and 18
per cent.
The alcoholic powers of sake, however, in addition to the bottles made
of opaque porcelain for the exclusion of light, and even the tiny cups
in which the drink is customarily served, are all pressed into service
in the sophisticated and intense social exercise of the Japanese
Business Dinner. The Japanese anthropologist Harumi Befu has explained,
from the inside, one of the rituals which Japan has evolved in order to
enact and celebrate this society' insistence both on close communal
interaction, and on clearly marked, formal assignations of hierarchy,
obligation, and honour.
Japanese business dinners must take place outside the sacrosanct pri-
vacy of the home. By preference, however, the restaurant chosen should
be a traditional Japanese one, which offers several advantages over a
western-style eating place: a separate room can be booked in advance
especially for a "business group"; a professional female overseer of
dinners undertakes to keep the conversation bubbling and everyone's
spirits high; the possibility of ordering everything in advance means
that there is no menu and that therefore no distinct and separate
choices need be made; and, above all, no money need change hands in
front of the company. In this manner as much as possible of the
character of home entertainment is preserved, and the impersonality of
a restau
189

rant venue is turned into a carefully orchestrated opportunity for
human contact and interaction.
During dinner everyone must drink copious draughts of sake and enter
into the spirit of things by allowing himself to come quickly under its
influence; the professional dinner-overseer, who drinks very little,
encourages the guests by appearing herself to become merrier and more
jocular as the meal proceeds. Warm sake is not enormously alcoholic,
but Japanese dinner guests seem to succumb to it surprisingly quickly.
Certainly the Japanese, who eat a lot less fat than westerners do, are
more easily affected by alcohol- but the main point is that getting
tight is part of playing the game. Those who do not get completely
drunk and go to sleep will suddenly become quite sober and capable of
looking after themselves and their weaker friends when it is time to go
home. There are rules about when and where one may get drunk, and
looking as if one is drunk may in certain circumstances be an urbane
and considerate social ploy. The behaviour of people drinking alcohol
shows enormous variation from culture to culture; societal pressures
almost always control it, and solo drinking bouts are for this reason
almost universally dangerous and deliberately discouraged.
At a Japanese dinner one never pours sake for oneself. Pouring is done
by guests for each other, as a sign of social awareness and good will.
Sake cups for dinner parties are tiny, so that the service must be
constantly repeated, and everyone must be on the watch for the chance
to be neighbourly and fill somebody else's cup. Secondly, one who is
being served sake must not leave the cup on the table, but must lift it
in his hand towards the bottle. This obliges the receiver of the
service to notice the action, and to thank his benefactor both during
and after it.
The opaque bottle with its large mouth is rather difficult to manage,
because it is impossible to know how much sake is inside, and how far
it has to be tipped in order to pour it. The tiny cup held in someone
else's hand is hard to fill with no spills - and spilling is very bad
manners. Add to this difficulty the fact that all the guests become
tighter and more fuddled as the party progresses, and the action of
constantly pouring sake for others becomes quite a feat. The intense
concentration and co-operation required is, of course, the object of
the exercise. Conversation, laughing, joking, and also precisely timed
and elaborate social scoring and impression-making continue all the
while. Manoeuvres with sake cups include the feigned refusal: the
receiver of a neighbour's attentions raises his cup to prevent its
being filled yet again; the pourer
190 

retaliates by raising his bottle at the same moment and pouring none-
theless. "Too much" must be ceremoniously refused; cups must however be
filled; and above all, no matter how drunk the contestants, nothing
must be spilled.
People of lower status often ask for the privilege of pouring for
people of higher status and may move from their positions to do so.
This makes it possible for converse and contact to occur between lower
and higher stations; otherwise the seating arrangements might keep the
various ranks apart throughout the meal. When one has drunk a cupful of
sake he offers the empty cup to someone else. While pouring is often
from lower to higher in status, cup-offering begins from higher to
lower. The response is to offer a cup back to the powerful one- either
the same cup or that of another person. The action symbolizes the
reaffirmation of a pact between the two and a salute across the
boundary separating social ranks.
The upshot of a whole sequence of such moves and counter-moves is that
cups travel up and down among the company, "binding" them together; and
those who have received the most homage end up with the largest number
of cups standing before them, while people of the lowest status have
none. The amount of honour offered a man is thus given tangible and
visible expression. Cups are provided in the centre of the group for
this stage of the proceedings, to be taken by the cupless so that
drinking may continue.
The whole dinner party is an improvised drama, with roles of varying
importance, elaborate stage business, props, and theatrical
conventions. At the same time it is a deadly serious affair where
tremendous decisions may be made, well camouflaged by the decorative
facade, but understood by all. Everyone knows the rules, is made to
participate, and indeed contributes to the script, and everyone is both
actor and audience.
The Japanese often say that having a western businessman present at one
of their dinner parties is utterly exhausting. Hospitality decrees that
the foreign guest, after all, has the principal role. But he is
precisely the one who has no idea of how to play his part - often no
idea, even, that he is actually on stage. The others have to
make-believe that his faux pas are charming improvised variations on
the agreed scenario. They have to "carry' the clumsy westerner and
simultaneously prevent him from finding out that he is an utterly inept
performer. He probably does not know how to negotiate a deal without
making appalling errors
191

of taste-or even how to get drunk in the prescribed and courteous
manner. He has not been brought up, trained, sensitized, toned and
strengthened, beautified and polished by the complex social exigencies
of rice.
192

Lettuce: The Vicissitudes of Salad

IN THE COURSE of the year 1984, the food industry in the United States
launched 3,340 new products; another several thousand bright ideas and
cunning new methods for preparing, combining, preserving, and packaging
foods were patented and awaiting buyers and promoters. Novelties
included Pizza in a Cone (bought frozen, to be heated in one's
microwave: obviates crusts and bending slices when eaten in the hand;
flanges on the cone are provided to catch drips), Snack Pellets
(long-lasting, compact, and amenable to any flavouring; can be shipped
anywhere; need only to be fried and they puff up into a ''finger
food"), and many artificial flavourings such as Condensed Milk Taste
(for fudge) and new varieties of liquid wood smokes (lending a
barbecued taste and red-brown colour to anything: one factory already
produces eight hundred thousand gallons of liquid smokes a year).
"New products are to a business enterprise what raindrops are to a
parched lawn." The principle, according to modern processing tycoons,
 193

applies to food as much as to anything else. A few ancient foodstuffs
remain intractable to modern inventiveness, however. These are mostly
vegetables which require, annoyingly, to be eaten "fresh." Many vege-
tables respond, it is true, to dehydration, preservation in liquid, or
freezing. But lettuce, one of the most popular foods in the modern
western diet, remains so far difficult to change or to treat. Something
has been achieved in the direction of toughness and staving off rot:
modern hard crisp lettuce heads can survive much mechanized handling
and achieve sheLf-lives as long as three weeks. But on the farm,
workers are, for the time being, still needed for supplementary weeding
of the lettuce rows and to inspect the growing plants for harvest
readiness, because lettuces in the field refuse, in spite of every
attention, to mature simultaneously. Attempts genetically to square the
spherical lettuce, such as have already given us the tough and boxy
tomato, have failed: the lettuce head remains round and therefore
awkward to wrap by machine. Even the search for a flat-bottomed lettuce
has so far been in vain. Lettuces, especially leaf lettuces, still last
a disappointingly short time after they have been harvested; and
freezing one can quickly turn it into a limp and slimy rag.
But everybody in the western world loves lettuce, and regularly, even
ritually, eats it. Lettuce is often the only green vegetable on the
menu (as it is on ours), and for many people, it may be the only
greenstuff commonly found in their diet. It provides an easy and
pleasant way to alleviate any guilt arising from the realization that
meat and carbohydrates have yet again dominated the meal. Curly lettuce
leaves are a universally acceptable device for decorating other foods,
and sandwiches rely heavily upon them for freshness, juiciness, and
crunch. The leaf is non-fattening and usually eaten raw, and eating it
is therefore virtuous for the body-conscious. Vitamins and minerals are
at present such prestigious words that the advisers of food businessmen
openly urge that the terms be used in ads and on packages wherever
feasible; and lettuce, apart from water, contains almost nothing but
vitamins and minerals.
Lettuce, in other words, has modern mythologies very much on its side.
It merits respect from the food industry even though relatively little
can be done to "enhance" it or to "move" sales of it. The nickname for
lettuce in the trade is "green gold." Iceberg lettuce, as grown in
California for a mass market, is the basis of a vast and specialized
industry, requiring enormous amounts of capital, complex organization
for optimum speed of delivery, and detailed co-ordination with dealers
194 

and supermarkets across the North American continent. The Californian
lettuce head has recently begun to reach international markets as well.
If the irradiation of vegetables becomes an acceptable method of pre-
serving them, lettuce might even begin a new phase in its long, unas-
suming, but doggedly successful economic history.

FOR AND AGAINST SEX

The word lettuce is from the plural of the French laitue (early French
laictue), a derivative of the Latin lactuca, meaning "milky." The sap
of lettuce looks very much like milk, especially in wild varieties.
Lettuce is one of 12,500 species of plants with milky sap or latex.
When rubber supplies were low during the Second World War, Lactuca
virosa, or the strong-smelling prickly lettuce, was investigated to see
if its latex could partially replace that of the Brazilian heDea or
rubber tree. The rubber yield of lettuce was unfortunately too low to
be useful.
For thousands of years people have speculated on the powers and uses of
lettuce sap. The earliest known meaning attached to the substance is
its association in the mythology of ancient Egypt with semen. The
lettuce of the Egyptians was tall and pointed, with leaves flattened
against a central phallic stem. It was sacred to the god Min, in whose
processions growing tubs or "gardens" of lettuce were ceremonially
carried. Min's main jurisdictions were over vegetation and procreation.
His sacred animal was a white bull fed copiously on lettuces to
increase his sexual potency.
The beginning of the annual Egyptian harvest festival was the Coming
Forth of Min, when the god's statues were carried out of his temples.
Min was a stiff hieratic figure, with legs bound tightly together like
those of a mummy. He was one of the oldest gods in the Egyptian
pantheon, and his representation reflects a yery early sculptural
style. He had an erect phallus, long, thin, and elegant. He wore a
skullcap with two tall feathers and two streamers hanging down his
back, and wielded a flail in his raised hand. Min was repeatedly
painted by his priests with a black bituminous substance, to symbolize
the fertile soil of Egypt and the promise of vegetable regeneration to
come. The Pharoah ceremonially reaped grain at the harvest festival and
then solemnly approached the god with an offering of two large
lettuces, holding one in each hand. This scene is the subject of carved
reliefs from Egyptian
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tombs of many periods; the earliest known example is about forty-five
hundred years old. Pharoah ritually begot his heir at Min's festival,
probably identifying himself with the god as he did so. Later Min was
returned to his shrine, which was quite small and surmounted by a tall
leaf-shaped fan sacred to the god. Min's house was surrounded by a
garden full of lettuces.
There is still a popular belief in the Nile Valley that lettuce
promotes fertility in males. This idea appears to have been preserved
from the time of the ancient Egyptians, because for well over
twenty-five hundred years a completely different opinion about lettuce
has obtained in the rest of the Mediterranean region where the lettuce
plant originated. A minor tradition makes lettuce an emblem for female
sexuality (Alciati's Emblemata libellus, 1546 and 1551, calls lettuce
an amuletum Veneris), and the same idea is to be found in Sumerian
texts of the third millennium BC, where the goddess Inanna's pubic hair
is compared to lettuce leaves. But on the whole, there has been staunch
agreement for a long time that lettuce is cold, soporific, and the very
opposite of aphrodisiac. "Lettuse," as Andrew Boorde put it in 1542,
"doth extynct veneryous [i.e., sexual] actes."
Modem chemists confimm that lettuce juice, in particular the milky sap
of the wild Lactuca dirosa, does contain a hypnotic (inducer of sleep)
or narcotic similar to opium. When lettuce runs prematurely to seed a
chemical reaction takes place which increases the soporific effect.
Lactucarium, or lettuce juice, has been used for centuries as a calmant
in cases of insomnia, nervous disorders, rheumatism, coughs, colic, and
seasickness. It was thickened and then dried into white cakes, to be
prescribed to patients, together with poppy seed, before surgery and to
alleviate pain. Crops of Lactuca Dirosa are still grown, notably in
France, for making tinctures which are prescribed for coughs, and for
bronchial and asthmatic conditions. The calming effect may also inhibit
sexual desire.
Since sex in human beings is not merely a mechanical matter, the
beliefs surrounding both aphrodisiacs and anaphrodisiacs help to de-
termine our response to them. People have always tended to attribute to
vegetation medicinal properties which correspond to the appearance of
the plant in question. Plants with lung-shaped leaves, for instance,
were eaten for bronchial complaints; consuming twinned fruit was
thought to give rise to the birth of twins; and walnut-kemels look like
little brains nestling in their nuts, which made them appropriate med
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icine for brain-fevers. The medieval version of this kind of thinking
was called the Doctrine of Signatures. It held that the medicinal
qualities in plants were made visible as "signatures of Natures owne
impression," and writers quite commonly express the wish that human
beings bore similar imprints so that one could tell a person's worth by
some sign on his person.
The ancient Greeks knew a lettuce which they considered to be es-
pecially useful for inhibiting sex. It was squat and round (without a
head however, for heads were bred later), and with very short roots. It
was the opposite, that is, of the tall phallus-shaped lettuce.
Pythagoras especially recommended this plant to his ascetic disciples,
calling it eunuch, a word which literally means "keeping seductive
women under control." (The Persians had castrated male servants -
eunuchs - to perform this office in the King's harem.) Women, we are
told, preferred to call the plant astutis, "incapable of an erection."
If one had unwittingly eaten an aphrodisiac and wished to escape its
spell, a lettuce was always the obvious antidote. On the other hand, a
character in an ancient Greek comedy, the Impotents (Astutoi) of Eu-
boulos, warns his wife that she has "only herself to blame" if she
serves him lettuce for supper. Lettuce in mixed salads could be
counterbalanced by herbs which promoted sexual libido, in order to
achieve a balanced after-effect. Rocket or aruchula has for centuries
been thought a powerful aphrodisiac and therefore appropriate to be
eaten with lettuce. "Eat cress" was an ancient Greek rebuke in the
guise of advice to dull and sluggish people - and watercress was
another complement to salads based on lettuce. The Romans called
watercress nasturtium. (The flower we now call by this name is the
Peruvian cress, both the leaves and the flowers of which are excellent
in salads.) The word nasturtium derives from the Latin for
"nostril-torment," which describes the action of pungent watercress;
prickly nostrils were thought to portend a general influx of vigour.
Another "signature" may have strengthened the reputation of lettuce as
a plant which induced sterility: the milk in lettuce was associated
with women's milk. Wet-nurses kept up their milk supply by drinking
plenty of lettuce soup. The plant was often given in order to help a
mother's milk come after giving birth; interestingly enough, the Amer-
ican prickly lettuce was called "milk leaf" by the Meskwaki Indians and
prescribed by them for the same purpose. The calming effect of lettuce
latex may indeed have helped the mother's milk supply. Breast-feeding
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is a form of natural birth-control, and milk can therefore be perceived
as an inhibitor of fertility. Young wives who habitually ate lettuce
were warned that it might prevent them from becoming pregnant. Also
milk, even vegetable "milk," is easily perceived as "female" and not,
therefore, a promoter of male sexual urges.
Lettuce is 90-95 per cent water, and is for this reason greatly prized
in desert climates. Along the roads leading out of the city of Baghdad
are many stalls selling lettuces. People stop their cars, buy lettuces,
and consume them whole, just as they are. It is said that eating
unsalted lettuce quenches thirst for much longer than drinking water
does. (Lettuce has been known as a vegetable in Iraq since at least the
third millennium BC; and the scribes of King Merodach-Baladan in the
seventh century BC recorded lettuces growing on the terraces of the
Hanging Gardens of Babylon.)
Yet another reason for the anaphrodisiac qualities of lettuce is to be
found in the system of humoral medicine, where lettuce is classed as
cold, largely because of its liquid character. Humoral medicine dates
back - in the west at least - to what is called the "hippocratic
complex" of the ancient Greeks; the Arabs inherited it from the Greeks
and Romans and taught it to the Spaniards, who carried it with them to
Central and South America in the sixteenth century. There the "hip-
pocratic complex" was accepted without any difficulty by the Aztecs and
other Indian cultures because they already had extraordinarily similar
sets of beliefs of their own. In China and Malaysia people have come,
apparently independently, to the very same kinds of conclusions: the
yang-yin system was discussed in the chapter on rice.
The world, according to this system, is divided into a series of dia-
metrically opposing principles: up and down, light and dark, male and
female, hot and cold, dry and wet, and so on. Harmony and balance must
be found between these opposites, or turbulence and pain will be the
result. Human health is, like everything else in the universe, a
question of balance; sickness is the body out of kilter, and medicine a
matter of compensating for excess and deficiency, chiefly by means of
diet.
Some diseases and conditions of the body are "hot": among these are
fevers, burns, and pregnancy. A wise person will help his body by
eating "cold" things to counteract his "hot" condition. Everything edi-
ble has a value: for instance, in the system prevailing among Nahuatl
Indians in the southern valley of Mexico, all vegetables are "fresh,"
that is, cold (because they are juicy and grow in well-watered ground
and
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anything that has to do with water is preeminently cold), yet slightly
warmed by the sun (obviously hot). Vegetables, then, are cold but not
overwhelmingly so, and can be used to cool an over-warmed body.
Exceptions to the rule about vegetables include peas, which are con-
sidered entirely cold, and chilis and onions, which are clearly hot.
Hot soup is classified as "cold" because it is liquid; whereas ice is
"hot" because it is hard, burns to the touch, and contact with it turns
vegetation brown. Methods of cooking (boiling versus frying, for
example) can temper the heat or the cold of foods.
Within this system, lettuce is invariably cold: juicy, eaten raw, a
"cool" green in colour, requiring plenty of moisture in order to grow.
Because it is cold, it goes with "female" in the schema of opposites,
together with "wet," "dark," and so on: it is diametrically opposed to
all that is hot, dry, bright, and masculine. Lettuce is "fresh" rather
than dangerously cold, however: as John Gerard wrote in hisHerball
(1633), "Lettuce is a cold and moist pot-herbe, yet not in the extream
degree of cold or moisture, but altogether moderately, for otherwise it
were not to be eaten." Even lettuce seeds were cold; pharmaceutical
books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries constantly call for
the Four Lesser Cold Seeds, of endive, succory, purslane, and lettuce.
("Lesser" meant smaller than the Four Greater Cold Seeds, of cucumber,
gourds, melons, and citruls or yellow melons.)
Insomnia (making one sweaty and giving rise to thrashing movements) is
very hot- so lettuce is the obvious cooling remedy.

If you need rest,
Lettuce and cowslip wine probatum est

wrote Alexander Pope. Lettuce, therefore, is "sedative" from one med-
ical point of view, and "cold," therefore sleep-inducing, from another.
But then, "cold" and "still" can easily be seen as homogeneous. "A dish
of lettice and a clear Fountain," wrote Jeremy Taylor in 1651, "can
cool all my Heat." Passion is fiery, and cooling lettuce will dampen
the flame.
In the Greek myth of Adonis, the young hunting hero is born of the
incestuous union of Myrrha with her father. After giving birth to
Adonis, Myrrha was metamorphosed into the tree which gives the heady
perfume, myrrh. The myrrh tree and its scent were thought of as hot,
dry, and incorruptible - the food of gods, not men. Adonis died after
being gored by a wild boar in a lettuce bed, where his lover, the
goddess Aphrodite, had hidden him. (Phaon, in a different story, was a
ferryman
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who was made young and beautiful by Aphrodite, and who made himself
irresistibly seductive by rubbing himself with perfume. He was hidden
by the goddess from the husbands he had cuckolded in a lettuce bed, and
there among the herbs of impotency he died.)
The story of Adonis, according to the Classical scholar Marcel De-
tienne, is about what lies outside marriage: the hero, doomed to his
premature death, is born of hot, dry, incestuous, and godlike myrrh,
and ends his life in cold, wet, sub-human lettuce. (The Greeks called
one lettuce variety adoneis. ) The plants of marriage, completely
different from either lettuce or myrrh, were the cereals which men
raise by the sweat of their brow: cultivated plants, civilized,
balanced and domestic. Adonis was a seducer, sometimes above marriage,
sometimes below it, either godlike or sub-human, and doomed therefore
to impermanence and no issue.
The Adonia in ancient Athens was a festival for courtesans. It took
place during the Dog Days, the hottest time of the year. The courtesans
would dance with their lovers on the flat rooftops of their houses,
where they also grew miniature "gardens of Adonis": pots planted with
lettuce, fennel, wheat, and barley. After shooting up quickly, the
plants would shrivel in the heat and were then thrown into a river or
the sea. Spices, on the other hand, came to maturity under the Dog
Star, and these the courtesans carried down from the rooftops and piled
onto incense-burners in honour of Aphrodite and Adonis. The "gardens of
Adonis," Detienne explains, were like Adonis himself- not serious or
built to last, not real agriculture, and not like marriage, which is
what human beings are meant for.

SALAD

When the festival of Passover was instituted by the Lord God in Egypt,
Moses and Aaron were told exactly how the Jews were to commemorate the
escape from bondage which they were about to experience: a lamb without
blemish must be ritually killed and then eaten "not. . . raw, nor
sodden at all with water, but roast with fire." It must be accompanied
with "unleavened bread, and with bitter herbs." The bitter herbs in
question are commonly agreed to have been chicory, watercress, sorrel,
dandelion leaves, and lettuce. All of these were common plants and
could easily be found in the wild. All of them, especially when
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wild, are bitter. It was only much later (200 AD at the earliest) that
the bitterness was first said to symbolize the embitterment of the Jews
when they lived in Egypt. They had no reason to dislike eating bread
with bitter herbs, as any gourmet who has tried it will testify. The
meaning of the ritual expressed most importantly the speed with which
they had to leave: "with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet,
and your staff in your hand; and ye shall eat it in haste." There was
no time to let the bread rise or the vegetables cook. Only the simplest
and quickest preparations were possible, and therefore ritually
appropriate, for the meal of the Lord's Passover.
Because lettuce is usually eaten raw, it constitutes, in the modern
world as it did in the ancient, a "fast food." This important office it
holds in addition to its status as a fresh, green, crunchy element in
sandwiches and hamburgers, and as the background to every kind of cold
plate. The modern "salad bar," offering variety as well as personal
choice made on the spot, virtue for those who know it is estimable to
"think thin," and cash-and-carry speed, is a perfect expression of
several of our basic cultural values. "Something salted" is the meaning
of the word "salad" (from sal, the Latin for salt). So important is
lettuce both as one of the ingredients in salads and as alone
constituting a salad, that words related to salad have become more
commonly used for lettuce in many languages than are cognates of the
term lettuce itself.
In case salad is being served together with the meat, says Emily Post,
the doyenne of etiquette, each person should be provided with a
separate plate for it, otherwise the gravy might mix with the dressing
into "an unsavory soup," and the lettuce will wilt on the plate heated
for meat. Wilted salad is utterly unacceptable: everyone wants
freshness and either pliancy or crispness where raw leaves are
concerned. (Lettuce can also be stewed and eaten as a soft vegetable,
which converts it into something belonging to a quite different
category.) The dressing we put on lettuce wilts it very quickly, which
is the reason why salad must be tossed just before it is eaten.
The rigidity of lettuce depends on the hydrostatic pressure of the
water in each of its plant cells. When the cells are full they become
turgid and the lettuce is succulent, but when water intake is exceeded
by water loss the cells collapse and the lettuce turns limp. (Iceberg
lettuce, to which this rarely happens, has been especially bred for
tough cell walls.) The osmotic pressure of vinegar or lemon juice and
oil destroys the cell wall's ability to hold in its water, which pours
out to
201

dilute the dressing; heat gradually weakens the membranes by coagu-
lating their protein; freezing punctures them by forming sharp ice
crystals inside the cells (something similar happens to human ears and
fingers when they become frozen). Water can pass by osmosis right
through lettuce cell walls and replenish the liquid inside them, which
is why lettuces soaked in cold water firm up so satisfactorily,
provided the cell walls have not been damaged.
The bitter taste of lettuce is due to an aromatic compound called
lactupicrin, found in the sap. Wild lettuce can be very bitter indeed,
but the cultivated varieties of the plant, Lactuca sativa, have little
bitterness left in them, although their taste becomes more acrid as
they become overgrown. The stalks of bolted (overgrown) lettuce, which
reach sixty centimetres (2 ft.) high and more if they are left long
enough, were once sliced and boiled in a sugar syrup to produce a
popular candy, sweet but faintly bitter, like the angelica which is
still commonly preserved in the same fashion. A favourite method of
making leaf vegetables more succulent and less bitter is that of
blanching them - tying up the leaves as they approach maturity so that
they whiten as they grow. This used to be a common practice in raising
lettuce.
Lettuce is a plant of the daisy or compositae family (its blossoms
contain many small yellow flowers crowded together), and it almost
certainly originated in the Mediterranean area, probably in Asia Minor.
Wild lettuce still grows all over temperate and southern Europe, and is
described by one botanist as "a humble, obscure, roadside weed,
inoffensive but unattractive." Cultivated lettuce quite often escapes
from gardens and takes again to the wild. The three main kinds of wild
lettuce, all of them capable of exchanging genes, are sewiola or
"prickly" lettuce (incorrectly but commonly called scariola, from which
comes the word escarole for curly chicory or Batavian endive), the
lettuce thought to have been one of the "bitter herbs" of the Hebrews;
virosa, "smelly" lettuce, a larger version of serriola (it can grow
over one and a half metres [5 ft.] tall) with a strong smell; and
saligna, which means "like willow." From these evolved, with
considerable help from mankind, the cultivated lettuce, sativa.
Much of the lettuce grown in the ancient world was raised for its seed,
from which a delicious vegetable oil was extracted; indeed it is very
likely that lettuce was cultivated in the first place for its seed,
large quantities of which have been found in ancient egyptian tombs.
Lettuce oil was one of the favourite salad oils in the Classical world,
and it is
202 

still used for this purpose in Egypt and in other parts of Africa. In
1954, American scientists used seeds of the Grand Rapids leaf lettuce
to show how light controls germination and dormancy in certain kinds of
plants: red light promotes and far-red light inhibits the emergence of
a shoot by means of their effects upon phytochrome, a protein plant
pigment which is sensitive to light, at a photosensitive site in the
seed. (In nature, most seeds are not covered by soil and germinate in
the light.)
Lettuce is self-fertilizing by the sexual mode and hence has enormous
gene plasticity. (It is not, like its relative the dandelion, locked
into the evolutionary cul de sac of constantly similar asexual
reproduction from an unfertilized diploid egg cell.) Lettuce is
capable, therefore, of endless variety in size, shape, texture, and
colour. Its versatility has made it the object of devoted attention by
horticulturists through the ages. They have arrived at hundreds of
varieties, which fall into four main classes. Asparagus lettuce or
"celtuce" is grown for its thick succulent stem (the leaves are
unpalatable); it is popular in China but grown in the west mostly as a
novelty. Leaf lettuce is fragile and smooth-textured; it comes in many
varieties including one with oak-leaf-shaped foliage and some tinged
with red. The plant does not run to seed but produces a succession of
leaves for cutting. Radicchio belongs in fact to the chicory family,
but most people count it and use it as a sort of leaf lettuce. It was
apparently found, until recently, only in Italy, as a specialty of
Treviso in the Veneto region, although now it is being exported (with
consequent deterioration in its quality) as a luxury product to many
countries of the world. In its fresh and native state it is small and
beautiful variegated red - one Italian poet calls it "a flower you can
eat" - with a texture like a delicate romaine.
The third class of Lactuca satiDa, head or cabbage lettuce, falls into
two types: butterhead (with soft, thick, and oily leaves) which
includes Boston, Bibb, and many prestigious European types; and
crisphead (hard-headed and crunchy), of which the most famous variety
today is Iceberg, known as Webb's Wonder in Britain. Butterhead
lettuces are what are called "truck crops" - nothing to do with trucks,
but from the French troquer, "to barter or deal in small lots": they
cannot be transported long distances without suffering, so they have
tended so far to be grown close to their customers. Even in North
America, small market-gardeners still deal in these vegetables locally.
Iceberg lettuces can put up with comparatively rough treatment, and
have therefore become a huge economic proposition; giant food
businesses truck these (in the automobile sense) for thousands of miles
to reach their points of sale.
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The fourth class, cos or romaine lettuce, is tall and crisp. The name
romaine is said by many to have originated when the lettuce was intro-
duced into France from Italy by the poet Rabelais in 1537;
alternatively it is said to date from its arrival in Avignon with the
Popes when they took up residence there. (The latter explanation seems
to have the backing of Le menaier de Paris, about 1390.) The name cos,
which is usually taken to refer to the Greek island, may attach to this
lettuce because the Romans found it on Cos, and because the ancient
Greek physician Hippocrates came from there. A more likely explanation
is that cos means "big" "gros in French), and is the same, though
phonetically altered by common usage, as the first syllables in
gooseberry and horseradish.
King Cambyses of Persia (about 550 BC), who had not only married two of
his sisters but had murdered many of his relatives as well, was accused
by a wife of having stripped all the leaves from his house as if it was
a lettuce, and of having left only the stalk. She showed Cambyses the
bare stem of a lettuce and asked him whether he liked it better with or
without the leaves. Cambyses angrily kicked her for producing this
tactless parable, causing her to have a miscarriage from which she
died. Herodotus thus gives us the information that Persians, as we
would expect, knew the lettuce well. Greeks cultivated it assiduously
too, none more so than the philosopher Aristoxenos of Cyrene, who
practised the system of thought called Hedonism. A passionate
food-lover almost as devoted as Pithyllos, described as "The Picky,"
who kept his tongue in a bag between meals to preserve its sensitivity
- Aristoxenos was so effete as to water his lettuces with
salad-dressing the evening before he wanted to eat them, while they
were still in the ground. The following morning he would pick them and
exclaim that they were white pastries sent to him by Mother Earth.
The Greeks and Romans grew one kind of lettuce with flat stalks that
were so tall, broad, and strong that they were used to make trellises
and garden gates. The Romans had a great many named varieties of
lettuce, and never failed to introduce their favourite kinds into the
colonies of their empire. A result of this is that most European
languages call lettuce by a name derived from the Latin lactuca. The
medicinal uses of lettuce were highly regarded. The great physician
Antonius Musa once cured the Emperor Augustus by prescribing lettuce,
in opposition to a previous luckless doctor who had tried "hot"
remedies. Musa was voted a statue in his honour, to stand next to that
of the god of healing,
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Aesculapius, and Augustus ordered that supplies of lettuce be kept
pickled in vinegar and honey so that they might be available as
medicine when out of season.
Exactly when lettuces were induced, by intensive selection of mu-
tations, to form heads or tight balls of leaves folded upon each other,
is as yet a mystery. The Romans did not know head lettuces, and
neither, as far as we can tell, did people living in the age of
Charlemagne (about 800 AD). In all likelihood, it was monastic
gardeners, responsible for supplying a largely vegetarian diet and
possessing a good deal of centralised horticultural expertise, in part
inherited from the Romans, who produced both head cabbage (developed
from kale and collards sometime during the Middle Ages) and head
lettuce. The earliest known mention of Lactuca capitata (with an
illustration) is in the Krauterbuch of Leonard Fuchs in 1543. Head
lettuce is dependent on man for its survival because the plant's
tightly wrapped head restricts the development of inflorescence unless
it is artificially aided.
It was the Dutch and Flemish who began market-gardening on a large
commercial scale. From the early fifteenth century onwards, Amsterdam
was famous for its vegetables as well as its dairy produce; the city
went so far as to exchange its "night soil" (human waste) for garden
produce in order to encourage agriculture, much as the Chinese have
traditionally done for rice. Catherine Parr, Henry VIII'S last wife,
used regularly to send messengers to Holland when she required a salad;
presumably the Dutch had plants to offer which were unobtainable in
England. By the end of the sixteenth century the Dutch and Flemish were
exporting all sorts of garden produce, including "salad herbes," to
other countries in northern Europe. An influx to England of Dutch,
Flemish, and Walloon refugees after Alva's reign of terror (1568-72),
did a great deal to improve the agricultural practices of the English
and to better their diet, which had never been strong on greens.
At the end of the seventeenth century, John Evelyn wrote a book on
salads, called Acetaria (things in vinegared dressing): A Discourse of
Sallets, in which he extols the reign of lettuce over the salad bowl.
"And certainly 'tis not for nothing," he wrote, "that our
Garden-Lovers, and Brothers of the Sallet, have been so exceedingly
Industrious to cultivate this Noble Plant, and multiply its Species;
for . . . by reason of its soporiferous quality, lettuce ever was, and
still continues the principal foundation of the universal tribe of
Sallets, which is to cool and refresh,
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besides its other properties," which include inducements to "morals,
temperance, and chastity."
In the early nineteenth century, Sydney Smith wrote his famous
versified recipe for salad dressing, which ends with a paean of praise
for the result:

Oh, green and glorious! Oh, herbaceous treat! 'Twould tempt the dying
anchorite to eat; Back to the world he'd turn his fleeting soul, And
plunge his fingers in the salad-bowl! Serenely full, the epicure would
say, "Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today."

Lettuce seeds must have been taken to America almost immediately after
Europeans arrived there, perhaps even by Columbus himself, since there
is a record of lettuce being cultivated in the Bahamas in 1494. One
American variety reported at least as early as the nineteenth century
was a red-tinged leaf lettuce "of no commercial importance" which was
called Iceberg. The name was adopted long after, in the 1940S, to
designate the wonderful hybrid forms which from 1926 on were turned out
by research laboratories in and near the Imperial Valley, California.
The most popular type of lettuce with the public in the 1920S was named
New York, so a lot of trouble was taken to ensure that the new variety
looked as much like New York as possible. At first these lettuces, bred
to combat brown blight, downy mildew, cabbage loopers, fleabeetles,
thrips, armyworms, rotting in transit, wilting while waiting, and other
hazards to which lettuce is prone, were all called Imperial (Imperial
F, Imperial I-13, Imperial I7, Imperial I52, and so on). But Imperial
is not a word with desirable connotations in America. The name Iceberg-
cold, clean and hard-was a winner.

LEttUCe AND LABOUR

Because American dollars are green, "a wad of lettuce" is slang for a
roll of dollar bills. (The idea is quite old: the Italians used to call
a gift of money "one of Sixtus v's salads," because the
sixteenth-century pontiff, whose father was a gardener, is said to have
helped an old friend by sending him a head lettuce, which when opened
proved to be full
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of paper money.) Today the lettuce industry of the United States, 70
per cent of which is located in California and 15 per cent in Arizona,
supplies North Americans and Canadians annually with three billion
heads of commercial lettuce, principally Iceberg. (Home-grown and
market-garden crops are not being taken into account.) That amounts to
nearly thirty pounds of lettuce per person per year, or more lettuces
than quarts of milk or loaves of bread. Lettuce can deservedly be
thought of as synonymous with money.
It is said, however, that the great lettuce business conglomerates,
which are called "grower-shippers" because they cover both aspects of
the industry, are companies endowed with "the spirit of gambling."
Their product is uniquely delicate, and economically risky. (Only
strawberries, which are often mass-marketed by the same giant
corporations as undertake lettuce, present comparable problems.)
Cultivated lettuces are annuals, not perennials; they require constant
reseeding, and the yearly clearing of the vast fields in which they are
grown. Water-bills, tonnages of fertilizers, and quantities of
insecticides and herbicides are enormous. Lettuces, even when sown
together, grow at different rates, so that on any given day only a
percentage of the heads (to be determined in the field) are ready for
cutting. A field must be gone over recurrently. A good deal of research
is being done into ways of transplanting the seedlings so as to
increase uniformity of maturation.
A slight change in the weather can considerably speed or slow readiness
for harvesting. The decision when to pick depends not only on the
plants, but on the labour available and on the state of markets all
over North America. Storage, even under refrigeration, can be for only
a very short time, and distances travelled to points of sale are often
in the thousands of miles; one small error in refrigeration levels can
spell disaster. Lettuce from the south-west of the United States is
supplied year-round to every region on the continent, and it must be
shipped and received daily with positively no let-up. Demand for
lettuce is what economists call "inelastic": people habitually buy a
certain amount of it, but cannot normally be persuaded to purchase more
than they usually do. This means that the price of lettuce, if weather
conditions are bad, can skyrocket, sometimes within hours (the price
which people are, if necessary, willing to pay for it being quite
high), or it can plummet if there is too much highly perishable lettuce
about.
Given the demand for year-round availability of cheap lettuce, the
organizational difficulty which this entails, the capital investment in
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machinery required by modern agricultural methods, and the relative
scarcity of the land and climate required constantly to produce
lettuce, the concentration of the industry was almost inevitable. The
same kind of food concentrations have occurred in Florida (citrus),
Texas (onions and meat), and the American Pacific Northwest (potatoes).
In 1976 twelve lettuce grower-shippers controlled 51 per cent of the
California industry, and twenty-nine firms held 77 per cent of it. The
four largest firms owned 40 per cent of California and Arizona lettuce.
The numbers of companies are growing smaller not larger, a factor which
presumably mitigates somewhat the anxieties of gambling.
The human labour for the lettuce industry is drawn from the "surplus"
(unemployed) of the big cities, from the local rural towns, and from
migrants to the Pacific coast, mainly from Mexico. Male Mexican and
Philippino braceros (from the Spanish brazos, "arms") have worked the
giant California lettuce fields since the 1920S; a continuing supply of
labourers was assured by an agreement made between the American and
Mexican governments in 1951. The rich soil required for the cultivation
of lettuce harbours weeds in spite of herbicides; these have to be
removed at least once during the crop's growing period, and empty or
double lettuces have to be rooted out. Lettuce-field workers have to be
constantly on the move, travelling with the harvest, holding themselves
ready to go wherever hands are needed. At harvest time, the braceros
walk along the miles of lettuce rows, judging which heads are plump
enough, and cutting them. The heads used to be loaded into bins which
would be hauled to the packing sheds to be iced for rail transport. The
lettuces were packed in wooden crates with ice in between the layers of
heads. The boxes were then moved on roller conveyors to railway cars,
into which they were stacked by hand.
Soon the packing, as opposed to the gathering, of lettuce became the
preserve almost entirely of North American "Anglo" labour; after
considerable labour unrest in the late twenties and thirties, workers
in the sheds were unionized, and by the end of the 1940S they were paid
well. The Mexicans, both braceros (who were Mexican citizens) and
native Mexican-Americans, stayed in the fields and were shamefully
exploited. Their living conditions were appalling, they were poorly
fed. Many of the braceros were sindocumentos, without papers and in the
United States illegally, and they lived in terror of being caught and
losing their jobs; there was no question of their complaining about
cruel treatment.
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In 1950 a revolution in lettuce technology occurred - and, as is usual
with technological innovations, it benefited the grower-shippers rather
than their employees, enabling them to overcome the inconvenience of
having to pay their newly unionized packers well. Vacuum cooling had
first evolved in Switzerland in the 1750S. An Italian physicist, G. B.
Venturi, demonstrated how it worked in 1796 and the device was called
the Venturi Tube thereafter. In 1948, Rex L. Brunsing of San Francisco
had the brilliant idea of applying the Venturi Tube (which was being
used mainly in carburetors) to the cooling of lettuce.
A steel tube fifteen metres (50 ft.) and two and a half metres (8 ft.)
in diameter has pneumatically-operated doors at each end. It is filled
with boxed lettuces and the doors closed, after which the air pressure
inside is rapidly reduced. Free water is vaporized from the vegetables
and carries the heat away with it; in a few minutes the temperature of
the lettuces is reduced to the optimum -1øC. (30øF.). They are trans-
ported to pre-cooled trucks. No ice is needed, nor are heavy wooden
crates. Vacuum cooling is much faster than refrigeration with ice. The
portable steel tubes can be taken wherever convenient, which means that
the ice sheds and the jobs that went with them were rendered obsolete.
Packing could now be done right in the field by low-paid Mexicans, who
were quickly taught how to trim the heads correctly, place them with
the top layer's butts up and the bottom layer's butts down, and fill
the boxes with the proper "squeeze," neither too tightly nor too
loosely. New smaller fibreboard cartons, eventually palletized for
mechanical lifters, took the place of the old crates on roller
conveyors. The work ceased to be paid on an hourly basis: the more
lettuce you picked and packed the more you made. Piece-rates are
notoriously the remuneration of the underpaid.
Soon after the arrival of vacuum cooling, a plastic film was perfected
which enabled the companies to have their lettuces wrapped before
packing and delivery to the supermarkets. This meant that higher-paid
workers in urban areas no longer had to be employed to trim and wrap
lettuce before display on the produce shelves, since the California and
Arizona Mexicans did it so much more cheaply. The costs of carting
waste lettuce leaves as city garbage were also cut. Today more than 20
per cent of Iceberg lettuces are sold "source-wrapped." To the
advantage of extra protection in transit is added what customers
perceive to be the sheer prestige of buying something ready wrapped.
(Unwrapped lettuce is referred to in the trade as "naked".) A further
benefit is the
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possibility, which all vegetable and meat producers covet, of providing
a natural object, like a lettuce or a chicken, with a brand name: sub-
sequent careful advertising can convince customers that one "name"
means better lettuce than another. The lettuce wrappers are mostly
women, partly because the job requires a good deal less travelling than
lettuce harvesting does, and partly because a lot of the work is
seasonal.
Public criticism of the way the braceros were being exploited in Cali-
fornia began to mount in the 1950S. In addition, local Mexican-American
farm workers increasingly began to see in the poorly-paid foreigners a
threat to their own job security. By 1960, the grower-shippers realized
that they had two possible ways of keeping control over the labour
supply: either the use of the bracero system must become further le-
galized, or they must mechanize the lettuce harvest and sharply reduce
dependence on human beings. Money for mechanization research was
provided by the California State Legislature, and the programme got as
far as producing a mechanical lettuce gauger, a machine which could do
away with the hitherto human task of judging the size and firmness of
lettuce heads. A first project for a lettuce harvester was also
developed.
These inventions were not put into use, however, because in 1964 an
agreement was reached between the American and Mexican governments by
which migrant workers could become "green-carders," with the right to
reside legally, for the purposes of work, in the United States while
remaining Mexican citizens, and even maintaining homes in Mexico where
their families lived. The mechanization programme wound down as the
cheap labour supply was further institutionalized.
But the farm workers of California were becoming restive: they found it
harder and harder to obtain work, since, in spite of laws enjoining
that American citizens should get preference in job vacancies, growers
much preferred hiring the cheaper and more submissive, often still
paperless, illegal, and therefore frightened braseros. The movement
against the persistent exploitation of the braceros and the hard
conditions of fruit and vegetable field workers generally began.
Thousands of poor Chicanos, under the leadership of Cesar Chavez, "took
on" the giant companies and formed their own union of workers from all
the California farmlands, including the lettuce handlers: There
followed the strikes, long marches, and non-violent resistance which
captured the imagination of the world in the late sixties and early
seventies. Middledass students and intellectuals joined Chavez in the
fight.
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The great grape boycott against the intransigent grower-shippers began
and spread all over the United States and into Canada. People gave up
eating grapes, unless cartons could be produced which bore the black
eagle designating their contents as having been picked by the
California farm workers' union. Eventually the grower-shippers saw
their largest markets for grapes completely shut down: Boston, New
York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, Toronto. The companies
continued to refuse to accept the union, out of fear of having to raise
wages. It had been the practice that workers were sent in to harvest
only three days after vegetable crops had been sprayed with pesticides;
rashes and stomach-aches were frequently reported among pickers. The
union sought to increase the waiting period after pesticide
application. They also wanted a health insurance plan and a fund
created into which the companies would put two cents per man-hour, in
order to cover workers' immediate expenses in case their jobs were made
redundant through mechanization.
In 1970, just as the grape-growers capitulated in the face of the grape
boycott (the struggle had taken five tumultuous and expensive years),
the lettuce workers began to strike for a similar settlement. The
response of the growers was to call in the Teamsters, an entirely
different kind of union, and try to have them force the farm workers to
join the huge and powerful transport workers' association instead of
Chavez's United Farm Workers. There were fights, shootings, beatings,
and threats. Chavez struggled to maintain unity and the non-violent
principles of his followers.
Consumers throughout the United States and Canada, who were just
beginning to enjoy grapes again, were asked now to abstain from
lettuce. This boycott was much more difficult to put into practice,
since table grapes are eaten as a luxury, whereas lettuce is an
everyday salad staple and irreplaceable as such. Yet many people
boycotted lettuce. An injunction was brought by the California courts
against the organizers of the lettuce boycott. Chavez defied it and was
jailed for contempt. Publicity surrounding this event enormously
increased the effectiveness of the movement; even exports of Iceberg
lettuce to Europe began to suffer. Finally the injunction was declared
unconstitutional and the Supreme Court of California supported Chavez's
union activities in the Salinas Valley lettuce dispute.
In May 1975, a California Bill of Rights for farm workers was passed.
It remains to this day the most advantageous legislation which farm
211

workers have achieved in the United States. Many of the objectives for
which the union had fought for ten years seemed assured. In March 1977,
the Teamsters signed a five-year agreement with the United Farm Workers
to help rather than fight them.
A major source of contention between the union and the growers was the
use in the field of the cortito, or short-handled hoe, used in thinning
lettuces and in weeding. Growers argued that the short hoe was
necessary to make workers bend closer to the lettuce; only then would
they inspect it carefully enough. The other point of view was that
bending over all day was inhumanly exhausting and painful: a long-
handled hoe would save enormous amounts of labour. The union won the
dispute, and the short-handled hoe was eliminated in 1975.
There was further unrest in the lettuce fields of California in 1979,
when non-union labour was hired. The union struck and $5 million worth
of Iceberg lettuce rotted away; prices rose to a dollar a head in
California supermarkets. After two months the grower-shippers signed
contracts. In spite of these attempts at accommodation the growers
remain to this day almost solidly opposed to the farm workers' union.
The other option- mechanization- still remained open to them. For
several years, research had been going ahead which would allow the
grower-shippers to bypass the union. After all, machines do not mind
pesticides, and machines, as the growers say, "reduce uncertainty" and
"increase productivity." Above all, machines don't strike.
By 1975, almost as soon as the workers had negotiated rights to the
long-handled hoe, the growers had their first two mechanical harvesters
ready. One of these machines emits gamma-rays and the other X-rays
through the lettuce; any head which is sufficiently dense triggers a
signal to the knife, which cuts it off at the base. Rubber fingers
close on the head, lift it and drop it onto a conveyor which carries it
to be mechanically packed and vacuum cooled. Four rows of lettuce can
be harvested at a time, and at least seven hundred cartons packed in an
hour. Drawbacks to the machines are that they are extremely expensive
and their great weight causes them to compact the soil. If they come
into general use, they will increase concentration of ownership since
only ever-larger corporations would be able to find the capital
necessary to buy and maintain them. Full mechanization is still only a
threat but already it has meant that hundreds of thousands of farm
workers throughout California, thousands of them lettuce handlers, have
lost their jobs during the past decade.
212 

Mechanization and the effect it has on employment is, of course, one of
the great problems of our age. The big machines make the rich richer
and rob the poor of their livelihood. Owners of factory farms argue
that hand-picking a harvest is at best a gruelling task; doing away
with it ought to be considered progress. To which one response is that
picking carrots from a garden patch for oneself and one's own small
vegetable stall is not hard: what is unbearable is sweating in a vast
plantation doing the same thing all day long in order to make money for
someone else. The task is dehumanized, in other words, long before the
workers are displaced; farming has been artificially readied for the
machine.
Perhaps the most important realization of all, although it is an un-
comfortable one, is that the social ills attendant upon mechanized
farming are the fault of the whole of society, and not only of the
growers. The growers, after all, are trying to provide us with the two
things we now demand: food which costs an unprecedentedly small
proportion of our income, and the availability of the full range of all
the varieties of food at all seasons of the year. For these reasons
each kind of vegetable is raised in vast quantities where it will grow
most efficiently; it is then shipped at the cost of enormous energy (to
say nothing of detriment to the taste and nutrition of the food) to
wherever the cities sit, voracious yet helplessly dependent upon the
suppliers and their huge tonnages of food. The transport costs of a
Californian lettuce bought in the eastern United States or Canada
amount to 22 per cent of the whole. The entire growing process,
including pesticides, herbicides, ploughing, and weeding, costs only 10
per cent; the rest is for harvesting, packing, cooling, loading,
inspecting, storing, and retail profits.
There is no sign of this intense specialization and mechanization
letting up. A new way of selling lettuce provides an example of recent
trends: Iceberg lettuce is now being marketed ready shredded. It is
cooled, then cored, chopped into "bite-sized" pieces, and packed into
ten-pound (4.5 Kg) polyethylene bags, often together with cut carrots
and cabbage. The air is then sucked out of the bags and replaced with
gases ("modified atmosphere") which inhibit discolouration of the cut
edges. Absolutely none of this is done by hand: shredded lettuce is a
mechanizer's dream. The product is sold to fast-food chains, hospitals
and prisons - and flown as far away as Hong Kong for use in fast-food
franchises there.
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In one limited but significant area new opportunities of work have
opened up for farm workers in recent years. It should serve to remind
us of the extent to which we, the public, control all the
industrializing trends in the food business. For complex and
far-reaching reasons (many of them not all that edifying), North
Americans and Europeans have decided to become food-conscious. We have
discovered Cuisine, at one and the same moment as we have found our
Bodies. The trend-setting middle classes are already totally converted
to wine with meals and cooking with olive oil (in countries where these
have not traditionally been the custom), and to elegant food
presentations, home breadmaking, and exotic recipes of every
conceivable kind and complexity. The new all-round Conspicuous
Competence which is incumbent upon the middle classes also demands
cooking skills of a high order for those who wish to rise and to shine.
Salads have become increasingly "creative," with the addition of"spe-
cial" ingredients like arugula, radicchio, mache, and herb mixtures al-
most unknown internationally less than five years ago. Iceberg became a
dirty word overnight to large numbers of new gourmets. The crispy
technological wonder was suddenly tasteless, nutritionless, and also
much too easy to get (difficulty of access being one of the hallmarks
of status). Nothing would henceforth do but Boston, Leaf, Bibb, and
delicate European varieties- all the soft lettuces, which have in the
past been considered incapable of travel and easily ruined in the
handling.
But we reckoned without the ingenious agri-businessmen, not only in
California but also in nineteen others of the United States, who do not
even attempt to be lovable: they merely study our desires and set out
to meet them. Middle-class neighbourhoods in the big cities now receive
abundant quantities and varieties of the most delicate and refined
lettuces, marketed by the giant food companies. They are picked by hand
(no machine could manage these) and carefully packed in good strong
boxes, by the million. They often travel as far as Iceberg lettuces
have ever done: Boston lettuce from California is now quite commonplace
in the eastern United States and Canada.
"Gourmet" lettuce remains, nevertheless, a small proportion of overall
output and consumption. There is no question that the culinary im-
provement, in its absolute sense of increased availability of lettuces
with excellent flavour and textures, has been enormous; and the demand
has been so competently met that status has already moved elsewhere.
214 

Meanwhile, our own self-centred fastidiousness may be achieving at
least some stay of execution for the farm workers whose previous suf-
fering and fear were equally the result of our unheeding greed.
But, at the same time, another development has occurred in lettuce
technology. The grower-shippers are beginning- particularly in the spe-
cialized new "gourmet" lettuce industry- to experiment with getting rid
of soil, let alone workers, altogether. Lettuces are increasingly being
grown in plastic foam cubes under bright lights. Nutrients are
dissolved in water which is provided, in computer-calculated amounts,
to every plant. Far less water is needed than for the irrigation of
soil. It is possible to grow lettuces on almost vertical slabs of
plastic foam, making them easy for a person to pick while standing up,
or for a machine to take over the job. The practice saves plenty of
space.
Air blows constantly through these lettuce-factories, cool in summer
and warm in winter. It is therefore no longer necessary to confine
lettuce growing to the silt-valleys of California with their mounting
salt-pollution problems. The new factories can even be set up close to
huge lettuce-consuming northern cities. The difficult standards of
gourmet cuisine would appear to have been met head-on: production close
to the point of sale in order to ensure freshness; the provision of
delicate varieties which are impossible to harvest by machine; the
ability to provide small crops of any type, to order, and almost
immediately.
But the businessmen's triumph is to be short-lived, if the reactions of
French gourmets to hydroponic lettuce are anything to go by. A recent
French article on lettuce complains that all this technology results in
a small, feeble, tasteless product; you can tell these sad creatures by
their insistently green colouring, brought about by gases blown over
them to activate chlorophyll production. They are so fragile that
sellers are forced to wrap them individually (so much for the prestige,
in France at least, of individually wrapped produce). The genuine
gourmet, this article sternly concludes, will accept only lettuces
grown in rich dark soil and in the open air; they must be eaten
immediately after picking- if possible while they are still warm from
the sun. And, apart from the romaines and some of the tougher leaf
varieties, the very best lettuce is hardly worth bothering about at
all, at any season other than springtime.
215

FRESH AND GREEN

Lettuce is an appetizer; lettuce clears the palate. At what point,
then, should it appear on the menu- at the beginning or at the end? The
ancient Romans puzzled a good deal over the issue. The great Greek
gastronome, Archestratos, had recommended that lettuce be eaten "after
the dinner, the toasts, and the smearing of perfumes" - in other words,
after the meal and before the serious drinking or symposium began.
Lettuce-cool, female, inert-would create a solid basis in the body
before the "hot" vapours of alcohol began to take effect. (The same
principle underlies the common belief that taking a glass of milk
before setting out for a party will stave off drunkenness and a
hangover: milk is calming, nourishing, female, and innocent in
character, and always the opposite of hot, strong, masculine substances
like blood, wine, or spirits.) The Romans began by following in general
the Greek example, but in the time of Diocletian (first century AD)
they decided to eat lettuce before the dinner, since a good deal of
drinking took place during it, and since it was commonly agreed that
lettuce makes you feel hungry.
The North American custom has traditionally been to eat salad greens
before the meal, and the Roman decision is often invoked as a
precedent. Emily Post thought the practice began with restaurants,
which "wished to keep the customer happy while his entree was being
prepared, and people simply became accustomed to it." The waiting
customer would whet his appetite while satisfying his impatience to
begin eating. Lettuce is also served in America as a side dish, as a
kind of vegetable to accompany the meal, but kept separate because of
the heating of the main-course plates, and because of the dressing. Raw
lettuce serves as a counterpoint to a hot cooked dish. The dressing
would often be dispensed with entirely, since gravy can provide
lubrication enough. As we shall see, an oily film over lettuce leaves
has not been thought invariably appealing in northern European
cultures.
In the 1930s, a crisis was provoked in the American lettuce industry
because the promotion of canned and prepared foods bit largely into the
domain of lettuce, the swiftly and simply prepared vegetable. Lettuce
was in great danger, warned the industry, of becoming "merely a gar-
nish" on the dinner tables of America. A campaign was launched, with
contributions from all the grower-shippers, to avert this threat. Ad-
vertising emphasized the monumentality of lettuce bowls and the de-
lights of tossing the leaves. The campaign may have done much to
216 

spread the use of salad dressings and the central lettuce bowl (as
distinct from individual side-dishes of salad) in North America.
The French, on the other hand, serve fairly substantial though often
cold hors-d'oeuvres first, and lettuce after the main course, to clear
the palate before dessert. Lettuce tossed in dressing is a kind of
interval, a pause to enable us to change the direction of our
expectations. The rising of one's hostess solemnly to perform the
tossing further heightens the caesura effect. Lettuce salad is half-way
between the seriousness of the entree and the frivolity of dessert. Its
simplicity reminds us of the delights of the natural, particularly when
a meal has involved considerable artistic skill, while its coolness
begins to prepare us for the end of the drama of dinner: we collect
ourselves in anticipation of the final confectionary flourish. A meal
at which fruit is served for dessert is a much more everyday, informal
affair, which repeats and re-emphasizes the "natural" theme enunciated
by lettuce.
It was the custom in the past that the youngest daughter of the
household had to turn the lettuce in the dressing with her fingers,
maintaining the "fresh, green, female" mythology of lettuce. Dressing a
lettuce made the anaphrodisiac plant "salad" (literally, "salted"); the
sexual connotations of salt could add an extra erotic dimension to the
girl's performance before the mixed company at the dinner table. The
French used to say of a still young and beautiful woman, elle retourne
la salade avec les do,igts ("she turns the salad in her fingers").
LeKuce comes directly from the garden, simplicity and innocence itself,
and its role is to "set off" the intricate or solid structures achieved
through culinary skill. Lettuce, then, must be pure, that is unspoKed,
unbrowned, unwilted, natural, and uncontaminated by artifice. Its green
colouring is one of our symbols of innocence, springtime, and paradisal
gardens. Both tenderness and crispness, two typical qualities of
lettuce leaves, mean to us life, spriteliness, health, and youth.
For modern food industrialists, the myth of lettuce is a headacheone
among many arising from food mythologies in general. They work
incessantly to provide us with what we say we want - only to come up
against walls of incomprehensible prejudice and ingratitude. What do we
expect? Food must be transported to the millions living in vast
concrete cities, it must cost as little as possible, and it must be
prevented from going bad while it waits for a sale. Why are people
annoyed by the idea of pesticides, chemical additives, colouring
agents, shape-holding powders, mouth-feel enhancers, artificial
flavours, and shelf-pro
217

longers generally? Insects, bacteria, roKing, sprouting, wilting, off-
flavours, and oxidation are some of the main enemies encouraged by
mass-production, lengthy transportation, and age. Food suppliers expend
billions of dollars and all the intelligence and know-how which the
scientific community can muster to fight back against these. In 1985,
the food industry in the United States was said to have outspent all
other commercial enterprises- and expenditures were growing faster than
those of any other trade.
And now we have something new. Imagine being able to keep cooked meat,
without refrigeration and without spoilage, for seven years. You could
send it anywhere, and store it until someone was willing to buy it.
This wonderful capability is already ours, if only the public could be
made to see reason. The process is called irradiation. Scientists have
been experimenting with it for thirty-five years, and food processors
are absolutely convinced that this will give them opportunities
hitherto undreamed of.
There are two ways food can be irradiated. The first uses gammarays or
X-rays produced by a radioactive source such as Cobalt 60 or Cesium
137. The source would be housed in a cell with thick concrete walls,
and/or kept at the bottom of a pool of demineralized water to protect
workers from exposure to the rays. Conveyor belts would carry the food
through the irradiation cell; the strength of the radiation dose would
depend on the speed of the food's movement through the cell, and the
distance between the food and the source. In the rival system, linear
accelerators shoot electrons from commercially-produced radioactive
substances. Until recently the electrons could be made to penetrate
only the surface of products, but a new compact accelerator, which uses
the electron beam to produce X-rays, is said to be faster and more
powerful than the cell method. Also, its supporters point out, the ac-
celerator can be turned off when not in use, and does not itself create
radioactive waste, as the irradiation cell does. We are not told how
the commercial producers of the radioactive substances required will
get rid of their waste.
There are disadvantages to contend with when high doses of irradiation
are used: colours change, smells arise, and flavours deteriorate,
especially in bland foods with a high moisture content like milk
products and vegetables. New chemical substances called "radiolytic
products" are known to appear in irradiated food, and to increase
proportionately the dose of radiation delivered. Processors stress,
however, that ir
218 

radiation could do away with many chemical additives, and effectively
kill trichina in pork. And the "positive" side of the degradation that
occurs in protein and carbohydrates is that meat is thereby tenderized.
Irradiation kills bacteria and insects, prevents mould and off-flavours
in aging food (when precisely the right amounts have been applied),
delays ripening so that fruits and vegetables can conceivably be kept
for months before eating, and prevents potatoes and onions from
sprouting. Scientists have given the measurements of irradiation par-
ticularly unfortunate names: one hundred ergs per gram make one rad;
one thousand rads make one krad (kilorad); one million (Io6) rads make
one Mrad (megarad). Sprouting in potatoes is prevented by the appli-
cation of five to fifteen krads. Russia has been irradiating its
potatoes ever since 1958; Canada began in 1960. Even in these
countries, however, irradiation is not common practice, for potatoes
and onions do last quite a long time before they sprout. Up to one
hundred krads would be required for bacteria destruction and long
shelf-life assurance in lettuce and other vegetables. Meat and poultry,
in order for the method to be "commercially viable," would have to be
irradiated with between two and four Mrads. Irradiation equipment is
enormously expensive; it would not be economically viable unless huge
tonnages of vegetables were constantly fed into it. In other words,
irradiation would greatly concentrate the already oligarchic food
industry.
In 1981, the World Health Organization produced a report entitled
"Wholesomeness of Irradiated Food." The food industry was elated the
moment, they thought, had come to irradiate. South Africa, the
Netherlands, Belgium and Israel have actually gone ahead and routinely
irradiate vegetables, fruit, prawns, frogs' legs, and spice. The South
Africans label irradiated products with a logo advertised as "the
symbol of quality and safety." In 1983, permission was given in the
United States to irradiate spices: and already plans are afoot to
triple the dose permitted in spice, making it three Mrads (three
million rads) strong.
Nevertheless, in spite of what the food industry sees as a break-
through, it sorrowfully reported in 1985 that "there is not a single
canister of irradiated spice on the retail shelf in the United States."
France had cleared some foods for irradiation, but no one there was
using the method commercially. The United Kingdom continued to allow
only low rad levels, except in hospitals for the special sterile diets
prescribed for some patients.
219

The problem seems to be, according to the food processors, that
irradiated food would have to be labelled as such. Market research has
discovered that the American and most of the European public, unlike
the Dutch or the South Africans, do not want to find out that their
food has been irradiated, and modern food laws require that the public
be told just that, wherever that is the case. No food distributors feel
they dare try it. The difficulty created for them by these laws, and
the intransigence of people's prejudice against irradiated food,
dumbfounds the industry. They have argued (so far in vain) that
irradiation is a treatment, not an ingredient or an additive, so they
should not have to explain on a label what they have done to the food.
So far irradiation label designs have been heavy on such symbolism as
innocent green leaves and golden circles. The stickers are small enough
to preclude statements like "this food has been irradiated." There are
aKempts being made to exchange the unfortunate term "irradiation" for
"ionization," which most people understand less than they do
irradiation, and would therefore (it is reasoned) worry about less.
The processors feel that irradiation is just around the corner, even
though a Coalition to Stop Food Irradiation has been formed in the
United States, and objectors are digging in their heels in other
countries also. People appear to have learned not to embrace absolutely
everything that is new. They are suspicious, and they doubt whether
concrete walls and ponds of water, or safety gadgets in powerful
accelerators, will always prevent gamma-rays and electron beams from
attacking people as they attack bacteria. What are "radiolytic
products" anyway, and why should we believe that the human frame was
built to thrive on them? And what would happen to all the radioactive
waste generated by routine food irradiation procedures?
Furthermore, the food processors have not succeeded entirely in
appropriating for themselves the short but potent word "fresh." Fresh-
ness is one thing modern food supply systems deny us. Fresh corn is
corn picked only when the water is already boiling in the pot, ready
for the cobs as soon as they are snapped from the stalk. Freshness is a
garden lettuce brought inside with soil clinging to its roots, dew on
its leaves, and the risk of the odd caterpillar or bug. Fresh in
supermarket parlance means "not rotten," or "this food was fresh when
something was done to it to prevent it from deteriorating." But real
freshness, for most people - and gourmets and food nutritionists concur
in this - has
220 

a value in itself. Fresh food tastes better, and is almost always
nutritionally better too. Of course we cannot expect supermarkets to
give us anything really fresh; but it annoys us when they pretend they
can.
Another dirty word for the American public, one advertising analyst
warned recently, is "natural." People no longer trust anything with a
label on it which says it is "natural," she tells us; we wonder,
apparently, why we should have to be told such a fact. Advertisers
should use "fresh" or "wholesome" instead. More than either low prices
or nutrition, 95.9 per cent of the people who were surveyed for this
particular report wanted freshness. People wanted dates on packages, so
that they could know how long their food had waited on a shelf. Perhaps
they will one day rejoice to find, along with the irradiation label, a
date showing that their cold cuts are seven years old. The prospect
does not look likely at present, but we can depend upon it that food
processors will continue their efforts to make this dream a reality.
People demand that food should be the colour they like it to be. The
anomalies that arise out of our insistence on the "correct" appearance
of food are numberless. Excellent oranges which remain green when ripe
cannot be sold unless they are first dyed or gassed an orange colour
(it being always easier to dye a thing than to teach a person). People
often refuse to eat dark chicken meat; bleach a leg, debone it, and
they buy it as cheerfully as they do their favourite breast-meat.
Lettuces must be a pure fresh green. Yet, more and more often, lettuce
leaves are presented at salad bars already torn off the stalk and cut
into pieces, and cut lettuce quickly turns brown.
The food processors looked about and found that if you spray sulphite
(salt of sulphurous acid) onto lettuce, the browning effect disappears;
a salad can wait all day and still look as if it has only just been
prepared. This was a boon to every snack bar and restaurant.
Supermarkets began to sell "serve-yourself " lettuce leaves by the
pound, ready cut up for salads. Six sulphiting agents were declared
GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) for spraying on salads, fruits,
vegetables, and shellfish, and for dissolving in beer and wine. Soon
faintness, shortness of breath and other allergic reactions to the new
preservative were being reported in asthmatic people; more than a dozen
people died as a result of sulphites. Even non-asthmatics developed
rashes and stomach-aches. Demands were made that sulphite-treated
products should be labelled and that if supermarkets or restaurants use
the chemical, the fact should be
221

posted. Sucrose fatty acid esters were also approved recently by the
American government for sprinkling on fruit and vegetables. The coat-
ing, which contains only sugar and beef fat, slows ripening and
wilting. But the very idea of it has enfuriated vegetarians, who have
demanded posting for this product too.
It is true that laws enjoining food merchants to proclaim the presence
of food additives are almost impossible to enforce. As one businessman
put it, 'When was the last time you saw a label for a waxed cucumber?"
Having accepted the principle that food must inevitably be "fixed" in
order to survive long enough to feed us, decisions about how far we
should go in allowing food to be processed, and what we should dis-
allow, become constantly necessary and endlessly complicated. The orig-
inal decision, of course, was to divorce ourselves as completely as we
have done from the source of our food, and thereby to make ourselves
utterly dependent on agri-business, transport capabilities, and on the
technological manipulation which serves both.
Once upon a time there was a greedy nun who came across a large and
succulent lettuce in the monastery garden. She could not be bothered to
say grace or to pause and bless the plant before seizing and eating it,
with the result that she swallowed a small devil who happened to be
sitting on one of the lettuce's leaves at the time. When she was
finally cured of the fit which followed, the little devil came out of
her mouth and addressed the exorcist in an aggrieved tone: "Why blame
me? What have I done? I was sitting on this leaf, and she came along
and swallowed me up." The story appears in the Dialogues of Gregory the
Great (594 AD). For the parable-minded, it contains a lesson about
greed, haste, and ingratitude, about cleanliness, and also about the
possibility that all might not be well, even if our lettuces look fresh
and green.
The story is also a clue to the fact that lettuces were well known at
that date. Historians often claim that people ate almost no vegetables
during the Middle Ages. This seems very unlikely, since vegetables grow
easily and cheaply, and many people must have had access to a garden
patch. Lettuces counted as "herbs"; and were probably also included
among the food-plants which the English called "worts"-more correctly
"cabbages," but the word may often have meant something like our
"greens." Their status was not high, and they were, therefore, seldom
thought worth mentioning- unlike meat and pastries, with their
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high price, complicated preparation, and conspicuous rank among the
dishes presented at a meal. A person ashamed of his poverty and low
status was made to feel "as potherbs among made dishes."
The English, it is true, have had an abiding contempt for green
vegetables:

Owre Englische native cannot lyve by Roots,
By water, herbys or suche beggerye baggage . . .
Give Englische men meate after their old usage,
Beiff, Mutton, Veale, to cheare their courage,

wrote William Forrest, in The Pleasaunt Poesye of Princelie Practise in
1548. The claim, of course, is made on behalf of "princes," but another
sixteenth-century document shows English maidservants despising French
servants for eating so many vegetables and so little meat. In the sev-
enteenth century, as we have seen, there was an upsurge of interest in
green vegetables and salads. But right into the twentieth century smart
English boarding schools for boys seldom provided their pupils with
milk, fruit, or salads, largely because these were considered
unnecessary luxuries, feeble and female foods which were unlikely to
help in turning out real men.
Salads in our culture have always been considered women's food. This
taste preference is, of course, invisibly bolstered by the ancient
categorization of lettuce as "female." French lettuces seem most open
to be given girls' names, such as Aurelie, Laura, Estelle, or Blonde de
Paris. Light, green, and frilly lettuce goes with white wine, fish,
chicken, souffles, airy desserts, and refined dishes like strawberries
and cream; red meat, potatoes, pies, red wine, and heavy puddings have
been thought typically "male." Machines in modern life have robbed men
of a good deal of the ancient necessity to prove themselves rough,
tough, overbearing, and entitled to a rich and solid sustenance. As
being lean becomes more difficult and more desirable, salads (and by
"salads" we chiefly mean lettuce) become increasingly prestigious.
Both men and women, alike in this now as in so much else, agree that
low-calorie, vitamin- and mineral-rich, cholesterol-free salad is what
we ought to want. A recent survey has established that the top five
"taste trends" in the United States are (in this order): salads,
seafood, chicken, fresh vegetables, and fruit. The salad eaters, the
report continues, were 45.1 per cent of them wine drinkers; they ate in
restaurants often, were either single or came from households where the
woman

223

had a job, were heavy spenders, saw themselves as adventuresome, and
undertook lots of jogging and weight-lifting. In other words, lettuce,
once the standby of the rustic poor, has become an emblem of urban
middle-class prestige and affluence.
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CHAPTER SEVEN

Olive Oil: A Tree and its Fruits

FOR ThOUSANDS OF YEARS the olive tree, its fruit, and its oil have
been central to the ritual and the poetic vocabulary, as well as to the
eating habits of the Mediterranean region, which is the heart of the
civilization of the west. The same oil that is gracing our lettuce
salad has been used to bestow irrevocable kingship, to consecrate
priests, churches, temples, and holy objects, to light sanctuary lamps,
and to signify sacramental grace and strength - even in countries very
far away from olive groves and presses. The olive tree is not a
spectacular plant, but it is one of the most deeply loved of trees.
Contemplating one for the first time, it is not at all obvious why it
should have exerted such power over the human imagination.
Furthermore, the olive itself in its pristine state, picked straight
from the tree and eaten, tastes horrible. It contains an extremely
bitter substance called oleuropein, (after the plant's botanical Latin
name, Olea europaea)n, which must be separated by patient and
sophisticated pro
225

cedures from the rest of the fruit. When the oil in the flesh of the
olive is pressed out, the oleuropein is siphoned off with the vegetable
water, which is difficult to dispose of and may become a dangerous
pollutant. The ancient Romans used to call this residue amurca: they
used it as a weed-killer and insecticide, and for eradicating woodworm.
In order to be rendered fit for eating, olives have to be soaked in lye
and carefully washed; they are then cured in brine. The timing of the
various stages of the process is important, and the addition of herbs
and flavourings is an ancient art. Dry-curing, oil-curing, and
salt-curing are possible without the aid of lye, but these methods can
take months to complete. Even before the fruit comes to be treated or
the precious oil pressed out of it, the moment for harvesting has had
to be judged with accuracy; the olives have to be picked and
transported, in spite of their delicacy, with as little damage done to
them as possible. The trees themselves, until they are old enough to
survive on their own, have to be grafted, pruned, encouraged, and
protected.
In other words, man and the olive are cohabitors, living in alliance
with each other. It is related in the Book of Judges of the Old
Testament that the trees once decided they needed a king. Being eastern
Mediterranean trees, they immediately thought of the olive as the
obvious candidate for sovereignty. But the olive drew himself up and
said, "Should I leave my fatness, wherewith by me they honour God and
man and go to be promoted over the trees?" The olive tree knew that he
had been accepted into civilized society and given high status within
it; he had left the wild behind him. (The unfortunate trees eventually
had to lower their sights and ask a bramble bush to be king.)
The extreme utility which the olive has traditionally offered in the
societies which have cultivated it is offset by the labour needed to
take advantage of the fruit and its oil. The tree has continually
caused men to wonder at their own ingenuity as they transformed a small
and nasty berry into a rich gastronomic triumph and squeezed out of its
bitter flesh the most delicious oil on earth. The olive tree became
synonymous for its cultivators with civilization itself and expressive
of the highest human ideals. It shares with bread a whole mythology
which speaks of wisdom, patience, mysterious goodness, and
technological expertise. Like rice and wheat, the olive must suffer in
order to render up its riches; the fruit must be crushed or man will
not profit from it. "Oil can be drawn only with the press," says a
Sicilian proverb: nothing is achieved without sweat. The olive is a
tree dwelling outside paradise:
226 

its fruit belongs to a different category altogether from that of
Adam's facile apple.

THE CUI,TI~;'ATED TREE

The olive is the Mediterranean tree par excellence. As one approaches
the Mediterranean sea, coming over the top of a hill or round a bend in
the road, one suddenly knows that one has arrived, even before the sea
itself comes into view. All at once, this is it: the white light, the
rocks, the special strident blue of the sky. The first olive trees
provide final proof that we have entered a region unlike any other.
Olive trees hug the Mediterranean coast so resolutely that it was
believed in the ancient world that the trees depended in some way on
sea-water, and that they could not survive more than seventy-five kilo-
metres (40 miles) from the coast. The second assumption is as
fallacious as the first: it is of course not the sea itself which the
plant craves, but the mild temperature to which the sea gives rise. In
the Mediterranean region the sea is a cooling influence on the African
shore, and a warming one on the north coast. Olive trees need long hot
summers, but also a winter chill for setting the fruit (nothing,
however, below 12ø C. [54ø F.]), and no spring frosts which would kill
the blossoms. In addition, they will not tolerate the climate at
heights greater than two thousand feet above sea level. These precise
conditions can be met in places on earth other than the Mediterranean:
Olea europaea has spread to California, South Africa, Australia, and is
at present the object of special attention in China. But as long as the
myth of the Mediterranean survives, the olive will remain
representative of its place of origin.
The Olea family of trees includes the privet, the jasmine, and the
lilac. There are over thirty species of Olea in the world, most of
which are valued for their hard wood, which is used in making tools and
furniture. Only Olea europaea is cultivated for its fruit. One
relative, also common in the Mediterranean region, is known as the wild
olive or oleaster. This is a hardy, spiny shrub with small
meagre-fleshed fruit; it is often used as a stock upon which the
cultivated olive is grafted. It used to be assumed that this wild olive
was the original material from which man gradually bred the fruitful
tree. It is now thought that Olea chysophylla ("golden leaf"), a
species found growing wild in Asia, Africa, and the Canary Islands, is
the real progenitor. The oleasters would then
227

be descendants of plants which have escaped from cultivation, and which
have degenerated over long periods of time into their present state.
(It is said that although there is very little oil to be squeezed from
the fruit of the oleaster, what there is attains the highest quality.)
Some scientists believe that Olea europaea is itself the original tree,
having needed only careful nurturing to make it as fruitful as it is.
The problems involved in deciding where the olive tree came from arise
in part from the longevity of the plant. Little can be done
experimentally to check hypotheses. By the same token, if human beings
developed the olive tree, just how they did so, given the plant's long
life span, remains a mystery.
All fleshy fruits with a single woody stone enclosing a kernel are
known among botanists as drupes, after the "original" drupe, the olive.
(The word for a ripe olive in both Latin and Greek is druppa.) The
olive nut is uncommonly hard and may take years to germinate. Farmers
sometimes remove the kernels from their shells, soak them in fertilizer
and plant them, but preferred methods of propagation include rooting
cuttings, grafting, and planting out suckers. Where the olive's root
structure joins the trunk, the circulation of sap slows down and con-
centrates into bulbous growths called ovules. These can be cut from the
trunk and planted out, and they will root and grow into separate trees.
Olive trees can live for centuries, sending deep tap roots down into
the soil in search of water. If a tree is cut down or burned, the root
survives and can spontaneously send out fresh suckers from the ovules
at its base underground. For this reason the mythology of the olive
includes ideas of regeneration and immortality: green shoots miracu-
lously being born out of an old charred stump. The shoots of a plant
are called "seions"- a word which came also to mean human offspring,
sons of the parental "stock." "Thy wife," promises Psalm 128, "shall be
as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house; thy children like olive
plants round about thy table." (The image here is perhaps that of a cut
stump "table" surrounded by green seions.) This ability to "begin
again" is also the reason for extreme longevity in the tree: ages of
two thousand years and more have been claimed in certain cases. The
eight gnarled olive trees on the Mount of Olives at Jerusalem
("Gethsemane" means "olive press") are said to have been there since
the time of Christ, and this might be literally true, or true in the
sense that they could share the root-system of trees living then.
228 

A tree which proliferates from suckers can develop an enormous girth,
made, in fact, of many trunks fused together. The trees on the Mount of
Olives are six metres (20 ft.) in circumference. One hollow tree
belonging to a nineteenth-century Provencial farmer is said to have
been used as summer sleeping quarters for himself, his family, and his
horse. Such ancient trees have often enjoyed a role in human society
partly analogous to that of a pet animal: people have given them
personal names (one famous tree near Nice was known as "Pignole"),
loved them, honoured them, or treated them as sacred. A family might
insist upon the quality of oil, unmatched by any other, which a
specific tree could give. A tree could be thought of as gracious, or
obstinate, or angry and therefore loath to give any fruit.
Olive flowers are tiny and greenish-white. The leaves are narrow,
pointed, and leathery, green on the upper surface and silvery under-
neath. They grow in pairs along the stalk: it is one of the
characteristics which make olive branches, even when extremely
stylized, immediately recognizable in art. Because the tree is
evergreen, one of its greatest benefits to man has always been the
year-round shelter it provides from sun and rain. Olive trees can grow
where there is very little water, thanks to their deep tap-root and
because they lose almost no moisture by evaporation: the olive leaf is
water-tight.
The fruit when young is an intense green; as it grows it becomes a
brilliant yellowish light green, then violet with coloured spots; as
the flesh within darkens, the skin gradually changes from violet to
brilliant dark purple covered with a whitish bloom, and finally to
black. Fully ripe black olives produce the most oil; but the
best-tasting oil is from fruit only beginning to ripen. Olives which
fall, as they naturally do when ripe, are often bruised and deteriorate
very quickly lying on the ground; one or both of these conditions will
destroy the quality of the olive oil. For these reasons fruit to be
pressed for oil should wherever possible be picked from the trees
before it is ready to drop off.
However, olives are highly resistant to separation from the tree before
they are ripe. It follows that picking this fruit is extremely onerous
work. For the finest olive oil, the fruit ought to be picked one by
one, and by hand. The olives should be deposited in sacks or baskets
carried by the pickers up into the trees. Any fruit which does fall
should be collected at once-daily if possible. The work is intensely
seasonal, lasting a few weeks in the year at the most. These facts
alone are almost enough to cause any self-respecting modern food
industrialist to throw
229

up his hands in frustration and transfer his capital to more easily
profitable fruit.
None of these factors was a serious problem in the past, although the
olive was always acknowledged to be a plant which demanded a great deal
of effort from its owners. Olive harvesting took place in the winter
when other farm chores were relatively few. The pressing of the oil
(often by human strength alone) was traditionally carried out by
sailors, who could not go to sea in winter. There would be perhaps
scores rather than hundreds of trees to be harvested, and all the
families of a village might pitch in to help, afterwards sharing out
the results of their work. Most oil was produced for personal
consumption.
The olive harvest (known as the olivades in Provence, and given
equivalent names in other regions) was considered to be one of the high
points of the year, comparable with the grape harvest. It was a social
event complete with picnics, and a climactic tasting of the famous
fiotte d'ail or bruschetta (toasted bread rubbed with garlic and doused
in the new oil), when the quality of the new stores was finally appre-
ciated. We hear, too, of elaborate song cycles, with themes ranging
from the epic to the jocular which had evolved over the centuries to be
sung while picking the olive harvest. Some of these have been pre-
served, thanks to the efforts of folldore collectors. The work of har-
vesting and pressing the oil was hard, and the monetary reward nothing
like what it would be today. It was accepted as part of the yearly
round, and celebrated as a triumph. The rewards were immediate- and
satisfying when times were good.
Even in idyllic circumstances, however, and even when people were more
patient about manual work than we are, olive-picking was so tiring and
difficult that short-cuts were sought. Olives should ideally be picked
by hand, and often cannot be picked any other way; but nearripe fruit
can be beaten and shaken from the trees onto mats set out on the ground
below. With some luck the bruising will not be too severe (one
ingenious Italian idea is to use open umbrellas placed upside down on
the ground to catch the olives: the fruit bounces, and bruises less),
and provided that the fallen fruit is quickly removed for pressing,
only slight damage can be expected. From the earliest times, people
have been beating their olive trees in order to save time and trouble.
In the Book of Deuteronomy, for instance, it is laid down that "When
thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again:
it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow."
230 

In the course of beating for fruit, branches were constantly being
broken off the trees. People reasoned, however, that olive trees liked
this kind of damage: farmers considered it important, interestingly
enough, to feel that their labour-saving devices were helpful and not
injurious to their trees. The beaters were in many cases actually
encouraged by being given any wood they brought down for fuel, as part
of their reward. Olive trees were pruned in order to augment their
fruitfulness: surely, therefore, beating the branches would have a
similar effect, whipping the trees into productivity?
Pruning has always represented a fascinating paradox: the cultivator
reduces a plant in order to elicit increase from it. The German
botanist Camerarius used as his emblem a drastically pruned tree, with
the words tanto uberius, "so much the more fruitfully," written
underneath. Camerarius himself doubtless understood the real science of
pruning, but people have all too commonly assumed that cutting back is
all there is to it. One Italian proverb pronounces that "An olive tree
needs a sage at its feet and a fool at its head": it wants careful
tending of the soil but mad pruning of its branches. Another folk
riddle represents the olive as asking, "Make me poor, and I'll make you
rich-who am I?" It has taken modern scientific hard-headedness finally
to establish the fact that- in spite of aeons of folk wisdom-olive
trees do best with only the minimum of pruning, and that indiscriminate
beating can destroy a whole year's fruit.
One of the commonest problems of olive-growing has always been that the
trees seem often to produce only every second year- and the better the
crop of fruit in one year, the less likely the tree is to produce
anything the following season. Great fruitfulness was thought to "ex-
haust" the tree's strength. This behaviour seemed annoying, but under-
standable. Today, biennial cropping has become economically
intolerable: modern commercial practice cannot put up with abundance
(low prices) one year, followed by a dearth and high prices the next.
No longer does one olive tree serve the needs of one family: vast
plantations are what we are after, to produce oil or fruit for
thousands, and every tree must be regular, uniform, and constantly
productive.
Modern agricultural scientists have discovered that the practice of
beating the trees (vareo it is called, from the Spanish: the beating
stick is called a vara) was largely responsible for biennial cropping.
Vareo brought down, in addition to the slightly unripe fruit, a good
deal of the new growth of twigs which would have borne the flowers and
fruit
231

of the following season; it was, in fact, systematic destruction of the
tree's fruiting power. And the actual purposeful pruning, if carried
out without expertise, was even more damaging to the tree: both men and
olive groves paid for the ancient saw that the trees benefited from
savage treatment. Careful and knowledgeable pruning, on the other hand,
can (and presumably often did, in the past as well as the present)
usually prevent biennial cropping altogether. The practice of vareo
continues, although it is generally discouraged, but a machine has
recently been invented for shaking olive trees. Nylon netting is spread
beneath to catch the fruit, and the branches are vibrated until olives
stop faLling. The practice saves manpower, while comparatively little
of the tree's new growth, which is vital for the next year's crop, is
damaged.
Olive trees, traditional wisdom said, should not produce fruit at full
strength until they have been growing for as much as fifteen or twenty
years: a man tended saplings which might really benefit only his
children and their descendants. He would cut back his young olive
trees, training their trunks, preventing branching too low down, even
forcing the branches to form ladders, useful for the pickers to climb
later. Every country and region had its own traditional ideas about the
size and shape of olive trees, the height of the trunk, the length of
branches, and the space between trees. But about one thing everyone
agreed: an olive tree could, and should, live for centuries. Early
pruning to create a tall trunk and the prevention of early fruiting
ensured long life for the tree. The ancient, gnarled, familiar,
idiosyncratic, almost human olive tree survived in the place where the
family had its roots. It gathered to itself all the connotations of
peaceful constancy, historic continuity, and unshakeable dependability
which were accepted as human ideals.
Nowadays, we cannot wait. Olive trees simply must not take more years
than absolutely necessary to begin fruiting. We want them around only
so long as they are intensely productive. Once they settle back into a
less vibrant old age, then away with them: uproot them and start again.
As a matter of fact, the olive, as twentieth-century man has
discovered, is by nature more like a shrub than a tree. It is man, with
his pruning and patience, who has created those twisted and massive
grey shapes, those angular branches gesturing against the backdrop of
the blue Mediterranean sea. If you leave an olive tree alone, its crown
of branches will sprout very low down - it will scarcely produce a
trunk at all- and it will begin setting fruit in five years, not ten or
twenty. Ideally, very light pruning will then be required - though none
at all is
232 

likely to be the rule, since pruning is labour-intensive. True, the
trees will not last anything like as long as those grown in the past -
but we care very little now about anything lasting.
In the past, an olive tree was often a poor man's mainstay. It would
grow practically anywhere (which was where poor men tended to live): on
steep stony slopes, in dry hot places; if nothing else would grow, the
olive (provided the climate was Mediterranean) could be counted on. The
peoples of northern Europe ate butter and the peasants there kept cows.
In the south a family had its olives and olive oil; possessing a tree
was far less risky than owning animals. Even if it stood far away from
anyone's home and received hardly any tending it produced something;
once it was established, it cost almost nothing to keep up.
We now know, however, that olives - like any other trees - do best in
correctly irrigated, rock-free, and fertile soil. In order to create a
profitable modern enterprise, we begin, therefore, by bulldozing the
land, removing the stones, and creating flat plantations for olives, to
ensure optimum drainage of the soil. The rooting of cuttings is speeded
up by a new mist-spray process. We plant the trees - shrubs really- in
serried ranks, so close together that their branches touch and they
become almost like hedges, with only enough space between rows for the
tractors to pass with herbicides and mechanical ploughs. Closeplanting
facilitates the spraying of pesticides from the air, since no chemicals
are wasted on the gaps between trees (even though olives are among the
least amenable of fruits to many modern pesticides, because their oil
disconcertingly retains the flavour and smell of chemicals.)
Scientists urge the creation of large groves, bearing more than one
thousand trees per hectare, in order to justify the use of machinery
and the cost of remodelling the terrain. The terraces created on steep
slopes by the labour of generations of farmers should now be abandoned,
some say, unless piped irrigation is available and access can be
created for tractors. Not least among the momentous changes being
advocated is that of ownership: big companies alone have the capital,
the access to scientific research, and, above all, the unified
leadership which mass agriculture requires. In spite of these new
ideas, it is still not uncommon in the Mediterranean countryside for
each olive tree in an ancient grove to belong to a different family -
even for many families to have inherited shares in one tree.
The amount of work which olive cultivation still requires is a serious
count against it in the modern scheme of things; the ease with which
233

other oils are produced from tropical seeds, (as we saw when we read
about margarine in chapter 3), causes fierce competition from these
cheaper oils for profitable markets. Olive oil, unlike margarine, can
come from olives and nothing else; and chemists, so far, do not seem to
have made any claims to be able to reproduce its flavour. Meanwhile,
people living in the rich countries of the world clamour more and more
insistently for olive oil. This development is very recent, and, as we
shall see, it is in several respects surprising. But the figures are
unmistakable: demand for olive oil has gone up at least 2,000 per cent
in North America alone during the past five years. The industry is
suddenly being called upon to supply an increasing quantity of oil,
just when olive cultivation was being comfortably thought anachronistic
and, in many places, doomed to extinction.
Several things are being done to change the situation in the olive oil
industry. "Rationalization," along the lines already described, is con-
tinuing apace. Old trees, abandoned by the farmers who used to tend
them and who have now gone to live modern lives in cities, are in-
creasingly threatened with destruction. This is especially true in
countries like Italy and France, where people command high wages, and
where it is often lamented that "nobody wants to tend the olives any
more." The spread of the Common Market and of agri-business in Europe
has already meant the ruin of many old olive groves, and the
dismantling of many more is being predicted for Spain and Portugal.
Prestigious centres of production like Liguria, Tuscany, Sardinia, and
Provence are holding their own, while Spain and Greece continue to
supply the world with large quantities of olives and olive oil. But
olive production is increasingly being shifted to poorer Mediterranean
countries, such as Turkey and Tunisia, where harvesters are content for
the time being both to do the work and to accept lower wages.

PICKLED OLIVES

The word oil comes from oliva, the Latin for olive. The earliest Greeks
had called the olive tree elaiwa; they later dropped the w sound, but
Latin kept it, and handed on the term oliva, together with oleum for
the oil, to the countries of the north which the Romans conquered, and
to which the olive was exotic. The other main root for the name of the
olive in the languages of the Mediterranean region is the Semitic
234 

zayt, which becomes zayith in Hebrew, zait in Arabic, and aceituna
(aceite for the oil) in Spanish. (The holy oils used in church ritual
in Spain are called oleos santos: the Latin name replaces the Semitic
because of the association of the Church with Rome.)
The ancient Egyptians (who called the olive tat) grew and harvested
olives mainly for eating, but preferred to leave the heavy labour of
growing, harvesting, and pressing for oil to Palestine and her
Levantine neighbours. The Egyptians imported enormous amounts of olive
oil from this region, for lighting and for ritual requirements in their
temples; olive crowns and branches are commonly found in mummy cases.
It is thought by some that Port Said means "Port alive," because it was
the point of entry for Egypt's olive oil supplies.
It is easy to see how people learned to squeeze oil out of the olive;
but the strange idea of seeking ways to make the bitter olive edible
is, as far as we can judge, equally ancient. Pickling the olive
preserves it in addition to adjusting its taste. The result turned out
to be of great nutritional importance in the Mediterranean area, where
olives have, from time immemorial, constituted an essential food
resource, depended upon by the poor but also appreciated by the rich.
Olives were a favourite snack (another fast food) in the streets of
ancient Rome, as they are in that city today. One would select olives
from an array of different types, sizes, ripenesses, flavourings, and
pickling brines, and carry them away from the vendor in cornets made of
papyrus. For the Romans, olives were something quintessentially Italian
and therefore civilized. They were also simplicity itself, and so
satisfied a craving for rustic frugality: the Romans needed to see
themselves as an austere people, content with little. Any foodstuff
which can cover two poles of yearning at once (in this case both
sophistication and simplicity), is bound to acquire great symbolic
complexity for the society which so honours it.
Most people who have never encountered an olive before find the idea of
eating one quite unpleasant, even repulsive. The blend of powerful and
quite perversely difficult tastes - salty, sour, bitter- needs some
getting used to. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that olives were like life at
sea: exotic and distasteful. With perseverance, however, a liking for
olives can be "acquired," and after that it is never lost. Taste is an
extraordinarily complex phenomenon, not to be thought of as purely
physical; human beings, indeed, are unique among omnivorous mammals in
continuing to try eating foods they find repellent in the beginning.
235

Liking for certain foods creates a bond among people, and effectively
excludes from the group those who have not acquired the taste. Learning
to like something is in the nature of an initiation, of progress into a
desirable position "beyond" the one formerly occupied. We prevent our
children from drinking coffee because it is bad for them. A secondary
but by no means negligible reason is that a coffee break becomes one
occasion which beleaguered adults cannot share with their children;
while we drink our unhealthy coffee, we can tell our children to "run
along" with a clear conscience. As people grow up, they teach
themselves to do what distinguishes adults from children: they will
choke and cough until they have mastered the cigarette, or force
themselves to down bitter beer until they arc ready to join the group
that actually likes it. Our television advertisements understand the
lure of this "in" group, and with infinite cunning portray
beer-drinkers as fit, extremely convivial, grown-up yet usually young;
cigarette-smokers are made to seem sexy, sophisticated, and extremely
healthy, even tough.
Eating olives, in our society (as opposed to that of the Mediterranean,
where children are taught to like olives at an early age) is
"sophisticated" behaviour. Liking them is proof of an adventurous
readiness to try foreign foods, as well as of familiarity with an
exotic yet universally acclaimed cuisine. Eating olives, one is grown
up, broad-minded, and a person, as we say, "of taste." One really does
like olives after a while: a new possibility for enjoyment has entered
one's life, like an ambition achieved or an object possessed. Clearly,
acquiring such a taste has many rewards, and once it has been acquired,
we wonder how we could ever have forgone the treat. The taste of
olives, once loathed because it was utterly unlike that of the pale,
bland, sweet foods so obviously and effortlessly pleasant to us, now
seems to be not only powerful and sophisticated, but also to possess a
primary or fundamental character. Lawrence Durrell writes in Prospero's
Cell that olives have "A taste older than meat, older than wine. A
taste as old as cold water."
The ways in which olives are eaten in the Mediterranean region create a
broad geographical division, separating the cuisines of the area into
two parts. In the countries of the eastern half (Yugoslavia, Greece,
Turkey, the Levant, Egypt, and Libya) olives are used as a garnish and
for hors-d'oeuvres; they are eaten like a fruit, that is to say
uncooked (except insofar as pickling them is "cooking" them) and often
as small meals in themselves, accompanied perhaps by bread, cheese, and
herbs.
236 Much Depends On Dinner

In the west (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Spain, Portugal, France, and
Italy) they are very often cooked along with other foods. The reasons
for these two attitudes towards the olive are to be sought in
traditional mealtime structures, and perhaps in the likelihood, in the
past, of there being little but olives to eat at certain meals. The
countries where olives are often cooked are also those where green
olives tend to be especially popular.
Olives may be eaten at the beginning of a meal or at the end; either
way, they always make an excellent accompaniment for drinks. The modern
martini pays homage to the olive's ancient role as enhancer of drinks
by including one "swimming," as the ancient Greeks would have said, in
the glass. In Spain, meals traditionally end with olives, so that a
person who arrives on the scene when everything is over is said to "get
there with the olives."
Spain produces more table olives than anywhere else on earth: two and a
half million metric tons a year for export, about two-thirds of those
being stuffed green olives. Factory-processed green olives get a short
cure in lye, and are then fermented in salt brine. This means that the
olives are treated with both of the methods used to discourage bacteria
in food: lye gives the olives a pH level too high for most micro-
organisms to live in, and the subsequent pickling brings the pH level
down too low. Lactic acid, produced naturally by fermentation and
sometimes added in the factory, together with salt, replaces most of
the taste which was removed in the lye.
Firm-textured green olives are easily pitted (modern machinery removes
seventeen hundred stones per minute) and keep their shape. The red
"pimiento," or sweet pepper stuffing is a ground-and-reconstituted
gelatinous pimiento paste which is extruded in ribbon form and squeezed
into the olives with machine-tooled precision. It is even possible
these days to replace the lid on a pitted olive so that no one would
guess that the olive had ever been broached - as though it had grown
seedless and ready-stuffed on the tree. Anchovy stuffing is funnelled
like toothpaste from tubes into the olives in the same fashion. Almond-
and onion-stuffed olives have still to be processed by hand. Cracked
green olives continue to be pickled at home or as a cottage industry.
They are soaked for about two weeks in water with the stones left in
them, and subsequently marinated in a salt brine with various
combinations of flavourings, which include fennel, fenugreek, cumin,
oregano, bay
237

leaves, rosemary, chili peppers, and orange or lemon peel. Either
vinegar or lemon juice may be added to the brine.
Black olives vary greatly in size, shape, texture, and taste. They grow
especially large in the warm climates of southern Spain and Greece,
reaching sizes over two centimetres (2/3 in.) long in some varieties.
Greek olives are often not treated with lye, but cured only in plain
salt or brine where, in time, they undergo lactic fermentation; the
result in many cases has a strong and bitter taste. French olives from
the cooler north shore of the Mediterranean are small, often with
comparatively little flesh and a strong flavour; they are generally
considered to be the best-tasting olives of all. Pickled Mediterranean
olives are exported in large containers, in their brine, to America and
to northern Europe. They continue to ferment in transit, so that valves
have to be fitted to let gases out and prevent explosions. The
alternative method, pasteurization to stop fermentation, is also
practised, but it results in pickled olives lacking in finesse.
Ripe black olives cannot be factory pitted because their flesh is too
soft; an olive pitter is, therefore, an inexpensive and useful kitchen
gadget to own. In California, however, unripe olives are processed to
make them turn black: the flesh then remains firm enough to allow
destoning in the factory. They are picked green and then chemically
blackened; the resulting dark colour is fixed with ferrous gluconate. A
lye treatment is followed by washing, pitting, inspection, and
immediate canning in a mild salt brine. There is no time taken for
ferrnentation, which means that these olives develop no strong pickled
flavour. They also need, as pickled olives do not, to be sterilized at
high heat in the cans in order to become resistant to spoilage.
The oldest Californian olives are called Mission, because they were
planted from Mexican stock at San Diego de Alcala by Franciscan
missionaries in about 1785. These are small olives, which may either be
eaten black or pressed for oil. California produces hardly any olive
oil these days, and small olives have not been greatly appreciated
there for the last sixty years. The old Mission trees are often used
for stock on which to graft large table varieties. Because many
Americans like their olives large, salesmen of canned Californian
black-ripe olives stress the size of their product with zeal; they have
given the various dimensions of olives names which include Giant,
Jumbo, Mammoth, Colossal, Super Colossal, and Special Super Colossal.
238 

PRESSING FOR OIL

"Let the salad-maker be a spendthrift for oil," advises a Spanish
proverb, "and a miser for vinegar, a statesman for salt, a madman for
mixing." The best and freshest lettuce deserves the finest of oils, and
plenty of it. The finest is unquestionably Cold Pressed Extra Virgin
Olive Oil. (A less wide-spread tradition advocated walnut oil; but this
has become these days, even in southwestern France, a luxury still
rarer than topquality olive oil.) Olive oil is called "Virgin" when it
is the first oil to come out of the olive, that which is relea.,ed from
the fruit with the least pressure being applied. It is "Extra" to
distinguish it from the merely "Superfine" Virgin oil: "Extra" has less
than 1 per cent oleie acidity (0.5 per cent in the very best product),
while "Superfine" has up to 1.5 per cent. "Fine" or "Regular" has
between 1.5 per cent and 3 per cent acidity, plain "Virgin" or "Pure"
has up to 4 per cent, and anything more acid than that is inedible lamp
oil.
This classification, which is used on most olive oil labels, is a relic
from the past. It can be completely misleading, because it has meaning
only if the oil has not been refined by modern chemical and mechanical
methods. An abominable olive oil can now be refined until its acidity
easily ends up less than 1 per cent. The resulting oil will have no
taste at all, let alone the matchless flavour of true "Extra Virgin."
It can be made palatable by the addition of 5 per cent to 10 per cent
of fiutada, the strongest-tasting "Extra Virgin" oil; this produces
what is called in the trade a "Riviera mixture," and it makes up most
of what is sold world-wide as olive oil.
The real "Extra Virgin" oil is to be known by its taste, by the name of
its supplier, or by the additional phrase "Cold Pressed," which in-
dicates that it has not been refined. Top quality also commands a high
price. In 1985, the finest Tuscan cold-pressed oils cost $20 Canadian
per litre, which is between three and five times the price of olive oil
as it is usually bought in the shops. Refining the oil and then
replacing some of its taste is a compromise which most people must
accept on account of the saving in money. A litre of cold-pressed oil
is to be treasured, and used only for salads or as an added condiment,
since heating it above 60øC. (140øF.) alters its flavour.
Olive oil "tastings," on an analogy with wine tastings, are one of the
ways in which the olive oil companies are acquainting the public in
non-Mediterranean countries with the range of their oils and persuading
239

them to recognize the prestige of olive oil generally. About six small
glasses containing oils ranging in colour from pale yellow to greengold
are savoured one by one, with unsalted bread and slices of apple
between oils to cleanse the palate. One rubs oil on the back of the
wrist - like perfume - to test the aroma. A fatty sensation in the
mouth is a bad sign, acid in the throat another. Olive oil is intensely
liable to pick up other odours and tastes, so the taster watches for
the least degree of contamination, and also for any hint that the fruit
was bruised in the harvesting, or was not precisely the right age for
pressing. Then there are varieties of olives in the blend to be noted,
the climate during growth being an important factor which improves or
lowers quality.
Olive oil has good years and bad years, but it does not improve with
age like wine. Five months aging is needed for fruity oils like the
Tuscan, which begins with a distinct peppery after-kick. (Some gourmets
consider this pepperiness part of the oil's excellence, and do not wait
for it to mellow.) Olive oil keeps well for up to two years, provided
it is not exposed to sunlight; it can, on occasion and in the proper
conditions, last for many years without deteriorating. The greenish
colour of certain oils is sometimes taken for a sign of their "extra
virginity." It is quite common now for manufacturers to add a few
ground olive leaves in order to produce what they call a "green note,"
just because the colour is attractive to customers.
Cold pressing olive oil is a risky and labour-intensive process. The
difficulties begin with the harvest, with fruit hand-picked at
precisely the right moment (olives do not ripen simultaneously, even on
the same tree), and with no bruises or damage in either transport or
storage. Ideally, olives should not be held in storage at all before
pressing because piles of fruit spontaneously heat up and begin to
ferment, with increase in acidity and damage to the oil's aroma. But
modern working conditions and the need for expensive modern machinery
to be kept in operation makes storage, with its concomitant risk,
almost inevitable. Stored olives are spread out as thinly as possible
and must be kept cool. The olive is one of the rare fruits with high
fat content. Its precious burden of oil -17 per cent of the olive's
substance - is contained in pockets within the fruit's cells. The oil
is removed by crushing the fruit until its vegetal structure is broken
down. Metal crushers are economical, but they conduct heat; it is
preferable to use millstones, each eight tons in weight. The softer the
stone the better the oil- but, as usual, the best stone requires the
most work, as it wears out quickly and needs
240 

to be recut and replaced. In the past, great care was taken to crush as
few olive pits as possible; today we are less purist, but make up for
this in part by providing more efficient filtering techniques.
The fruit is reduced to a paste so that the torn cells release most of
their oil. In the cold-pressing method, the milled paste goes straight
to the press, where it is spread, in loads of nine kilograms (20 Lb.)
of paste each, on round nylon mats. These are then mounted onto disks
eighty to ninety centimetres (31 to 36 in.) in diameter, each with a
hole in the middle. The disks are threaded one on top of the other onto
a vertical spindle, and the whole column is then squeezed downward; oil
and water pour down the perforated central shaft into the catchment
basin. The method is essentially unchanged (except for the materials
out of which the press is made) from that used three thousand years
ago.
The first pressing, performed without the use of too much force and
always in this method without heat, releases the finest olive oil of
all. Second and third pressings, requiring increased power, produce
successively inferior oils. Filtering, settling, and decanting to
remove vegetable water follows. This process relies on the fact that
oil is less dense than water, and therefore separates itself out and
rises to the surface. Simple decanting pots, with a funnel at the
bottom to drain off the unwanted liquid, have been found in Crete,
dating back forty-five hundred years.
Next, the oil is stored for a few weeks in cool, dark, underground
vaults, so that minute particles of remaining fruit can settle to the
bottom. The oil is then filtered again. Many oil enthusiasts insist on
very little settling and filtering: the taste is fruitier without it,
but the oil looks cloudy instead of a brilliant clear green-gold. The
best oils are filtered through cotton; filtration through alkaline
earth helps to lower the acidity of poorer oils. Sunlight spoils olive
oil, so bottles should be opaque.
In modern mills which do not cold press, the crushed olive paste is
heated slightly and then beaten with mechanical paddles. The purpose of
this is to break down the membranes of lipoprotein which develop on the
drops of oil freed in the crushing of the fruit, so that the oil drops
run together as much as possible. Next, the mass is pressed with the
help of heat and water. More and more commonly a centrifuge or spinning
press is used; this saves time but damages the oil. Most of it,
241

however, will be refined to remove acidity and used as the base for
fiutad()-flavoured cheaper olive oil.
Modern producers of olive oil would dearly love to find an extraction
method which would do away with the breakable disks and the labour-
intensive cold press. Even where all the latest machinery is in use,
they sadly compare their conditions of work with the cheerfully
automated continuous screw-presses which the seed-oil industry can use
to pour out vast quantities of cottonseed, rapeseed, peanut, soya, and
other oils at a far smaller cost. Seed-oil can even be extracted by
chemical solvents. But olive paste will not submit to the same
treatment: the cold disk press, hot-pressing, or centrifuging the paste
remain the only practical processes available for olive oil.
Difficulties of harvesting and timing added to the non-continuous,
multi-operational pressing methods account for most of the high cost
and explain why olive oil, once a poor peasants' staple, is now a
luxury.
People have always adulterated olive oil, or tried to, whenever other
oils have been easier and cheaper to get. Today regulations are such
that real, though refined, olive oil must be used as a base, with the
addition of frutido, if the product is to be allowed the appellation
"olive oil." Before a way of testing for saponification levels and
other modern scientific methods of verification were available,
tasteless vegetable oils were used to eke out the expensive "real
thing." For example, an olive oil racket involving adulteration with
tea-seed oil imported from the Orient was broken in the United States
in 1936; the affair greatly encouraged the systematic inspection of
oils in North America.
In May 1981, thousands of Spaniards became sick and hundreds died
because rapeseed oil from France had been used illegally to adulterate
olive oil which was then sold off at apparently "bargain" prices. The
rapeseed oil, which was meant to be used only in steel mills, had been
treated with aniline dye. It was bought up, bleached, recoloured, and
reprocessed, and passed off as something like the refined olive oil
base to which we are all accustomed. But in the process a deadly poison
was created that killed or paralyzed human beings who ate it. Thousands
of people demonstrated in Madrid, many of them on crutches and in
wheelchairs; the tragedy was one of the most horrible food-poisoning
disasters in modern western history. More than twenty people were
jailed. The Spanish government introduced new laws making datestamping
obligatory, guaranteeing compensation for victims of food
242 

poisoning, and introducing fines for offences against public health.
The twentieth century has unprecedentedly high standards of hygiene in
one sense, but the dangers of chemical poisoning have escalated beyond
anything imagined by our simpler and "dirtier" forefathers.

HEALTH, HEALING, AND ILLUMINATION

The ancient Greeks and Romans seem to have spent much of their lives
pouring olive oil over themselves. They oiled after the bath, before
and sometimes during meals, before and after doing physical exercise,
before long journeys on foot and again upon arrival, and in general
whenever they wished to relieve tension and fatigue. The prescription
for health of the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus was "honey on
the inside, olive on the outside." Later Greek and Roman versions of
this adage prefer wine to be taken internally, but olive oil remains
the external lubricant.
There were many professional anointers who offered massage for a fee to
anyone feeling in need of relaxation, especially in the gymnasia and
public baths. Every athlete who took his sport seriously (and every
young man with pretensions to style was expected to frequent the
gymnasium) had two trainers: a gymnastic master for physical training
and an "anointer" who advised him about diet, gave him medical check-
ups, and either prescribed massages and oil-rubs or performed them
himself. The official in charge of the gymnasia of an ancient city con-
sidered one of his main tasks to be the provision of enough olive oil
to make sport, as the ancients conceived it, possible.
Before wrestling naked, as was customary in the ancient world, one
first did a few warm-up exercises to open the pores, then poured on oil
and rubbed it in to make the muscles supple. Next one sprinkled oneself
from head to foot with sand or dust, which stuck to the oil and
provided a kind of protective second skin. This prevented the body from
being too slippery for one's opponent to grasp; in addition, the oil
and sand were thought to keep the body temperature constant and so to
ward off colds and stiffness in the muscles.
After exercise, one was rinsed and scraped with an iron tool called a
strioil, with more oil to soften the instrument's abrasiveness. After a
bath in water and lye made from wood ash or lime, or a rubbing with
Fuller's Earth to remove any remaining sweat, sand, and grease, one
243

was ready for yet another generous application of olive oil to soothe
the skin. An athlete's essential equipment (the equivalent of our soap
and towel, sweat suit and sneakers) included a sponge, a strioil, and
an oil flask with a flat disk round the opening with which to spread
the oil as it poured out. The poet Martial, complaining about the young
men of his day who refused to do any work, said they spent "most of
their lives in oil," meaning that sport and luxurious massages were all
they cared for.
The ancient Gauls, who may have learned the secret from the Phoe-
nicians, made a kind of soap from goat fat and beech ash (potash). They
used it mainly to redden their hair and make it fashionably stiff and
waxy; but they also used it occasionally to clean themselves a good
deal less painfully than the Greeks and Romans did with their scrapers
and their lye and Fuller's Earth. Soap, which began to be imported into
Italy in growing quantities in the early years AD, would eventually cut
drastically the amount of olive oil which the people of the southern
Mediterranean region used on their skins.
Olive oil became, however, the basis for making the highest quality
soap, which came to be called "Castile" because this industry was
centred in Spain. Other kinds of oil were used to make soap, but in
Spain only olive oil was permitted. Castile soap is opaque, white, and
glossy, with a faint natural fragrance. It became a world-famous luxury
article from the eighth century AD onward. Marseilles, once the point
of departure for exports of Gaulish soap to the Classical world, took
over a good deal of the market in the thirteenth century. Marseilles
often adulterated its soap by using other oils, until a law was passed
in 1668 (it is still in force) refusing the name Marseilles to any soap
containing oil not made from olives.
Olive oil is an excellent base for perfumes, and scented oils were used
liberally on all social occasions in the ancient world. France, then as
now, specialized in soaps, perfumes, and cosmetics generally; the in-
dustry depended upon French olive groves. Hair gleaming with perfumed
ointment was greatly admired, as we saw to be the case among northern
peoples who used butter rather than oil for this purpose. The ancient
Egyptians used to set large cones of perfumed ointment, which must
often have been made with olive oil, upon their heads at dinner
parties; as the atmosphere warmed up the cones would gradually melt and
deliciously drizzle scented oil down their hair and faces and over
their bodies. (In butter cultures, as we saw earlier, butter was used
in
244 

much the same way, for cosmetic basting of the human body.) Women in
Greece and Rome perfumed themselves with scented oils, imitating
Aphrodite (Venus) the goddess of sex, who was regularly anointed by the
Graces on her sacred island, Cyprus; Hera herself, in the Iliad,
enhanced her sexual attraction for Zeus by the application of perfumed
oil to her person. Olive oil covered the bodies of dinner guests, and
crowns of olive or bay leaves were worn at banquets as well. Excavators
at Roman Pompeii found a shop which had specialized in perfumes and
olive garlands: people invited to dinner could stop by on the way to
the party and pick up the headgear and the oils which they needed for
the evening.
Many people who live in the Mediterranean area today drink olive oil
regularly in small amounts, one or two spoonfuls at a time, once a day,
once a week, or once a month, for their health. The oil is a gentle
laxative. There is some evidence that it has astringent properties as
well, when applied externally. But it is health in general which many
believe to result from taking small but constant doses internally of
soothing, nourishing, softening oil. An Egyptian medical text of 1550
BC mentions olive oil seven hundred times as appropriate either to be
taken orally or to be rubbed on the body. The use of oil as a shield
against infection was a well-known precaution. The Good Samaritan, who
is described as pouring wine and oil into the wounds of the man beaten
up by robbers, first used antiseptic alcohol, then olive oil as
protection from external contamination. Ground olive leaves can be used
to cause fever abatement, and were an ingredient in ancient medicines
given to combat malaria. It is now known that the olive tree contains
salicylic acid, the active element in Aspirin. The hardened sap of the
olive tree used to be chewed as relief for toothache, and "Lucca gum,"
as it was called, went into many medicaments, especially ointments for
healing wounds and infections.
Light at night was most commonly provided in the ancient Mediterranean
world by lamps filled with olive oil; an oil-soaked wick takes a good
long time to burn. For sanctuary lamps, votive lamps, and any light
which burned continually, olive oil was the preferred vehicle, since it
smokes and smells so little. Until the early twentieth century it was
customary in southern Europe to leave money in one's will for candles
and lamp-oil for the funeral lights.
Olive oil has been used from time immemorial for dressing wool: it
minimizes the breakage of fibres, prevents static electricity, and
makes
245

the fleece easier to handle as it is drawn and twisted in the spinning.
It never causes discolouration, and is easy to wash out. Olive oil is
now much too expensive to be used for this purpose, and is replaced
with specially treated mineral oils. Olive oil is employed, or has been
used in the past, for rust prevention, softening and lubricating
leather, making ink, and diamond polishing. Fish has been canned in
olive oil ever since Nicolas Appert perfected the canning process in
1804, although now soya oil is being increasingly used for cheaper
products. In the ancient world, statues in danger of cracking because
of the climate were kept constantly coated in olive oil. The huge image
of olive-crowned Zeus at Olympia sat with a black marble pavement
rimmed in white at his feet. Its purpose was to hold the oil which ran
from the god's majestic gold and ivory form.

THE OLIVE BRANCH

The ancient Athenians were confident enough in their worth to believe
that two gods fought for the privilege of being their patron. In front
of the king of Athens and a panel of gods to judge the contest,
Poseidon struck the rock on top of the Acropolis with his trident and
produced a salt-water well or "sea"; then Athene miraculously presented
her gift- an olive tree. The prize went to Athene, and Athens received
her name. Poseidon, in a fit of pique, flooded one of Attica's plains,
and sent his son to cut the winning tree down. The boy died by missing
the tree and chopping himself down with his axe. From the day of the
contest to the present time, pilgrims to the Acropolis have been shown
the marks of Poseidon's trident in the rock (the salt "sea" was near
by) and the "City Olive" growing on the hill among the temples which
crown it.
The City Olive was believed somehow to embody the destiny of Attica.
When the Persians besieged and then burned the Acropolis, the tree was
left a charred stump. But almost immediately (the very next day, people
said) it sent out a green branch: Athens was to rise again from the
ruins. The tree stood at the psychological centre of Attica. From it,
twelve suckers were taken and planted at the mythic "boundary" of
Attica, in the Academy gardens (later to become the place where Plato
founded his philosophy school), outside the city walls. These twelve
trees were called the Moriae. They were constant and immove
246 

able: expressive, with the City Olive, of the centre, the extent, and
the boundary of the Attic state. They were also protected by a curse:
anyone doing them damage would immediately find himself the object of
supernatural rage. When the Spartans surrounded the city of Athens they
laid waste the countryside, paying especial attention, as enemies did
in the ancient Mediterranean world, to the destruction of olive groves.
But they were sufficiently impressed by the curse to spare the Moriae.
A single olive tree, planted to commemorate the Moriae and the site of
Plato's Academy, now stands stranded in the middle of thundering
traffic in the city of Athens.
There were many other sacred olive trees in the Attic countryside, all
of them thought to be offshoots from the City Olive and its scions, the
first twelve Moriae. They were fenced round, regularly inspected, and
protected directly by the Council of State whose other main duty was
deciding cases of murder. Anyone who damaged one of these trees, even
if it appeared to be dead, was in the early days liable to be executed;
in later times he was merely exiled for life and had all his property
confiscated. From the fruit of the sacred olive trees was pressed the
oil which was given to winners in the games held in honour of Athene,
goddess of the olive tree and of Athens.
On the occasion of these games, once every four years, the citizens of
Athens staged an especially elaborate procession up the Acropolis in
honour of their goddess. Their goal was an ancient olive-wood statue of
Athene which was dressed in a newly woven robe as a climax to the
festival. A depiction of the procession, expressing as it did the
totality of the people of Attica, was carved as a frieze round the
great new temple which rose, a kind of man-made version of the green
branch which grew from the charred olive stump, on the ruins left
behind by the retreating Persians. The two great pediments of this
temple, the Parthenon or Virgin's Temple, showed Athene's birth at the
east end, and Athene winning the contest with her olive tree at the
west.
Olive trees, as these myths and rituals exemplify, mean revitalization
and continuity, as well as constancy. When Odysseus built his marriage
bed, one post of it was the trunk of an olive tree, still rooted in the
ground: it meant that his bed was immoveable, just as the Moriae were
immoveable, and as is the marriage bond. His wife Penelope alone shared
the secret of this bed, and in the Odyssey she cunningly tests the
disguised Odysseus's identity by seeing whether he knows this crucial
fl~t When a male child was born in ancient Athens (a branch or scion
247

issuing from his parents' wedlock and from the state), the family dis-
played an olive wreath at the front door of their house.
Olives are the most civilized of trees. The iconographical scheme of
the Parthenon includes, in addition to the great procession frieze and
the myths of Athene's birth and creation of the olive tree, a series of
symbolic representations of Civilization conquering Barbarism. Tending
olive trees requires experience and a technical mastery which makes
them belong very clearly to the domain of Athene, the goddess of
craftsmanship. Olive trees, like agriculture in general, suffer badly
in wartime. In Attica, where olive oil was the country's chief export,
burned olive groves spelled disaster. So olive branches, evergreen and
civilized, came to mean "peace."
The olive tree represented wisdom not only in the sense of technical
skill but also because peace is wise and can be preserved only through
intelligence and civilized restraint. Olive branches were carried and
worn as crowns by suppliants and heralds in the ancient world, much as
a white flag signifies surrender and a non-belligerent attitude today.
Suppliants, like sacred olive trees, should be safe from violence, no
matter what the politics or what vengeful feelings may be rampant. They
constitute a demand for self-control on the part of the powerful.
Heralds used the olive to indicate their inviolability as they
presented themselves in the camp of the enemy; in time the olive branch
became a herald's badge of office. When artists of the Italian
Renaissance depicted the angel Gabriel announcing the birth of the
Saviour to Mary, he was usually shown holding a lily, symbol of purity
and virginity. The lily was also the emblem of the city of Florence,
however, and some of the Sienese painters decided that a flower
representing a city which was their deadly rival was quite
inappropriate for Gabriel to carry. They found a brilliant substitute:
for Simone Martini and others, Gabriel holds an olive branch or wears
an olive crown as a mark of Mary's purity, and also because he is a
herald and peace-bringer.
Winners at the ancient Olympic Games received a crown of olive leaves
for their prize. This honour implied that the victor possessed all of
the civilized virtues associated with the olive branch. According to
the Olympic ideal, any monetary reward would fall far short of the
prize of recognition for true worth. The wreath was in some sense also
the Fate of the wearer (as the City Olive embodied the destiny of
Athens): Fate had ordained that this man should win, and Victory,
represented as a winged goddess, bound his head with the triumph, in
248 

the form of an olive branch, in the sight of his countrymen. In
medieval Europe, following a tradition going back directly to Jewish
and Classical times, the anointing of a king or queen with olive oil
would be completed by placing the crown of destiny upon the sovereign's
head.
The olive wreath, and the bay wreath in honour of Apollo, were
customarily worn by all the guests at banquets in the ancient world.
Eating together is a sign of peace, trust, and civilized conviviality.
For the Greeks, wearing olive and bay crowns at dinner also signified
their acceptance of human limitation and abhorrence of hybris. Hybris
meant insulting contempt for other people's honour arising from an
arrogant misunderstanding of one's own worth and duties. Prometheus,
the divine benefactor of mankind, had ordained the wearing of the
wreath in memory of the day when he had been set free from bondage.
The olive tree, together with its oil, is a symbol of virginity,
because its role is to preserve and to be constant, inviolable, and
unchanging. Athene herself was a virgin. Olive-pickers, right into the
Middle Ages in some places, had to keep chaste while the harvest was
on. Olive oil, once pressed, is pure; it is golden and healing and
gives light by preserving the flame of the lamp. In one of the parables
of Jesus, the wise virgins were able to keep their lamps full of olive
oil as they waited for the bridegroom, because they prudently took a
supply of oil with them to top up their lamps if need be. They were
humble (for in Christianity humility and wisdom are aspects of each
other), and therefore not misled into forgetting what they were living
for: they were able, as a result, to preserve and be constant. The
foolish virgins got everything wrong, even their roles as virgins.
The modern phrase, "extra virgin olive oil," is a barbarism arising
from the hectoring excess of advertising. "Virgin" here means merely
"first"; the oil squeezed out in the first pressing of the fruit. But
virginity, even when it is supposed to mean only the state of being
first, is an absolute and superlative condition: it cannot become
"extra" or more than itself. The misuse of the word comes about because
the industry wishes to extend the use of it to oils inferior to the
best: the best has therefore to be distinguished by means of an
enthusiastic absurdity. Even though virgin is now used of olive oil in
a technical rather than a mythic sense, the continued association of
the word with the oil seems to be a remarkable - if unconscious -
survival of an ancient linkage of ideas.
249

ANOINTING

When Noah decided that it was time to see whether the flood had
subsided, he sent a dove out from the ark. She returned because there
was nowhere for her to rest. He sent her away again a week later, and
she came back bearing an olive branch; at the third try she flew away
never to return. The olive branch in the dove's beak was a potent
symbolic message: it meant that the most constant of trees, sure
indicator of hope for the future and of the rebirth of civilization,
had survived the flood. The dove was a herald from God, who was ready
now to make peace with the world.
Christians from the earliest times understood the story of Noah, his
ark, the flood, and the olive-bearing dove as a prefiguration of the
Resurrection and of the sacrament of Baptism; they painted the scene
with its new meaning over and over again in the catacombs. The dove and
the olive branch are to be found especially often; they constituted a
kind of shorthand for the whole story and its Christian meaning. The
flood is the death of the old so that the new can begin afresh; it is a
symbol of initiation. Noah and his ark "die" and are purified in the
flood, as the Christian's old self is drowned in the waters of Baptism,
so that he may be saved and rise again from them a new man. The dove,
with its message of hope, wisdom, health, and peace as embodied by the
olive, is the Holy Spirit, who appeared as a dove at the Baptism of
Jesus. The olive twig stands for olive oil, which after the Baptismal
washing anoints the Christian's head, completing his initiation and
signifying the support of the Holy Spirit in his life. The oil also
reminds the Christian that "Christ" means "Anointed" (Christos in
Greek, Messiah in Hebrew.)
Anointing with olive oil was a sign of respect in the ancient world:
one poured oil over the head of an honoured guest, and one anointed the
dead. It was customary in ancient Greece to leave a jug of olive oil in
a dead person's tomb as a friendly and respectful offering; if anything
could be useful to the dead in the hereafter, oil was thought likely to
be what they needed. The oil was apparently more costly than the
beautiful container: the jug often held a tiny vessel inside the neck
so that no more than a very little oil need be left in the tomb.
Presumably the dead were thought to be weak, and were therefore to be
cheated with impunity, even as the forms of ritual were being adhered
to.
250 

A host would offer oil for the feet of anyone who arrived at his house
after having walked a long way. No one intending to travel a great
distance on foot would dream of setting off without oil for tending his
feet at the beginning and end of each day. When Jacob had his vision of
angels, he rose the next morning, set up the stone he had used for a
pillow, poured oil over it and called it Beth-el, "the House of the
Lord." Jacob was travelling as lightly as possible at the time-but he
had still thought it necessary to carry a flask of olive oil on his
person. Later, Jacob returned to Beth-el, set up a second stone there,
and poured wine and oil over it.
For thousands of years people have felt that it is right and necessary
to pour oil over special or significant stones. Just why they have done
this is mysterious. Perhaps these are some of the factors involved: The
oil sinks into the stone, darkens it and makes it shiny; the oil seems
somehow to have penetrated the stone, honoured it, perhaps even
imparted some sort of life to it, adding dynamic power to the strength
and duration of rock. "Fatness" always tended in the past to mean "life
force." "Fat" land is fertile, whereas dry land and "dry bones" mean
death. Oil made a man's skin "glow" (as we say) with life and
happiness. The omphalos stone at Delphi, which claimed to be the centre
or "navel" of the earth, was constantly anointed by the ancient Greeks;
the sacred black rock of Islam, the Ka'bah at Mecca, is ceremonially
drenched in oil. When Moses had the Tabernacle built at Sinai, God told
him to anoint with olive oil, specially spiced according to a precise
recipe, the Ark of the Covenant, the altars, and all the vessels and
candlesticks. "You shall consecrate them, that they may be most holy;
whatever touches them will become holy. And you shall anoint Aaron and
his sons, and consecrate them, that they may serve me as priests." In
memory of Jacob's action at Beth-el and of Moses at Mt. Sinai, all
Catholic churches are consecrated as "Houses of God" and "Gates of
Heaven" in a ceremony of anointing by a bishop: the twelve places of
anointing are marked on the pillars and walls of the church by Greek
(equal-armed) crosses. Altars are anointed with particular emphasis,
and there are special traditional ceremonies for naming and anointing
church bells.
Whatever is anointed- man, building, ritual utensil, or rock- is set
apart; anointing initiates it into a new and singular state. Anointing
the head of one's guest admitted him into one's house and into the
number of one's friends. Dead people were anointed out of respect,
251

and because they had entered a new state; when Jesus was anointed
before the Passover by a woman as he reclined at dinner in the house of
Simon the Leper, he interpreted the action as a preparation for his
burial. A ceremonial application of olive oil could also be used as a
way of distinguishing one group or society from another. The anointings
at Mt. Sinai by Moses were designed in part to differentiate the Jewish
Temple and Jewish ritual practice from those of the Egyptians and of
the other peoples in Canaan.
Priests in the Catholic Church are ordained, as priests were in the Old
Testament, by the pouring or rubbing on of oil. The image of oil as
representing strength, constancy, and wisdom is present in all ini-
tiatory anointings, as it is in Christian Baptism, as well as Holy
Orders, Confirmation, and the Anointing of the Sick. This last ceremony
(which is not recognized as a sacrament by most of the Protestant
churches) has recently been the subject of controversy in the Roman
Catholic church. A decision was taken by the Vatican to emphasize the
symbolism of strength over that of initiation: the oil is administered
primarily as aid and comfort to the sick, and only secondarily as
Extreme Unction, as it was formerly called, the "final anointing" or
initiation into the "last journey" of death.
Consecrated olive oil, in both Jewish and Christian practice, repre-
sents the action of the Holy Spirit, whose other chief symbols are wind
or breath ("life force"), the dove, and fire (we recall that olive oil
was used for lighting). Oil flows, spreads, and penetrates, and then
softens, nourishes, warms, strengthens, and provides illumination: it
easily comes to signify what Christians call "grace," the "extra
something" which God confers. When Samuel saw David, "the Lord said,
'Arise, anoint him, for this is he.' Then Samuel took the horn of oil
and anointed him in the midst of his brethren; and the Spirit of the
Lord came upon David from that day forward."
David instantly took on, with the Spirit, legitimacy, and also that
personal inviolability which, in the ancient world, was the privilege
of olive-bearing heralds and suppliants as well as oil-anointed kings.
The change induced by anointing was permanent: even though Saul had
been deposed as unworthy of the Lord, David rebuked the man who claimed
to have killed him, for Saul had received the oil of consecration, no
matter what his subsequent actions had been. "How wast thou not
afraid," said David, "to stretch forth thine hand to destroy the Lord's
anointed?" As Shakespeare put it many centuries later,
252 

Not all the water in the rough, rude sea Can wash the balm from an
anointed king.

When a Jewish king was anointed by a priest or a prophet, he became a
person permanently set apart, as the stone Beth-el was; he was granted
the divine right of access to the throne because the oil expressed con-
tinuity and legitimacy. As king, he was permanently sacred and in-
violable, and he had it in his power to radiate peace, civilization,
and wisdom, and bring victory to Israel. In other words, the manifold
meanings of the olive tree and its oil are all aspects of the Jewish
idea of kingship.
Beginning with the Visigothic monarchs of Spain in the seventh century
AD, and continuing with Charlemagne, who was anointed emperor by the
Pope on Christmas Day, 800 AD, the medieval kings of Europe took over
intact all of the symbolism of the Old Testament for their rites of
coronation. King Solomon's anointing by Zadok has been especially
singled out for commemoration: the anthem "Zadok the Priest and Nathan
the Prophet" has been sung at every English coronation since 973 AD.
Olive oil became, together with the crown, the embodiment of kingly
authority. The consecrated oil also ensured that authority was not
wrested from the original holders and guardians of it: once again, the
olive tree and its fruits expressed continuity, in this case the
preservation of the status quo.
For not just any olive oil would do. It was related in medieval France
(the legend is believed to have been born in the ninth century) that
when King Clovis, or Louis the First, was baptised in 496, the press of
the crowd was such that the man with the oil had trouble reaching
Bishop Remi, who was waiting to complete the King's baptism by
anointing him. Suddenly the crowd saw a dove appear above the king; it
descended with a small pear-shaped flask of olive oil in its beak. This
was used to anoint Clovis and so initiate him into Christianity. When
Remi died, a church was built in his honour at Rheims. In the church
was preserved the original flask of oil, the Sainte Ampoule, as it was
called. The kings of France were forever to be anointed from that store
of oil (topped up at intervals: sacred oils do not dilute), and that
alone.
The legend of the Sainte Ampoule was a political device, and a
brilliant one. No upstart claimants to the throne could tear apart the
fabric of the state: the royal line would be continuous and exclusive.
Legitimacy depended upon the agreement of the powers (the Church and
those who could Persuade the Church) who controlled and guarded the
sacred
253

symbol of sovereignty, the irreplaceable Sainte Ampoule. At the corona-
tion of a French king, the procession of the Knights of the Sainte
Ampoule at dawn to get the flask was followed, in the great Cathedral
of Rheims, by the solemn showing of the flask to the people, and its
veneration. Then came the ritual anointing of the king on his head and
stomach, between his shoulders, on his right shoulder and his left,
under both his arms, at the elbow and the inner joint of each arm, and
on the palms of his hands. The king wore a special cloak with openings
at all these places. After the anointing the slits were closed up and
gloves drawn on over the king's oiled palms. (It was the anointing of
the royal hands with the sacred oil, a symbol of healing, which was
believed to give kings the power to heal scrofula by touch.)
The flask was smashed during the French Revolution at the sacking of
Rheims Cathedral, but a piece of it was salvaged. This was used at the
last French coronation, that of Charles x in 1825. The fragment of the
Sainte Ampoule was then retired from its long service, to the tomb of
St. Remi behind the high altar in the saint's Cathedral, where it
remains today.
Thomas a Becket had been driven into exile in France by King Henry II
of England when he received from the Virgin Mary a flask in the shape
of a golden eagle which contained sacred olive oil. This oil was
henceforth to anoint all the true kings and queens of Britain. Henry
II, anointed with oil which had no celestial origin, was by the same
token unacceptable to heaven. This "vision" was kept secret and the
golden eagle was hidden away for two hundred years. It came to light
only when the dream of a hermit led to its discovery - just in time to
anoint Henry IV as the rightful king of England. His predecessor,
Richard II, had been anointed, but with oil which had not come directly
from heaven.
Some sceptical people at the time thought that the legend and the oil
had been invented in order to support Henry's dubious claims to the
throne, and to compare Richard with Thomas a Becket's enemy, Henry II.
Some malicious chroniclers even reported that the miraculous unction
gave Henry Iv head-lice. But the golden eagle, known as the Ampulla,
has been employed in England for every royal anointing since 1399. The
Ampulla and the ancient ritual Oil Spoon were among the few objects of
the regalia to survive the Civil War in England in the seventeenth
century. They are both now to be seen in the Tower of London.
A bitter conflict arose during the twelfth century over the increasing
254 

insistence of kings that they were in some sense priests as well as
temporal rulers: that anointing and coronation constituted a sacrament.
In the early thirteenth century Pope Innocent III decreed that there
was a difference between bishops and kings, and he tried to insist that
bishops could be anointed on the head with chrism (consecrated olive
oil mixed with scented balsam), while kings received simple unscented
olive oil on their arms and shoulders only. (The English and the French
blatantly ignored the Pope and continued to anoint kings on their
heads.) The coronation ceremony was further said, by Pope John XXII, to
lack the permanent mark on the soul which priestly ordination con-
ferred. This was potentially very damaging, because it suggested that
kings could be unmade, whereas one of the chief meanings of anointing
had always been that they could not. The details may appear to be
merely picturesque, but they represent a deadly serious battle for the
right of the Church to confer or withhold authority, over whether
temporal authority should be thought absolute at all, and over the
power of kings to interfere in what the Church saw as its own domain.
Anointing today is almost entirely restricted to religious symbolism,
and even there its role is often largely traditional and either
misunderstood or greatly reduced in meaning for many people. The modern
secular state has no truck with absolutes such as inviolability and in-
delibility: our political ideals have rather to do with reducing the
claim of anything or anybody to be unique or irreplaceable, while value
is expressed as far as possible by means of money. We are committed to
mobility and change, and these must always militate against both con-
tinuity and irrevocable status. The idea of things or persons being
sacrosanct or "set apart" is not a feature of our mythology- not con-
sciously or officially, that is. The imagery associated with the olive
tree has, therefore, tended in modern times to limit itself to
intimations of virtue (peace, strength, wisdom), and to be downplayed
as a mark of permanent initiation and of exclusive and unquestionable
status.

FROM GREASY TO MONO-UNSATURATED

The peoples of northern Europe belong to the butter cultures: sauces
are traditionally made with cream, salads are dressed with salad-cream
or even cold sugared water, and vegetables are often boiled because
butter burns at a lower temperature than oil does, and is therefore
unsuitable for long pan-frying. The olive-oil cultures to the south
have
255

traditionally distrusted and despised butter. As we saw in Chapter 3
the ancient Greeks thought the barbarians who ate butter were primitive
and weird; the Japanese complained that butter-eaters stank. Plutarch
tells us that when a Spartan lady paid a visit to Berenice, the wife of
Deiotaros, one of them smelled so much of scented olive oil and the
other of butter that neither of them could endure the other. For the
opposite is equally true: the English have long shuddered at southern
European food, calling it greasy, "reeking" with garlic, and "swimming
in olive oil." Olive oil and garlic in combination was, of course,
almost hilariously dreadful.
One typical story among many of how the image of olive oil has recently
changed for people whose cuisine was traditionally based on butter, is
associated with the history of the Greeks who came relatively late to
North America, arriving in large numbers only after 1905. These people
imported olives, olive oil, sharp cheeses and feta, spices, and dried
figs for their own use: they had heard from the earlier GreekAmericans
that these things would be hard to find in their new country. (The
Creoles of New Orleans were an exception: they had always brought in
plenty of olive oil, together with other French foods, for themselves.)
According to R. J. Theodorakis, who has studied the evolution of Greek
cookbooks in the United States, the new Greek-Americans' eating habits,
together with their religious rites and language, kept them very
isolated as a group for several decades.
Nevertheless, many Greek-Americans became cafe-owners, quickly learning
what their clientele would find acceptable. They carefully censored
their menus, keeping such intensely national and strong-tasting dishes
as skordalia (olive oil and garlic) a secret, to be shared only in
their own houses, among themselves. Before 1960, cookbooks written for
Greek-Americans regularly warned their readers not to eat skordalia
before going out into the Anglo-Saxon world. The immigrants did,
however, introduce a few dishes which pleased and educated American
palates: the hand-held shish-kebab, or meat on a stick, for instance,
was cheap, fast, and acceptably "interesting," with its flavourings of
oregano, rosemary, lemon, marjoram, and bay leaves.
After the invasion of northern Greece in 1940, Greeks went to the
United States in steadily increasing numbers. It was difficult to get
olive oil during the war, so they used American cottonseed, peanut, and
corn oils in their cooking. The result was that many more Americans
began to eat and like Greek food. Greeks, on the other hand, began to
adopt
256 

American ways, shifting away from eating organ meats and the goat
(taboo and rare in America), learning to like more "northern" dishes,
and cutting down on oil for the purposes of slimming.
American acceptance of southern cuisine accelerated in the 1960S.
Garlic arrived. "Ethnic" cooking was increasingly perceived by middle-
class North Americans in general as alluring rather than revolting; ad-
venturousness became good taste. Experimentation with "Mediterranean"
foods (beyond the already acceptable shish-kebab), began in the Greek
case with stifado, a stew with herbs and spices, from which all traces
of oil could be meticulously removed before eating. Moussaka (almost
unknown before the 1950S, when North America first took an interest in
the eggplant and eventually began growing it) was suddenly on every
open-minded, sensuous and hearty, intelligently money-saving table.
Greek and other Mediterranean dishes required oil, not butter, and
Americans quickly learned to like oil; a taste for olive oil in
particular grew simultaneously, quietly, and naturally. Skordalia was
brought out of hiding; it was soon being referred to in cookbooks as
nothing more sinister than "a zesty sauce."
Disapproval of oil entirely on grounds of taste (finding oil "disgust-
ing") still lingers among people of northern European descent, but in
North America, the middle classes have on the whole become unprece-
dentedly eclectic about food: oil, like garlic, is now perfectly
acceptable. Oil actually has an advantage over butter: it is largely
"unsaturated" and therefore believed to be healthier.
It was first suggested by scientists in the 1950S that daily
consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids (known in the journals as
PUFA) might actually lower blood cholesterol; and high blood
cholesterol was known to be one important factor contributing to the
risk of coronary heart disease. People began to turn from butter to
margarine (the restrictions on the appearance of which had been lifted
in 1950). Margarine was partly made of seed-oils whose fat is
polyunsaturated, unlike saturated and cholesterol-carrying butter.
Soya, corn, and sunflower-seed oils in particular could boast 55 per
cent PUFA, and no cholesterol at all.
The most recent research (Mattson and Grundy, 1985) begins from a new
realization that habitual large intakes of polyunsaturated fats may
not, in fact, be healthy. Experiments in which animals were fed on it
resulted in cancer. The composition of cell membranes has been shown to
be altered by polyunsaturated fats, and the risk of gallstones may be
257

increased. There are two types of lipoproteins: high density (HDL) and
low density (LDL). While it may be beneficial to lower the incidence of
LDL, it is not desirable to cut down on HDL. Polyunsaturated fats
reduce both.
Saturated fat molecules are chains of carbon atoms which connect with
hydrogen atoms until no more hydrogen or any other gas can be
accommodated. (One reason for artificially saturating fat, as in mar-
garine, is to prevent oxygen getting in and turning the fat rancid.)
Polyunsaturated fat (with linoleic acid) has room for four or more
additional hydrogen atoms per molecule. In between polyunsaturated and
saturated fats is an intermediate type: that containing oleic acid. The
fat is called mono-unsaturated, because it has only one double bond
(polyunsaturated fat has several: saturated fat has none) and can
absorb two additional hydrogen atoms per molecule. Olive oil is a
mono-unsaturated fat.
Until now, mono-unsaturated fat has been largely ignored in the great
cholesterol debate. It has been called neutral or intermediate in
effect and lumped with saturated fats: people have been advised quite
often to avoid it wherever it is possible to choose a polyunsaturated
substitute. Experiments have now suggested, however, that mono-
unsaturated oil may well be the "healthiest" choice of all.
Oleic acid, according to these experiments, reduces total LDL cho-
lesterol (the "bad" kind) as the polyunsaturates do, but it reduces the
"good" HDL appreciably less. It has long been known that mammals form
mono-unsaturated fat in their bodies by directly removing two hydrogen
atoms from saturated chains. It is also known that people from the
Mediterranean region have a curiously low rate of cardiovascular
disease. One reason for this may be their preference for mono-
unsaturated olive oil.
This kind of research can produce great problems for the food industry:
just when margarine was getting its powerful polyunsaturated message
across, along comes olive oil to snatch away the prize. To make matters
worse, olive oil has come a long way in public esteem lately if health
can be related to a product already considered to be a luxury, there is
no telling how far the product could run. But the polyunsaturated oil
men need not despair, for chemistry can still save them: if the public
should become determined to buy mono-unsaturated oil, they can quite
easily add some hydrogen to their oil, lose a double
258 

bond or two, and soya oil or corn oil too could end up monounsaturated-
and still be much cheaper than olive oil. The only problem remaining
would be the hopelessly complex flavour of olive oil, and the public's
growing predilection for it.
259

CHAPTER EIGHT

Lemon Juice: A Sour Note

THE ACID JUICE of a lemon arouses our taste-buds, sensitizes them,
and causes our mouths to salivate on the instant. Indeed, once we have
known the taste of a lemon we never forget it and are liable to
salivate at the very sight of anybody sucking one. It is said that a
small boy with the aid of one lemon can reduce a brass band to helpless
mouth-watering incompetence in a matter of minutes. When behavioural
scientists (who claim to have shown that introverts salivate more in
response to lemon juice than extroverts do) conduct salivation experi-
ments, they have to hide the fruit away because subjects seeing a lemon
in addition to tasting one are liable to react in a manner which ruins
the saliva measurements.
The surprise of the sour on the human tongue inspired Plato (who had,
of course, no knowledge of the nervous system) to speculate that it
must arise from the action of extremely fine particles which lock into
and mobilize cubical and octohedron-shaped granules in the tongue,
260 

churning them about and turning them into frothy bubbles. This dis-
turbance must have been what communicated the powerful "acid" message
to the heart, where Plato thought, reasonably enough, that we probably
registered the sense of taste. Modern scientists tell us that sour
things have a strong concentration of protons, which are active and
mobile particles bearing a positive electrical charge. These, when on
the loose, attach themselves quickly to nearby molecules and im-
mediately change them. The tongue, nerves, and brain interpret proton
concentration and activity in terms of what we call the sensation of
sourness.
A few drops of sour lemon juice can tweak us into a heightened
awareness and appreciation of a myriad different flavours. Almost
everything we eat contains at least a tiny amount of acid, or we would
find it insipid. Lemon juice or a twist of lemon peel can intensify the
savour of vegetables, meat, staple grains, and sweet dishes; enlivening
everything from cabbage to fish and ice cream, and all kinds of drinks
from gin or pop to tea and coffee. Our simple lettuce salad, "raised,"
as the French put it, with salt, and accompanied by rich, complicated,
smooth olive oil, and lemon juice, sharp and rousing, turns into one of
the great irreplaceable culinary classics.
The yellow, oval, nippled shape of the lemon is both attractive and
utterly unmistakeable: an image-creator's dream. Because its beauty
conceals a sour interior, we describe a car as a "lemon" if it looked
good when it was bought, but gave us an unpleasant surprise later. (The
Citroen automobile people do not emphasize the fact that their
product's name means "lemon.") But the comparison is unfair: we buy a
lemon precisely for its endlessly useful acid juice; we would be very
annoyed to find it sweet inside. Handy in size, available all year
round, inexpensive, long-lasting, and perfectly packaged in a tough
skin which is as valuable as the juice it contains, a lemon is the
ideal household implement, an honorable standard against which all
patented inventions might be measured. A modern kitchen without a lemon
in it is gravely ill-equipped. "Life is a difficult thing in the
country," exclaimed Sydney Smith in early nineteenth-century England,
"and it requires a good deal of forethought to steer the ship, when you
live twelve miles from a lemon."
261

THE GROWTH AND SPREAD OF THE LEMON AND ITS TRIBE

Oranges, lemons, mandarins, grapefruit, limes, pomelos, kumquats, and
citrons are the main categories of citrus fruit. Many of us are
familiar with hybrid forms, such as the tangelo (mandarin/grapefruit or
mandarin/pomelo), the tangor, the chief variety of which is temple
(mandarin/orange), the Meyer (presumed to be lemon/orange), or the
greenhouse ponderosa (lemon/citron) and calamondin (sour mandarin/
kumquat). The grapefruit itself, which has only been cultivated since
the 1750S iS thought to have been a mutation of the pomelo, or perhaps
a hybrid of the pomelo with some other as yet unidentified citrus form.
Human beings have selected and bred all these fruits, and honoured them
with names. There are in the world endless varieties of citrus fruit,
bred from mixtures among species which number from 8 to 145, depending
on the categorizations used by botanical authorities: these plants
hybridize with exceptional readiness. In addition, citrus seeds are
liable to what is called nucellar embryony: some of them (all of them
in some types) contain more than one embryo, and grow several seedlings
- all of which might be very different from one another. It is
impossible to foretell the characteristics of fruit from a citrus tree
grown from seed, until the first fruit ripens.
Outside the huge controlled citrus farms, in places where citrus is
plentiful and people take life easy, most people simply learn what va-
rieties and flavours are available on the trees growing near by, and
make arrangements with the owners to have access to the kinds they
like. It might be difficult to know quite what to call any particular
fruit; modern commercial names like "limequat" and "citrangequat" give
some idea of the complications. What all this means is that the history
of various kinds of citrus fruit is very muddled indeed until recent
times: when ancient writers refer to a citrus fruit by one name or
another, we cannot know precisely which form they mean.
The ancient Greeks, for instance, called any strange fruit an apple,
distinguishing it only by the name of the country they believed it came
from, until it became familiar to them. It is still common for people
to think of the ancient Greek myth of the Golden Apples of the
Hesperides as concerning oranges or lemons. The Greeks themselves
suggested this possibility, at about the time of Christ, when citrus
fruit was first becoming well known in the Mediterranean region. The
conjecture seems unlikely to be correct, however, because for one thing
early Greek
262 

artists appear to have been quite happy to think of the wonderful
Golden Apples as quinces, and for another the nymphs called Hesperides
lived (as their name suggests) in the west, and it now seems certain
that citrus fruit originated in the region of the Himalayas.
Did citrus fruit come from northern India or from south-central China?
Both countries claim precedence, each with some justification.
According to the explorations of the Japanese botanist T. Tanaka in the
1920S and 1930S, most cultivated citrus originates from a small area in
Assam and northern Burma, and radiated from there to China, India, and
Malaysia. The kumquat was, until relatively recent times, unique to
China and Japan; and it is thought that the rest of the "orange" citrus
strain evolved in China too: bitter oranges, mandarins, sweet oranges,
and the Poncirus or trifoliate orange. Malaysia seems to be the
producer of limes, pomelos, and their relatives. India is the most
likely source of the citrons, some types of the bitter orange, and
lemons. An earring in the shape of a lemon, or perhaps a citron (from
about 2000 BC), was found at Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley.
The first known reference to the lemon in Chinese literature, on the
other hand, dates from as late as 1175 AD, when Fan Ch'en-ta described
what he called the li-mung as "the size of a large plum . . . it
resembles a small orange and is exceedingly sour to the taste." His
words imply that oranges were common in China, as were plums, but
lemons (if the li-mung was a lemon) were new. A Chinese emperor was
solemnly presented with two bottles of what might have been lemon
juice, also during the Sung period; and again this juice must have been
rare in order to have been chosen as a royal gift.
A very early spreading of citrus to the three Asian centres must,
according to this theory, have been followed by almost no exchange
among them for many centuries, during which time the main citrus
strains were developed in separation. No lemons of the common Medi-
terranean type have been found growing wild in any of those regions -
or elsewhere; the lemon is, therefore, thought to be a relatively late
hybrid, one of whose constituent strains is certainly the citron.
Citrus fruit of the Indian (lemon-citron) type was growing in Iraq in
the third millennium BC, if the dating of a find at Nippur of citron or
lemon seeds is correct. A very early contact by sea between the Indus
Valley and the Mesopotamian civilizations has been proven: citrus fruit
could well have arrived in the Fertile Crescent from India via this
route.
The citron, which is commonly believed to have provided some of
263

the lemon's ancestry, is a knobbly, oval yellow fruit, usually between
ten and twenty centimetres (4 to 8 ins.) long - though it has been
known to grow until it weighs between three and a half and nine
kilograms (8 and 20 lbs.)-with a protuberant nipple like a lemon. The
tree, like the lemon tree, flowers all year round and is highly
susceptible to frost. Its flesh is very scanty, most of the fruit's
girth being taken up by white pith an inch or more thick. This skin is
made into an aromatic candied peel, which constitutes the fruit's main
value today. Most of the world's commercial citrons are now grown in
Tunisia and in Puerto Rico. On the island of Corsica, a liqueur called
Cedratine, made from citrons, is a traditional speciality.
The Jews called this fruit an etrog, and still use branches of the tree
and its fruits symbolically, together with myrtles, palms, and willows,
in their annual harvest Festival of Booths. They interpreted a passage
in the Book of Leviticus which speaks of the "goodly tree" as referring
to the etro,g. Controversy has raged over when the Jews adopted the
etro,g as the "goodly tree." Did they come into contact with it for the
first time in Babylon during their exile there (586 - 539 BC) ? The
Hebrew names for the fruit appear to have Assyrian and Persian origins,
but Palestine could have received the citron from the east long before
the sixth century BC. Some think it could have come from southern
Arabia; there is even one theory that citrus fruit actually originated
in the Arabian peninsula and spread from there. The idea that the
Biblical "goodly tree" was some other plant entirely, and that the
citron replaced it in ritual later, is discounted by many investigators
on the grounds that the Jews were extremely conservative in matters
concerning religious tradition.
But whenever and wherever the Jews found and adopted the citron, it
became for them a fruit of enormous significance. Use of it distin-
guished Judaic harvest rituals from those of all the other religions of
the Middle East. The etro,g became for the Jews a kind of symbol of
national and religious identity. After they rebelled against Rome in 66
AD they were dispersed to various parts of the Roman Empire. Wherever
they went they planted citrons, so that supplies would always be
available for the harvest festival; it seems reasonable to suppose that
oranges and lemons were cultivated in association with the etrogim. For
ritual purposes citrons had to be from an ungrafted tree, of a certain
size and shape, fresh and unblemished. A great many of them had to be
grown in order for a few to be found perfect; the rest were presuma
264 

bly sold in local markets. The Jews were famous for their horticultural
expertise in the first centuries AD they planted orchards round the
great cities in Spain, and worked the lands-partly for the benefit of
their own community- round Alexandria. In this manner they were respon-
sible for spreading citrus plantings around the Mediterranean.
Italy seems to have received its first citron trees, and probably other
citrus varieties as well, in the first century BC perhaps from
Alexandria just before and after the annexation of Egypt by the Roman
Empire in 30 BC The Greeks had always referred to citrus fruit vaguely
as "Persian" and "Median" apples. The Romans followed their lead, until
about the middle of the first century AD when they, and then the
Greeks, began calling the citron citreum, cedrium, and other similar
terms. The reason for this is a mystery: there seems to have been some
confusion between the very different cedar (cedrus) and the citron.
Among several theories accounting for it, perhaps the most likely is
that the aromatic quality of the trees' wood was what these two species
were perceived to have in common. The implication seems to be that the
Romans had citrus trees but usually failed to get them to fruit; they
grew them for their exotic scent and their wood, the smell of which was
thought to discourage moths. In a fresco of the Villa of Livia at Prima
Porta (38 BC) a tree carefully enough painted to be recognizable as
citrus is provided with quinces, presumably to replace the fruit which
had not matured. Oranges, lemons, limes, and citrons were all known to
the Romans, for we see the fruit depicted on several mosaics, paintings
and basreliefs. Citrus fruit remained rare, however, and perhaps mainly
confined in Italy to the gardens of the rich.
What is certain is that all traces of citrus fruit other than the
citron, which survived owing to its religious importance for the Jews,
died out after the Barbarian invasions of Italy from the end of the
fourth to the sixth centuries AD The Arabs and Persians continued to
cultivate citrus fruit, but it did not spread to the west again until
after Islam was founded (sixth century AD) and began its conquests in
the Mediterranean Basin. The oranges which the Arabs brought with them
from Persia and Mesopotamia, and from their forays into India in the
eighth century, were bitter. Sweet oranges were discovered in China and
brought to Europe for the first time by the Portuguese in the sixteenth
century: there is in addition one reference to a sweet orange in Sicily
in 1480
The Arabs cultivated citrus trees as ornamental plants, especially de-
lighting in the scent of their leaves, flowers, and fruit. They
shredded
265

the ends of twigs from orange, lemon, and other aromatic trees and used
them as disposable toothbrushes. They ate citrus fruits raw and
sweetened, candied the peel, and preserved bitter Seville oranges and
their skins in sugar (the ancestor of our marmalade), and lemons in
brine (a practice which remains one of the characteristic specialities
of Moroccan cuisine). Citrus oil was a favourite perfume, and went into
soaps and medicines. The Patio of the Oranges was planted at the Great
Mosque of Cordoba in southern Spain in 976; the courtyards of the
Alhambra in Granada were filled with oranges and lemons. After this,
citrus trees became favourite plantings in Spanish mosques, and then in
palaces, cloisters, and kitchen gardens throughout the Mediterranean
world. Huge citrus plantations were created in Spain. It is thought to
have been under the Normans in the twelfth century that Sicily, which
is still the world's largest producer of lemons, received its first
lemon tree.

THE LIFE OF LEMONS

The first clear literary reference to lemons is, as far as we know, an
Arab document of the early tenth century, where the laimun tree is said
to be very sensitive to cold. After citrons and limes, lemons are the
most vulnerable of the citrus fruits to frost. Ripe fruit on the tree
is
destroyed by a temperature of -1øC (30øF); even immature lemons
suffer internal drying at - 3øC (26øF) and the trees which bear them
can take only four more degrees (Celsius) of frost. The lemon is a sub-
tropical tree, and the fruit in its natural habitat is green in colour
even when ripe, and scarcely sour at all. The "orange" family of citrus
fruits show by their behaviour that they come from semi-tropical
climes, further north and cooler than the sub-tropical home of green,
sweetish lemons.
The warm, humid climate of northern India, where lemons most probably
came from, almost never gets colder than 10øC (50øF) But the quality of
acidity which we prize in the lemon, and also what we think of as its
characteristic colour, develop only when the fruit gets
cold (though not freezing) from time to time; less than 10øC (50øF) iS
needed to begin decomposition of the chlorophyll in the peel. If we
want lemons sour and bright yellow we are compelled to grow them quite
close to their threshold of cold tolerance, which is why lemons
266 

can be "tricky" trees. Modern lemon plantations are provided with wind
machines and oil-burning orchard heaters in case of frost; personnel
must constantly monitor temperatures and weather predictions, and
maintain readiness to adjust the heat in the groves artificially at any
moment. The cost of heating has become so heavy recently that low -
energy methods are under study; running water in furrows and under tree
sprinklers can provide some protection from frost.
Lemon trees love plenty of water, but not a lot of rain: if the fruit
gets wet its skin becomes puffy and prone to disease. The reason is
thought to be that lemon trees evolved in forests where they lived in
the shade of larger trees, so that little water actually fell on the
lemons. The trees' trunks and branches are extremely sensitive to
sunburn: in certain climates their limbs have to be protected by being
wrapped against the sun, or painted white to coat them and reflect the
light and heat off their bark. They have a very shallow root system for
their size, and they need more fertilizer than most crops; again these
characteristics are thought to have developed because of their origin
in rich forest soil.
The lemon tree (citrus limon), like the closely-related citron (citrus
medica), has purple buds and white flowers tinged with purple. It
blooms and fruits all year round if the temperature is ideal: a tree
often bears buds and flowers (white and purple), developing fruit
(green to silvery) and mature fruit (yellow) all at the same time. The
flowers, only 10 per cent of which actually set fruit, usually grow in
clusters; each one may be accompanied by a single thorn. The lemon tree
is naturally upright and spreading; its overall shape, like its fruit,
is oval rather than round like the bushy orange tree and its spherical
progeny. Lemon trees, unlike orange trees, have to be severely pruned
every year, a labour-intensive and costly process which is necessary to
encourage fruiting.
Citrus trees are evergreen, and the number of their leaves is directly
related to the amount of fruit they produce, for the leaves manufacture
the trees' food and help store any excess. Lemon leaves are paler than
orange leaves, and, like them, dotted with tiny sacs containing
volatile aromatic oil. The sacs can be seen by the naked eye if you
hold a leaf up to the light; they burst and release their fragrance
when the leaf is crushed. The leaves of all citrus trees contain
d-limonene, which means that orange, grapefruit, or tangerine leaves
all smell of lemon. Lemon leaves breathe on their under-sides, which is
a highly useful trait when the environment is dusty.
267

A lemon is actually a large and rather unusual berry, of the type
known, after the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, as a hesperidium. It
has concentrated the solidity of the pulp of ordinary berries in its
leathery rind, and given over its interior to membrane and juice. It is
the outer rind, the.Jlavedo, which turns yellow in cold conditions. The
inner spongy white pith is the albedo, enclosing between ten and
thirteen membrane-covered compartments containing vesicles full of
greenishyellow juice. There may be up to eight seeds, or none. The
lavedo (from the Latin for "yellow") is dotted with oil sacs which are
self-contained and without communication with surrounding cells or the
fruit's exterior; this enclosure preserves the oil until its volatile
fragrance is released when the peel is pressed or cut.
In North America and Europe the peel of citrus fruit is used quite
differently from the flesh: we eat it only when it has been grated or
cut in tiny pieces and mixed with herbs to be sprinkled over food, or
we soak a twist of it in liquid as a flavouring. In other cultures, in
Africa for instance, citrus fruit is quite commonly eaten whole,
without peeling: it would be considered a waste to forgo the strong
sensations afforded by the rind. Ripe tropical lemons are much less
acid than ours, so that lemons as well as oranges can be eaten whole.
In Athol Fugard's play, The Island, an African eats an orange whole; at
the play's opening night in London, the audience sat coolly through the
nude scenes on stage, but there were gasps of horror at the sight of a
man enjoying a whole unpeeled orange.
Citrus fruits comprise the third-largest fruit crop on earth, after
grapes and bananas. About 10 per cent of them are lemons and limes
(which for some reason are not differentiated in world citrus
statistics); most of the rest are oranges. There has been an enormous
increase in worldwide lemon production, which more than doubled between
the 1930S and the 1960S. Today about three million tons of lemons are
grown annually, roughly two-thirds of them in Italy and the United
States. The rest are grown in the Mediterranean region and in Mexico,
Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Australia, and South Africa. Unknown
quantities of lemons are raised for personal and non-commercial use,
mainly in Africa, India, and the non-Mediterranean Middle East.
Nearly all the lemons in North America are grown in California. Florida
tried hard to achieve commercially viable results in lemonraising, but
periodic frosts, in particular the disasters of 1835 and 1895, killed
off the plantations. Some lemons are now grown in the southern
268 

part of the state, but the semi-tropical climate and the humidity of
the Florida peninsula easily cause lemons to become puffy and
relatively tasteless; their colour is never as brilliant as that of
fruit grown on the cool, sub-tropical coastlands of southern
California.
A wider daily temperature fluctuation gives all California's citrus
brighter colouring, thicker rinds, and more of both sugar and acid than
Florida fruit, which is rounder, juicier, and thinner-skinned. Oranges
with an inherently high acid content may be too acid for many people's
taste when grown in California, whereas Florida lemons may not be acid
enough. It has been found practical and economical for California to
grow most of the citrus eaten fresh and whole in North America. The
thicker rinds of its fruit are an added advantage, providing extra
protection for the transport of fruit across the continent. Florida
provides the huge quantities (mainly of oranges) demanded for the juice
and concentrate market, and for processing generally.
When the Spanish ceded Florida to the United States in 1821, they left
behind them many wild citrus trees which had escaped from the
plantations and could survive the sudden Florida frosts. Among these
were various kinds of sour oranges and rough lemons: the latter tall
trees covered with small thorns, bearing large, unpleasant-tasting lem-
ons with thick skins and rough nipples. The rough lemon is believed to
have been brought from India by Vasco da Gama or his Portuguese
successors in the sixteenth century and planted where it is now found,
in Africa and America.
Citrus trees, especially lemons, when raised from seed are ferociously
thorny and take fifteen years to begin producing fruit; buds grafted
onto already growing rootstock, however, begin to bear within five
years and are far less prickly. Because of this, and because of the un-
predictability of citrus fruit when the parent tree has been grown from
seed, modern plantations invariably propagate their trees by budding or
grafting fruit-bearers of known excellence onto rootstock, which should
be tough and resistant to cold and disease. Oranges develop the finest,
slightly acid taste when their rootstock is sour orange, but sour
orange trees have been found to be subject to tristeza or "quick
decline," a serious and so far almost untreatable citrus disease which
is dreaded all over the world. Rough lemon rootstock gives an orange
with less of the acidity required for the finest taste, but with
resistance to tristeza as well as to drought. In addition rough lemon
roots cause oranges to bear more fruit. For these reasons rough lemon
is today the rootstock
269

of millions of orange trees, especially in North and South America.
Rootstock is toughest when it has grown from seed; Seminole Indians,
who received citrus stock from the early Spanish missions, still pick
rough lemon fruit, much of it growing wild in the Everglades, and sell
it for rootstock seed to the giant orange corporations of Florida.
California lemons are budded onto orange rootstock because orange trees
are far sturdier than lemon trees being grown for acid fruit, and less
prone to crown- and root-rot diseases. Lemons grown from seed are also
the most unpredictable of the already erratic citrus tribe. Sweet
orange, grapefruit, mandarin, sour orange, and tangelo stock are all
used to support lemon scions.
There are twenty-one officially named kinds of lemon. Verna makes up go
per cent of the lemon production of Murcia in Spain; Femminello Ovale
is 75 per cent of that from Italy. The two main varieties grown in
California (and therefore the two commercially available throughout
North America) are Lisbon, originally from Portugal but introduced into
California from Australia in 1874, and Eureka, which was propagated
from a single tree discovered in California in 1858.
The Eureka lemon is very similar to the Lisbon, but its tree is smaller
and almost thornless, making the fruit especially easy to pick. An ex-
tremely important point is that it stores well. Both Eureka and Lisbon
produce medium-sized fruit, very yellow, highly acid, and containing
few seeds. A close relative which used to be grown a good deal in
California, the Villafranca, has been almost abandoned now because it
takes one year longer to bear than the two winners in the highly com-
petitive commercial stakes. Eureka predominates two to one in the
coastal regions; most of its fruit tends to mature in summer when
demand is highest. Lisbon withstands frost, heat, and wind better, and
is chosen for inland locations; its shorter, though heavier, main
harvest is picked mostly in the fall and winter. The two types of lemon
are hard to tell apart, except that a dimple or crease at one side of
the nipple probably (but by no means certainly) means it's a Lisbon.
A lemon tastes best when it has been left to turn fully yellow on the
tree and is picked as soon as possible after that. Anyone who can
obtain such a lemon is fortunate indeed; it would be almost worth
moving somewhere with a citrus-growing climate or buying a greenhouse
just to be able to control one's fate in this respect. For most people
outside the tropics, lemons have to be bought in grocery stores and in
supermarkets. They have deliberately been picked green, when the acid
con
270 

tent is highest; the acid is what makes ripe lemons last longer in
storage than almost any other fruit, and immature lemons are more
indestructable still.
Lemon-pickers go over the trees as many as six times a year, carrying
five-centimetre (2 in.) ring gauges and taking from the tree only green
lemons too large to pass through the ring. (Any yellow fruit is im-
mediately processed or used locally.) They wear gloves to protect them-
selves from thorns, and take care not to scratch or bruise the peel in
any way; fruit on the tree has a tender skin which can be damaged by
the merest scrape of a fingernail. It must never be picked wet, because
a wet lemon's rind is turgid and extremely easy to spoil by the release
of its oil when pressure is applied. The eighty-eight kilogram (194
Lb.) picking sacks for lemons are especially designed to allow gentle
emptying from the bottom into boxes for transport to the storage sheds.
Green lemons have an FRF (Fruit Removal Force) of as much as nine
kilograms (20 Lb.) or more; this means that picking must be done by
hand, with the aid of clippers. Research is being done into ways of
chemically lowering the FRF of citrus trees in general, so that
mechanical shakers or water hoses can be used to bring down the fruit.
To date, the work remains manual, however: lemons in particular are
especially hard to dislodge because they are not allowed to ripen on
the tree, and would be at great risk of damage from their own thorns if
shaken down. Moreover, the chemicals in question hasten the aging of
the peel and reduce its resistance to decay. Pesticide use is also a
problem for lemon growers, because the tree is never stripped of all
its fruit: renewed applications of chemicals mean repeated doses for
the lemons at their various stages of development.
Citrus, unlike most deciduous fruit, does not continue to ripen once
severed from the tree. The next stage, "curing" the lemons, is carried
out for aesthetic reasons alone and makes no difference to the juice
inside. The lemons are washed and brushed and then made to turn yellow
by being treated with ethylene oxide. The process was once known as
"gassing," but "degreening" and "curing" have been judged to have less
sinister connotations; "gassing" has therefore been dropped from the
fruit-growers' terminology. Ethylene gas "degreens" by loosening the
thin membrane that separates chlorophyll from its associated enzyme,
chlorophyllase. This enzyme destroys chlorophyll on contact, leaving
only the carotenoid pigment, lemon yellow. Ethylene gas is given off by
many ripening fruits, so that this particular manipulation
271

is considered to be almost natural; green lemons closeted with lots of
ripening bananas, for instance, will turn yellow in a day or so.
Lemons are kept at the ideal temperature of 14øC (58øF) until needed
for sale, often between three and six months after they have been
picked. As they age, their skins become harder and more resistant to
injury during transport. They are dipped in solutions containing
copper, sodium carbonate, and other fungicides, and given a coat of wax
to replace that lost in the scrubbing. This helps them withstand water
loss, and keeps them looking shiny. Care has to be taken not to apply
too much wax, for it would suffocate the lemons and ruin the taste of
the juice. The tissue wrappers and cartons in which the fruit is packed
are also impregnated with bactericides.
Before the invention and establishment of the processes of refrigera-
tion and efficient rail transport, even the sturdy lemon was hard to
obtain and expensive in cold northern countries. One ingenious answer
to part of this problem was the creation of the lemon pavilions of Lake
Garda in Italy, the northern-most citrus-growing plantations in the
world. The lake is deep and itself a warming influence, and the lie of
the surrounding land, which includes mountains screening off the cold
of the Alps, creates a mild enclave. Even this is too cold for lemons,
however, since temperatures drop below 0øc (32øF) for about twentyone
days in the year. The solution adopted for this problem was a cheaper
version of the glassed-in galleries known as orangeries which were all
the rage at French chateaux from the sixteenth century onwards.
The lemon gardens at Lake Garda were protected with high walls on three
sides. Concrete and stone pillars about ten metres (33 ft.) tall were
built at four-metre (13-ft.) intervals, with the trees growing between.
In November when the cold weather arrived, gardeners would cover the
sides and tops of the pavilions, fixing matting and wooden screens
across the tops of the pillars and the open side, to enclose the trees
completely. Glass panels let in some light; and stoves or fires were
carefully lit inside on the coldest nights. The trees, in this manner,
lived through the winter, and, the following April, the temporary parts
of the lemon houses could be dismantled. Each tree produced about six
hundred fruit a year, and would go on fruiting for over a century. The
fruit was sold throughout northern Italy, and over the Alps in Germany
and Austria.
This method of cultivating the lemon, one version of which is still
practised in the region of Sorrento, dated back at Garda to at least
1500,
272 

and has been traced to the influence of the Franciscan monastery at
Gargnano, founded in 1266. When D. H. Lawrence visited Lake Garda for
the first time in 1912, he was told that St. Francis of Assisi himself
had brought lemons to the region. He describes the lemon houses of
Garda in his book Twilight in Italy, and relates his discussion with a
worried proprietor who resented the threat to his trade of the lemons
already arriving in increasing numbers from the south. And yet this
very man, Lawrence thought bitterly, cared nothing for his beautiful
lake or for the sun; he wanted railways, machines, and riches. "He did
not know these mechanisms, their great, human-contrived, inhuman power,
and he wanted to know them." Apprehension about the seemingly
inevitable and probably ugly future results in a yearning for the past.
"I sat on the roof of the lemon-house," Lawrence continues, "with the
lake below and the snowy mountain opposite, and looked at the ruins on
the old, olive-fuming shores, at all the peace of the ancient world
still covered in sunshine, and the past seemed to me so lovely that one
must look towards it, backwards, only backwards, where there is peace
and beauty and no more dissonance."
Today lemon-pavilion colonnades still stand on the terraces above Lake
Garda, their light, regularly-spaced pillars reflecting in the water
and stitching serene patterns over the green mountainsides. They are a
unique and magical part of this famous landscape. But only a handful of
the pavilions still have lemons growing in them, and those only because
their owners do it for pleasure and to keep up the tradition. Sicilian
lemons have long ago put them all out of business. But there are
movements afoot to preserve the lemon-pillars, even without the
gardens, as a distinctive sight and a tourist attraction. Expensive
resort hotels in the area like to incorporate the lemon-pavilion "look"
into their architecture.
Lemons do play a role for people living in cold climates which cor-
responds to that of the faraway and longed-for Golden Apples of the
Hesperides of Greek myth. Imported lemons arrive in our shops from the
gardens of the fortunate south like golden missives from the sun
itself. Northern Europeans, and especially Germans, have for centuries
regarded the lemon juice, limone spremuta, of Lake Garda as their first
taste of the south after the journey down from the Alps. The heart-
stopping sight of the beautiful lake seemed to northerners like a
glimpse of paradise, which would later ripen in their minds as a
nostalgic and golden memory. For those who had only heard about it, the
imagined
273

splendour of this lake was symbolic of an equally ardent longing for
the Future or for the Past, or for Elsewhere. Goethe evoked instantly
the romantic desire of northerners for the south when he opened one of
his poems with the words, Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen bluhn?-
"Do you know the land where the lemon-trees bloom?"

LEMONADE, POP, AND PROCESSED JUICE

The people of northern Europe had no knowledge of lemons until the
Crusaders first tasted the fruit in the Holy Land at the end of the
twelfth century. Not long after this, ships arriving in England from
Spain and Portugal were including in their cargo a citrus sweet which
they called succade; the lemon variety of this confection was specified
as sitrenade. The fruit itself began to be regularly transported
northwards for sale a hundred years later. The sour principle in
cooking until then was supplied by tart fruits and leaves (crab apples,
sorrel, green gooseberries, quinces) and vinegar; sour grapes gave acid
verjuice. In France, the marchands d'aigrun sold everything sour, and
monopolized the sale of citrus fruit as soon as it became available.
Oranges, lemons, limes, and grapefruit are still called agrumes in
French, from aigre ("sour"), even though sweet oranges now comprise
most citrus in France as elsewhere.
One of the first uses for citrus fruit in northern European cooking was
as an accompaniment for meat; bitter oranges and lemons would be stewed
and served whole. Seville oranges were thought to be especially good
with fish, while lemons were served with poultry. Lemons were for a
long time unreliably acid; the earliest lemons mentioned in the north
were mostly the "sweet," that is only slightly acid, citrus limetta,
which the Sicilians called lumie. It is only in the eighteenth century
that lemon juice (by now dependably sour) begins to be named regularly
as an accompaniment for fish- a combination which today seems as
obvious to us as that of butter with corn.
The Mongols were the first people recorded (in 1299) as enjoying
lemonade (actually sweetened lemon-juice preserved with alcohol), al-
though others must have discovered the drink before them. The English
learned in India to like punch. The word comes from the Sanskrit for
"five" because of its five ingredients: alcohol (originally arrack),
tea, lemon juice (known in eighteenth-century England as "rob of
lemons"), water, and sugar or honey. "Shrub," perhaps from the Arabic
word
274 

sharbia, "drink," which also becomes "sherbet," was another popular
English drink. It was made of brandy, white wine, lemon juice and peel,
and sugar.
In the seventeenth century sugar became increasingly available in
northern Europe, being shipped in from the new plantations in the West
Indies. A fashion arose in France for lemon juice sugared and diluted
in water. Limonadiers, who carried this drink in metal containers on
their backs to sell it in the streets, became a familiar sight in
Paris, much as fruit juice and water-sellers are today in Istanbul,
Damascus, and other cities of the Middle East. Regular shipments of
tropical fruit began to arrive in England from British colonies as well
as from southern Europe; in 1703 oranges and lemons were being sold in
the streets of London from "moveable shops that run upon wheels,
attended by illlooking Fellows." Oranges were a favourite snack, sold
by female vendors at the theatres; Nell Gwynn, the mistress of King
Charles II, was once an "orange girl."
A few drops of vinegar had always been added to water by the itinerant
water-sellers, to help quench thirst; but sweetened lemonade was far
more pleasing, though few people could afford it at first because both
lemons and sugar were imported and costly. Parisian food connoisseurs
at the same time added the claim, which has often been reiterated
since, that lemon juice in salad dressing was less likely than vinegar
to clash with the wine served at meals. (Lovers of vinegar in salad
dressings respond that vinegar provides a "more complex" taste.) The
vinaigriers of Paris began to see some of their trade being threatened;
and the matter became serious for them in 1630, when a sudden drop in
the price of sugar brought the price of lemonade down so that ordinary
people could buy it, and demand for it started to grow.
In 1676 the French government granted a patent or monopoly to the
lemonade men, creating a whole new guild, the Compa,gnie des Li7non-
adiers. They set up permanent shops on the streets of Paris, and,
together with the sellers of coffee and chocolate, gradually evolved
the cafe one of the great institutions of the modern city. Until the
midnineteenth century, the owners of Parisian cafes were often known
both officially and popularly as limonadiers.
Sometime in the eighteenth century, most probably in Switzerland, a
method was found of "impregnating factitious waters with fixed air." At
last it was possible to make ordinary water fizz, just as the delicious
waters did from healthful mineral springs. Like so many culinary revo
275

lutions, the birth of carbonated beverages was thought at first to bea
purely medicinal triumph; from the beginning carbonated quinine water
was called "tonic," and drunk as one would follow doctors' orders or
visit a spa. The next step was the sweetening of the "soda" water with
another technologically perfected wonder, sugar; finally fruit syrups
were created to be dissolved in the drink. Carbonated lemonade was one
of the first of these concoctions, since lemonade itself was already so
popular. At the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, more than a million
effervescent drinks were consumed, most of them soda water, ginger
beer, and lemonade.
In the United States, where soda fountains became huge baroque
architectural fantasies as well as centres for the social life of towns
and cities, the new fizzy drinks achieved a reputation even loftier
than that of a remedy for sickness: they were non-alcoholic, therefore
safe and pure; they were an alternative to Evil. Coca-Cola-which
started out as a medicine with a kick, combining extracts from the
Bolivian Indian stimulant leaf, coca (from which cocaine is derived),
and the African "Hell Seed," the kola nut-was advertised by its
inventor in 1886 as "the Intellectual Beverage and Temperance Drink."
It was sold by its first great promoter, the devout Methodist Asa
Griggs Candler, not only with the commercial instincts of a genius, but
also with absolutely sincere missionary zeal. It was a soft drink:
clean, wholesome, and entirely innocent. American medical journals
began their attacks on the ready availability of cocaine in 1899; and
very soon, in 1903, the Coca-Cola company without announcement removed
all trace of the drug from its product, using from then on only spent
(drugfree) coca leaves. The "healthy" image was quite sufficiently
intoxicating to the buying public; any hidden "kick" had become not
only redundant but a potential threat to the product's reputation.
"Pop" received its name in late nineteenth-century America. The word
referred to the popping of corks which occurred when bottles were
opened. In all probability pop has also come to connote in most
people's minds the first syllable of the word popular. North Americans
today annually consume 165 litres (36.3 Imperial gallons) of pop each -
that is more than a bottle a day for every man, woman, and child. The
amount has tripled since the 1950S; pOp was said to have replaced water
as America's favourite drink in 1983. Carbonated beverages contain
water, sugar or aspartame, natural and artificial flavourings, natural
and artificial colouring, acidifying agents, buffering agents,
emulsifying and
276 

stabilizing agents, viscosity-producing or viscosity-lessening agents,
foaming agents, and chemical preservatives. Several of the chemicals
involved are derived from citrus fruits, or were once extracted from
oranges and lemons but are now artificially synthesized.
Drinks containing predominantly lemon-lime flavours have long been
overtaken in popularity by cola pop: they comprise 12.7 per cent of the
American market, while the colas make up 63.2 per cent. The most famous
of the lemon-lime drinks, Seven-Up, was produced by a family-
owned-and-operated business until 1967. It began its career in 1929
with the unwieldy name, "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda," and was
sold, in the moral and medicinal tradition, as a hangover cure "for
home and hospital use." From the start, however, it was usually bought
as a mixer for various kinds of liquor. In 1968, Seven-Up began an
advertising campaign in which it proclaimed itself "the UnCola." Given
the role of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola in North American culture, this
distinction implied a rejection of the establishment which amounted
almost to profanity: it caught exactly the spirit of the rebellious
young in the late 1960S. Lemon-lime drinks jumped from third to second
place in North American sales, a spot they have held on to ever since.
Meanwhile, the idea of drinking fruit juices, an entirely different
experience from that of eating fruit, was becoming increasingly attrac-
tive. Fruit juice in a glass is cleaner and easier to consume than the
whole of the fruit; it is the refined and luxurious essence of the
thing, produced by previously performed fastidious effort, like
de-boned chicken or strained consomme. Perfectionist middle-class
nineteenth-century households, with their high standards of both
decency and comfort, demanded more and more lemonade for children's
parties, drinks on the lawn, picnics, and family gatherings.
Until the end of the nineteenth century, the kitchen gadgets used to
squeeze lemons were made in two parts, often fitted together with
hinges, one bowl-shaped to receive the half-lemon, the other dome-
shaped; the two pieces were squeezed together by means of long handles.
They were made first of wood, then of cast-iron; the squeezing parts
were often of porcelain, because of the fruit's acidity. After 1860,
the bowl becomes cone-shaped to hold a lemon better, and then per-
forated to allow the juice to flow out without the pips and pulp.
The familiar object we all know as a lemon-squeezer was a stroke of
genius, created by an unknown inventor before 1897, when it first ap-
pears in the Sears Roebuck Catalogue, complete with ribbed dome and
277

juice-catching rim; the teeth for catching the pips appear soon after-
wards. The brilliance of this invention involves the realization that
the human hand, which can twist the fruit about and so get the maximum
amount of juice from it, is far more efficient than a wooden or iron
plunger. The squeezer began its conquest of the world's kitchens when
an advertisement was placed in the Saturday Evening Post for February
19, 1916, suggesting that we should "Drink an Orange" for breakfast,
and offering round glass orange-squeezers to readers for ten cents
each. This was an early sign of the coming revolution in American
breakfast-eating habits. It was just at this time that Will Kellogg was
beginning to promote corn flakes, the new cold breakfast cereal.
Lemon juice, which was once by far the most popular of fruit juices, is
now drunk much less than orange juice, especially since the discovery
in 1948 of a way to make frozen concentrated orange juice which retains
a good deal of its citrus flavour. Concentrated lemon juice is far less
successful, largely because of the poor integration of the added sugar
into the overall taste.
People still squeeze fresh lemon and orange juice for themselves, and
they know that the result is opaque in appearance. Within twenty-four
hours after squeezing (within four hours in the case of navel oranges)
the juice clarifies; at the same time, though for different reasons,
the fresh citric taste is lost. What has happened is that a pectic
enzyme called pectinesterase destroys the opaqueness, what the trade
calls "cloud" (which is associated in our minds with the distinctive,
fresh citric taste) in the juice. extreme care is therefore taken with
temperatures when orange and lemon juice is processed. After
pasteurization at 60-6SøC. (140--149 F.) for lemons (the fruit is
extremely sensitive to heat--much more so than oranges) the juice would
turn as clear as diluted concentrate of apple juice: the taste would
not have been destroyed, but customers would never accept unclouded
citrus juice. So lemon juice is heated to 80øC. (176øF.) for exactly 3
seconds, or 85 C. (185 F.) for .8 seconds: this treatment is just
sufficient to kill the pectic enzyme and so prevent "cloud" loss. The
slightest error in timing or temperature impairs the flavour of the
juice. There are also "clouding agents" available to the processed
juice industry; these are made of coconut oil and dearomatized cocoa
butter, or methoxy pectin with starch and gum.
In spite of the lemon's excellent qualities of self-preservation and
handiness, people still find it worthwhile to add preservatives to
lemon juice and to package it in plastic lemon shapes. The size and
form of
278 

the lemon are so perfect and unmistakeable that they are kept; but
square bottoms are sometimes added, because the lemon has failed to
evolve a non-rolling feature. The same treated juice is also bottled
for kitchen use.
One of the pioneers in this method of marketing lemon juice, ReaLemon,
became engaged in 1978 in a long legal battle when its first real
competitor found that it had to charge so little for its product in
order to attract customers that it failed to break even. The case is a
fascinating demonstration, not only of the attitudes governing com-
petition in our society, but also of the behaviour of customers.
Borden, the owners of ReaLemon, were told by the United States Court of
Appeals in 1982 to cease and desist from pricing their product so low
that the competition had no chance. They had, the Court judged, un-
lawfully monopolized the processed lemon juice market; the ReaLemon
name had attracted too much power to itself.
Customers, it seems, are both "inert" about their shopping and tend to
brand loyalty. Lemon juice is used in small amounts on all kinds of
food. A poorly produced processed lemon juice could spoil the flavour
of everything it is sprinkled on, so people who have found a brand of
bottled lemon juice which they can put up with are cautious about
trying another which might displease them and ruin a lot of food before
it is discarded. They are actually prepared to forgo risking something
new, especially since processed lemon juice is rarely high on the
grocery list, and is not very expensive. ReaLemon had, in fact, priced
itself so low in the first place because if it had asked a higher sum
people might have remained satisfied with actual lemons.
Although profits to be made from the food-processing industry are huge,
the headaches, as we have had occasion to remark before, are many: food
can be machine-tooled, but people remain hopelessly irregular and
difficult to predict. In this case they showed themselves to be lazy
enough to buy a product which cannot match in taste the original; they
were also too cautious to investigate the claims of something
different. Perhaps we should marvel more at how much the industry
persuades us to get out and buy- and then to accept when we have bought
it.
279

THE ANSWER IS A LEMON

The lemon is perhaps the most versatile of fruits, not only in its
range of culinary applications, but also in its general household and
medicinal usefulness. The aromas and acids extracted from citrus fruit
in general and lemons in particular are used in hundreds of different
ways. Almost every kind of pop, for instance-not just those with
obvious lemon flavourings - includes in its formula one or more
extracts from various citrus fruits, including lemons. The anti-oxidant
and flavouring agent d-limonene, extracted from the oil of lemon and
orange peel, is one of the ingredients in the Coca-Cola formula which
is kept such a celebrated secret.
Citral, a light yellow liquid with a citrus odour, is used as lemon
flavouring in commercially-produced ice-cream and candy. It comes from
lemon oil, but is now usually synthesized. Lemon oil and its products
are also in packaged gelatin desserts, chewing gum, condiments,
cereals, and many kinds of flavouring syrups. The fragrance of the
concentrated oil (known in the trade as "folded" oil) is important in
the soap, detergent, perfume, and cosmetics industries. Lemon oil is
said from time to time to be cancer-causing, but complaints have not so
far been sufficiently substantiated to elicit any action against it.
Citrus peel causes allergies in some people; for this reason citrus
products for infants never contain the constituents of peel. Frozen
concentrated citrus juices, on the other hand, rely on peel-oil for a
good deal of their taste.
Citric acid, an anti-oxidant and mild astringent, is the most widely
used acidulant in the food industry; it is present in pop, candy,
processed cheese, jellies, potato chips and other processed potatoes,
and frozen foods generally. It is useful in curing meats and for
firming-up such vegetables as peppers and tomatoes: it neutralizes
odours and deactivates trace metals with their propensity to dull
colours and cause off flavours as foods age. When vegetables are
mechanically peeled, the lye used to loosen skins is neutralized by
citric acid.
More of this acid is found in the juice of lemons than in any other
widely available fruit. Extraction of it, by boiling, settling, and
screening the juice, or by freezing its water component and removing
the ice so as to concentrate the acid, was once an important industry
in Sicily, Cyprus, the Caribbean, and other sources of the world's
lemon supply. Calcium citrate, marketed in powdered form, was also
derived from
280 

lemons. But nowadays citric acid is usually prepared by mould fer-
mentation of sugar solutions. The discovery of this process in the
1920S dealt a devastating blow to lemon and lime cultivation in the
Caribbean. Citric acid is, in fact, found in most plants; this helps
explain why the taste of lemon juice weds satisfactorily with the
flavours of such a wide variety of foods: the lemon sharpens the acid
already present in them.
Absolutely every part of a lemon is useful in some way, from its seeds
to its outermost peel. Lemon-pip oil, unsaturated and aromatic, is im-
portant in the soap industry and in special diets. The pulp left over
from squeezed lemons is evaporated and concentrated into "citrus mo-
lasses" which is sold as a base for making vinegar and as an ingredient
in bland syrups and alcohol. The remains of the "rag" or pulp is also
sold as cattle feed. Most of the pectin used to thicken and solidify
jams, jellies, and marmalades comes from the white pith of citrus
fruits. Among these, lemon and lime pectin has the highest "jelly
grade" or capacity to thicken liquids. It is widely used in medicines
taken to combat diarrhoea. The flavedo, or outer yellow layer of lemon
peel, is invaluable for its intense taste and scent. (The word zest,
which originally meant "skin or peel," then specifically "citrus peel,"
is now in common use as signifying "lively enjoyment.")
The chemical properties of lemons have been noticed and used for
centuries, not only in the kitchen but as part of any knowledgeable
housewife's medicine chest. Lemon juice is recommended in household
manuals for hair and skin preparations; it is an ancient prescription
for skin whitening and the removal of freckles, and is often claimed
actually to promote slimming. It was a universally applicable bleach, a
cold remedy, a relief for asthma and rheumatism, a laxative, and an aid
for upset stomachs generally. The ancients had recommended citrus fruit
as an antidote for poisons. Lemons have such high status as an allround
curative in modern Egypt that, according to a Coptic expression, a
person convinced that everyone needs and adores him "thinks himself a
lemon in a nauseated town." People used to chew lemon slices to relieve
toothache (at least it could provide a distraction), and rubbed their
teeth with lemon peel to whiten them. Determined women would bite into
lemons or limes before parties, to sweeten their breath and redden
their lips.
Lemon juice has been used to clean wooden furniture and silver, and the
peel to get rid of mites, mosquitoes, and moths. Habitual sucking
281

of lemons can corrode one's teeth to the gums, particularly if acid-
softened teeth are brushed immediately afterwards with gritty
dentifrice. The acid of lemons is strong enough to dissolve pearls. The
resulting "salt of pearl" used to be thought an enormously powerful
medicine: both magical enough and prodigally wasteful enough to cure
even the diseases commonly attributed to possession by spirits.
Benvenuto Cellini describes its use against epilepsy and hysteria; rich
people could also demand that it be administered as a counteraqtion
against suspected poison.
By far the greatest contribution of the lemon to human health has been
its generous provision of vitamin C. A lack of vitamin C in the human
body causes scurvy, which makes people depressed, weak, and anaemic.
Scurvy victims are subject to internal haemrrhages and seepage of blood
from the roots of their hair. Wounds refuse to heal, muscles ache, legs
swell, gums bleed-the list of symptoms goes on and on. This horrible
disease became a matter of focused concern in the sixteenth century,
when long sea voyages of exploration were increasingly undertaken; the
first account of an outbreak of scurvy at sea was written by Vasco da
Gama, who discovered a passage to India via the toe of Africa in 1497.
It was months of abstinence from eating fresh vegetables and fruits
which, as we now know, resulted in scurvy.
Knowledge of how to cure the disease certainly existed long before
vitamin C was discovered and understood. Jacques Cartier's sailors came
down with scurvy on his voyage to colonize the coast of Newfoundland in
1535, and the Indians saved them by making them drink an extract of
spruce needles, which are rich in vitamin C. An English herb was known
as "scurvy grass" because of its remedial properties. Portuguese
sailors during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were ordered to
carry orange and lemon seed with them on all their journeys, and to
plant citrus wherever they went. Victims among a Portuguese ship's
sailors were once left behind on an island north of Venezuela. When the
ship called back to pick them up on the return journey, the men were
found to be in perfect health: they had eaten a good deal of citrus
fruit during their stay on the island, which was named Curacao, "cure,"
after this incident. A British ship on its maiden voyage for the East
Indian Company in 1601 was able to stop off at Madagascar to take on
orange and lemon juice as "the best remedy against scurvy" for the rest
of its journey. The Dutch planted citrus at the Cape of Good Hope in
282 

1654, for the use of passing ships. In the early eighteenth century a
Hungarian doctor called Kramer treated scurvy by making his patients
eat citrus pulp and green vegetables.
In 1747, James Lind, Physician to the British Royal Navy, performed
what is thought to be one of the first clinically controlled
experiments on record. Twelve scurvy victims were isolated and all
given the same diet, in Lind's words: "Water-gruel sweetened with sugar
in the morning; fresh mutton-broth often times for dinner; at other
times puddings, boiled biscuit with sugar etc; and for supper, barley
and raisins, rice and currants, sugar and wine, or the like." It was an
eighteenth-century fantasy: their version of eating almost nothing but
junk food. The men were then divided into six pairs, each pair's diet
being supplemented by one of the following: cider; vinegar; a diluted
sulphuric acid mixture; plain sea-water; a scurvy remedy in use at the
time which consisted of garlic, mustard, gum myrrh, balsam of Peru, and
other ingredients pounded into a paste; and two oranges and one lemon a
day. Both of the men in the sixth pair were completely cured of scurvy
symptoms six days after the experiment began. Even Lind, however,
thought of citrus fruit as a remedy for scurvy; the idea was still to
be conceived that nutrition might be so inadequate as to be the cause
of illness, even when people have enough food comfortably to eat their
fill.
The delay in making use of the accumulated knowledge of how to treat
scurvy must be accounted one of the triumphs of bureaucratic
isolationism and ineptitude. The British were nevertheless the first to
take systematic steps to enforce anti-scurvy provisions for sailors.
Fortyeight years after Lind's experiment and a year after his death,
the British Navy, desperate for manpower which it still constantly lost
to scurvy, decided at last to act. Ships' captains were ordered to
carry enough lemons on board for every sailor to receive a daily dose
of juice, beginning when the ship had been at sea about five or six
weeks.
Until that date, sailors had been given rations of rum diluted with
water. The water was the idea of Admiral Vernon, who saw that neat rum
caused more trouble than consolation. The sailors called the watered
rum "grog," describing the state of mind it induced, even after
dilution, as "groggy." They named the drink after the Admiral's famous
old cloak which was made of groscgrain, anglicized as "grogram"; the
Admiral himself was known to his men as "Old Grog." Now, in 1795, grog
became a mixture of rum, water, and lemon juice-which is still sold as
a hot drink called grog in Paris cafes during the winter.
283

The British Navy ceased to be attacked by scurvy. Its fighting force
had doubled by the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars, and lemon juice
has been cited as one of the reasons for Britain's victory in that
conflict. Lemons were chosen over oranges because they keep much
better, especially when picked green. (We now know that lemons have
roughly the same amount of vitamin C in them as oranges do, and four
times as much as there is in limes.) Lemons and limes were often
confused by name, lemons commonly being called "limes." British sailors
soon acquired the nickname "Limeys," while the area where lemons were
loaded and unloaded at the East London docks was called "Limehouse."
It has been known for centuries that a few drops of lemon juice
sprinkled over cut vegetables, apples, or bananas, will prevent them
from browning, and citrus fruit itself does not discolour when sliced.
It was an investigation into just this phenomenon which led to the
discovery of vitamin C by a young Hungarian biochemist called Albert
SzentGyorgyi, who published his findings in 1928. What non-browning
plants had in common was an acid which turned out to be the substance
which prevents scurvy - ascorbic (anti-scurvy) acid, or vitamin C.
Lemon juice prevents browning by means of two acids, citric and
ascorbic. These slow down the action of the enzyme set free by the
rupture of plant tissues, and prevent it from combining with phenolic
compounds and condensing them into brown polymers. Acid from other
plants would perform this function just as well, but lemon juice is
easy to apply and does not spoil the taste of the food it is
protecting. Only man, other primates, and guinea pigs must consume
ascorbic acid in their diets: all other animals make their own vitamin
C. The acid plays a vital function in the connective tissue of our
bodies, in the elimination of toxins, and in resistance to infection.
Just before he received the Nobel Prize for his work on vitamin C in
1937, Szent-Gyorgyi reported that he had found yet more gold in the
peel of citrus fruit. He had isolated a substance which he called
"citrin," which was a mixture of bioflavonoids, companions of vitamin C
in the peel and pulp of oranges and lemons but not present in synthetic
vitamin C. He thought they might provide additional help in the main-
tenance of the body's smallest blood vessels, the capillaries.
Szent-Gyorgyi himself withdrew his claims and suggestions as early as
1938, but the new substances, named vitamin P, became the subject of
heated interest all over the world.
There are now known to be about eight hundred bioflavonoids,
284 

natural pigments which occur in most plants; about thirty of them are
found in lemon peel, three of the best known being hesperidin,
naringin, and rutin. Great hopes were raised that they could be used to
help people suffering from diseases involving bleeding, skin disorders,
frostbite, diabetes, and abortion. In the west, disappointment with
bioflavonoids was heavy. Experiments failed to prove any positive
effects of these substances, but believers in their beneficial
qualities could point out that anyone taking natural vitamin C always
did so together with bioflavonoids, so that the power claimed for them
was not easy to isolate.
In 1950 the term vitamin P was dropped from the medical vocabulary,
though it was kept in France and Russia. In the late 1960S the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration pronounced that bioflavonoids "were not a
vitamin" and "lacked all nutritional value." The controversy has ended
in a division between eastern and western medical practice: Russia and
the Eastern Block countries prescribe bioflavonoids and market them in
tablet form, but most western doctors have dropped them from the
official medical repertoire, although they are still being offered,
along with vitamin C, in cases where the combination just might be
helpful. The dossier is not quite closed on the latest in the lengthy
and ancient list of blessings which are claimed to be derived from
oranges and lemons.
The manifold practical and scientific aspects of lemons can never claim
all our attention, however: the poetic and evocative power of this
fruit always has the last word. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke was
all his life captivated and inspired by the smell, taste, and beauty of
lemons, as well as by their aura and promise of the warm south. "How I
live it, this fragrance of lemons," he wrote once. "God knows how much
I owe to it at times." In a letter to his wife dated 1901 he imagines a
simple country repast which turns into a romantic seascape at sunset:
"There would have to be bread, some rich, whole-grain bread and
zwieback, and perhaps on a long, narrow dish some pale Westphalian ham
laced with strips of white fat like an evening sky with bands of
clouds. There would be some tea ready to be drunk, yellowish golden tea
in glasses with silver saucers, giving off a faint fragrance.... Huge
lemons, cut into slices, would sink like setting suns into the dusky
sea, softly illuminating it with their radiating membranes, and its
clear, smooth surface aquiver from the rising bitter essence."
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CHAPTER NINE

Ice Cream: Cold Comfort

MANKIND thought Zeus, was a failed experiment. The creature had no fur,
no claws; he was weak, fearful, inadequate, and generally hopeless: it
would be better for his maker simply to cut his losses and start again,
learning this time from his mistakes. But Zeus reckoned without his
uncle Prometheus, the philanthropist or manlover. The mischief-making
Titan stole fire from Zeus. Then, not content with giving man what he
had no business possessing, he proceeded to "place within him blind
hopes" and to teach him technology: how to keep warm, to cook, to bake
pottery, and to mould metals. People could then begin to live in houses
instead of caves, to tame and exploit animals, to mine, to write, to
compute, and all the rest.
Man in possession of fire was a thing existing in a state of permanent
transgression. He encroached ceaselessly upon the rights of the rest of
the universe; his weakness combined with his greed and his techno-
logical know-how gave him what the Greeks called daemonic charac
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teristics: he was neither one thing nor the other, a hybristic and
troublesome mixture of beast and god. He was a perpetrator of nasty,
dangerous, and pollution-causing acts, such as raping his Mother Earth
by ploughing her up, and travelling over the seas where only fish be-
longed. It even occurred to him that he could find out how to fly.
The whole unfortunate yet fiendishly exhilarating saga began when
Prometheus deceived the gods and let man get his hands on the secret of
fire power- perhaps at the time when flint flakes emitted sparks as
they were chipped into the first manufactured tools. The early stages
of technological progress we call the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and
the Iron Age. Each of these was characterized by an increase in mastery
over heat: human beings found out how to attain and use higher and
higher temperatures. Later came insights into the uses of steel, steam,
electricity, and nuclear power: all of them manipulations of heat.
Very recently we have begun a new journey of exploration, this time
into the realms of cold. Heat is still the essential tool, however, for
heat must be used in order to make cold. The science of low
temperatures began seriously to affect people's everyday lives only
about a century ago. Within one hundred years, cold (which had
previously been almost always synonymous with death, evil, and the
inhuman) has become essential to the lives we have chosen to live, in
vast agglomerations of people cut off from what we need to nourish
ourselves.
Cold preserves food until it is within our reach; cold enables us to
get food from anywhere on earth at any season of the year. It therefore
helps modern man to reduce the dominance that space and time hold over
him. Robbed of cold, a modern city would be beaten to its knees within
weeks. Blood banks, sperm banks, cryomedicine, plant libraries,
rockets, and satellites are some more of the applications of cold to
modernity. It would be wise perhaps to remember that these are all
expressions of our need as well as of our resourcefulness.
We now know that it is impossible for anything to get colder than
-273øC. (-459øF.). There is a great deal more about cold that we do not
know, for cold science is still in its adolescence. The promising young
technological giant had humble origins. Our realization that cold could
be systematically used, even created, to prevent the putrefaction of
meat and other foodstuffs came only after thousands of years of seeking
out and saving ice merely to satisfy a desire for cool drinks in
summer. Scientific enterprise also received modest but sustained
support from the discovery that ice cream, a luxury dessert which had
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long been known, but only to the rich and by hearsay to everybody else,
could in fact be made quite easily and cheaply by - and eventually for-
everyone.
The democratization of ice cream depended on far more than cold
science, however: it also required a great breakthrough in medical
knowledge, as well as deployment of all the technological and social
systems and structures which constituted the Industrial Revolution. Ice
cream is, therefore, much more than merely its firm, sweet, frozen
self. In its present form and widespread availability, it is a
peculiarly modem phenomenon. For this reason, and also because of the
ancient and still vigorous connotations of milk and of cold, it has
become invested, in European and American cultures, with what amounts
to mythic power. Ice cream is an appropriate and inevitable symbol of
the yearnings, satisfactions, and contradictions inherent in modernity.

THE HISTORY OF ICE

A crowd never failed to collect, day after day, outside the window at
164A, The Strand, in London. It was the mid-1840s, and London was a
densely populated, dirty, sprawling city, the largest the world had
ever known. In the window sat a miracle, or rather the fruit of many
miracles, the most perverse and delightful sight many of the crowd
could imagine. It was a block of pure ice, and as it melted it was
constantly replaced, from within the office building, from an unending
supply of similar blocks. The ice had been brought by ship and rail all
the way from America, and had successfully weathered a journey lasting
over a month. Queen Victoria was pleased to express her admiration, and
after that the royal household was always given ice by the American
trading company, on request.
The sight of ice was surprising because it was in downtown London in
the mid-nineteenth century. For thousands of years people have known
how to collect ice from ponds, rivers, and mountain tops, and to save
it, packed in heaps and insulated, for hot days when cool drinks are
delicious. It has been suggested that mysterious pits found in Iron Age
villages in Britain were intended for ice storage, and experiments have
shown that they could have been used for this purpose. At the beginning
of his great work, The Mediteranean, Fernand Braudel discusses the
importance of the presence of mountains throughout the
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region, and shows how through the ages men have mined the summits of
the Alps, the Pyrenees, Taygetus in Greece, and the mountains of North
Africa for ice and snow, and carried these treasures down to the hot
Mediterranean coasts and plains for sale.
In the fifth or early fourth century BC, Xenophon complained of people
who "drank before they were thirsty," and therefore needed such effete
titillations to thirst as costly wines and snow in summer. When
Alexander the Great besieged the Indian city of Petra he had thirty
"cold pits" dug, filled with snow, and covered with oak planks, so that
his army could cool their wine and wait out the summer for their
victims in relative comfort. Alexander had learned this technique
(which was probably also known to the Indians) at his home in
Macedonia. Roman emperors had ice brought to them by donkey-pack,
sometimes from as far away as the Alps, over the excellent Roman roads.
Seneca railed against the drunken habitues of the "shops and
storehouses for snow" in the city of Rome.
The Arab word for "drink" is sharba, which, as we saw earlier, gave us
the word sherbet, so common was it to ice fruit drinks in the middle
east. In 1494, the owner of a pilgrim boat received as a gift on his
arrival in the Holy Land a sack full of snow, to the surprise and
delight of his hot and thirsty passengers. The Turkish Empire was
especially addicted to iced drinks, and was so well organized that
ordinary citizens and not merely the military or the elite could enjoy
them. Merchants sold snow water, pieces of ice, and fruit ices cheaply
in the streets of Turkish towns. Boatloads of snow from Bursa arrived
frequently in Istanbul (then known as Constantinople) during the
sixteenth century, and the Pasha Muhammad received an income of 80,000
sequins for his ice mines in 1578.
Underground ice houses were known in China from at least 1100 BC when a
hymn addressed to the Goddess of Cold included these words:

In the days of the second month, they hew out the ice with harmonious
blows;
And in the third month, they carry it to the ice houses
Which they open in the days of the fourth, early in the morning,
Having first offered a sacrifice: a lamb with scallions.

Relays of horsemen brought snow and ice down from the Hindu Kush to
Delhi to ice sorbets for the Moghul emperors of India during the
sixteenth century. Mrs. Fanny Parkes, a nineteenth-century English
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woman, described an ancient Indian method of collecting ice on the
Hooghly plain near Calcutta. Shallow lined pits were filled with un-
glazed pottery pans. When it looked as though the temperature would dip
to freezing, a gong sounded and Indians streamed out from the Calcutta
bazaars to fill the pans with water. At 3:00 A.M., if ice had formed,
the gong was beaten again and the workers got out of bed and knocked
the ice out of the pans into baskets, which they carried to the
underground ice house. After having been supplied with blankets, shoes,
and heavy wooden mallets, they went down into the pit and beat the ice
into a solid mass before receiving their pay and returning home.
Insulation was understood very early. Everything from sawdust, leaf
matting, and straw to sheepskins and rabbit fur was used to keep the
ice from melting. Ice packed together in large stocks, especially in
stonelined vaults, keeps for more than a year without much trouble,
provided the ice pit is drained, ventilated, and kept well covered. The
Italians and Spanish piled snow in stone wells and cellars under their
houses, tamped it down hard, covered it, and saved it for the
summertime.
It was of course in hot countries that ice-collecting was not
considered too much hard work; in the temperate north, summers were
bearable without ice. But in the seventeenth century, when rich
Englishmen started to travel extensively in Europe, it began to be
thought amusing and profitable for mansion-owners to build themselves
ice houses. Water coolers in the shape of ornamental urns with ice
compartments became all the rage. Until this time there is little
mention of the uses of cold for preserving food, except in China where
ice houses had long been depots for keeping fish and fruit. Food in the
west was either eaten immediately, or was salted and stored during the
winter months.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century ice houses on English estates
were fitted with shelving for fruit and later for meat. By the early
nineteenth century there were commercial ice houses on all the
principal salmon rivers in Britain, so that salmon preserved in ice
could be taken to London for sale. Soon after this, ice began to be
loaded into the fishing boats as they set out to sea; fish would be
packed in ice for transport back to shore and then to its final
destination. As iced fresh fish became increasingly available, the long
decline in the popularity of dried, salted, and pickled fish began.
In early nineteenth-century Peru, blocks of ice were cut from glaciers
by the Indians in the Andes. The blocks were lowered by ropes down the
mountains to waiting women and children, who covered the ice with grass
290 

and packed it onto the backs of mules, which then began the hurried
ninety-kilometre (56-mile) journey to Lima. By the time the ice
arrived, at least a third of it had melted. What remained was sold in
the streets of Lima by Indians carrying trays of ice on their heads and
shouting, Helado! It was bought mainly for making iced drinks and ice
cream, which were so popular that people would riot if their ice supply
were to be cut off. Even when revolutions flared, no one dared
commandeer the ice mules for any task other than their normal duty.
The United States of America was a country with wide extremes of
climate. It had a huge hot south, which longed for ice in the summers.
Southerners could be provided with ice from the northern regions of
their own country, with its unpolluted stretches of water which froze
in winter into huge supplies of excellent ice. The challenge of
marketing northern ice to the south was to stimulate both trade in ice
and solutions to the problems of transporting it. On the western coast
of North America in the mid-nineteenth century, Russians in Alaska
shipped cargoes of ice to California.
English interest in ice houses had no sooner been aroused in the
seventeenth century than the American colonies began to take advantage
of the ancient but (in England) newly fashionable expertise. On De-
cember 22 1665 the Governor of Virginia Sir William Berkeley, was
granted "licence to gather, make and take snow and ice . . . and to
preserve and keep the same in such pits, caves and cool places as he
should think fit, saving the king's loving subjects liberty to make and
preserve snow and ice necessary for their own proper use."
Enlightened wealthy landowners in America, as in Britain, continued to
experiment with ice houses during the eighteenth century. George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson both took a keen interest in the
building and stocking of their own ice houses at Mount Vernon and at
Monticello. By the 1800S ice had begun in America to descend the social
scale: merchants were making profits from supplying solid cold to more
and more customers. In 1799 Charleston already had a street market in
ice, and ships which had carried southern products to the north-eastern
cities would fill up with ice at Boston for the return journey.
One of the earliest uses for ice, in the north as well as in the cities
of the American south, was to cool fevered patients in hospitals. In
1805 an outbreak of yellow fever in Martinique inspired one of the
pioneers of the ice trade, Frederick Tudor of Boston, to transport the
first load of ice known to have been delivered to the tropics. He went
on to build
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an experimental insulated ice house at Havana. He then established a
trade in ice with Cuba and with Jamaica, Georgia, and Louisiana. Having
enormously improved techniques of ice insulation on ships, he succeeded
in landing Boston ice in Calcutta in 1833 Almost half the ice had
melted before it arrived, but it could still be sold at half the cost
of the native ice from the Hooghly plain.
For over a hundred years, from the early 1800S on, ice-harvesting in
Canada and the United States provided employment for fishermen, farm-
ers, and other country people during the winter months. Like
hog-killing, corn-husking, and barn-raising, it was often a local,
communal effort for the benefit of everybody. The process was soon
speeded up, regularized, and simplified by mechanical and
organizational means; it could then be operated as a specialized and
lucrative industry. The use of ships to transport ice, and later
foodstuffs as well, meant that ice had to be provided in uniform blocks
so that the cargo would not shirt in transit.
Ice surfaces had to be scraped and kept clear of snow as soon as horses
could venture onto the pond, so that the ice could thicken without the
insulation of snow. When the ice had formed to the desired depth, the
surface was marked with a toothed plough in blocks fiftysix centimetres
by eighty-one (22 in. by 32) Another plough was then dragged over the
grooves, back and forth until the cuts sliced through two-thirds of the
thickness of ice. A channel was cleared across the pond by cutting
through the ice with picks and handsaws, then lifting the ice blocks
out with iron claws. Large sheets of ice were then separated from the
field and poled or pulled by horses fitted with spiked shoes, along the
channel to the storage area, where they were broken into blocks. These
were then hoisted to the ice houses and stacked inside. By this time
American ice houses were no longer underground pits, but tall,
carefully insulated structures relying largely on the sheer quantity of
ice they held to retain the cold.
Everything had to be done as quickly as possible. No water could be
allowed to flow into the painstakingly-prepared grooves and to fill
them with new ice. The channel had to be kept clear of ice overnight,
often by means of towing ice-rafts through the water, up and down all
night long. If necessary, ice-cutting would go on till dawn by the
light of flares. The working horses wore rope nooses round their necks
so that if one slipped into the water channel the rope could be drawn
tight: the horse was then incapable of struggling while planks were
placed underneath him and a team of men and horses dragged him out.
292 

The animal then had to be dried, blanketed, and given strenuous ex-
ercise. There were often dozens of horses at work at a time on the
surface of an ice pond, necessitating the constant removal (more or
less scrupulous) of dung from the ice.
The Norwegians cut ice and sold it to most of Europe during the
nineteenth century. In 1822, when the first Norwegian ice cargo arrived
in Britain, it caused consternation at the customs house, because it
did not fit into classification lists for import duties. By the time it
was decided that ice was "dry goods," the whole cargo had liquefied.
After this, in spite of occasional cold winters in Europe, the
Norwegian trade flourished. Its interest clashed with American ice
after 1844, when the Wenham Lake Ice Company of Boston began shipping
ice to Liverpool.
American advertising specialists had already begun to realize how much
power could lie in brand names, even for products as natural and as
simple as ice cut from a pond. The public was encouraged to think of
Wenham Lake Ice as synonymous with an extraordinarily good taste,
clarity, purity, and cleanliness. The company's power and technological
mastery was symbolized by the block of ice constantly melting in its
office window in the Strand. Norwegian ice continued to be cheaper,
however. The American company eventually bought the rights to ice which
formed on the surface of Lake Oppegaard in Norway and shipped it to
England at the lower price, first renaming their Norwegian property
Lake Wenham, so that ice of "extreme purity" could arrive in England
under the title which the company had worked so hard to provide with
the correct connotations.
By 1832, North American home-owners were accepting ice as a normal
household comfort - a luxury in summer, but one which many people could
expect to enjoy. In that year Frances Trollope reported from New York,
"Ice is in profuse abundance. I do not imagine that there is a home in
the city without the luxury of ice to cool the water and harden the
butter." In 1855, a writer in De Bow's Review called ice "an American
institution - the use of it an American luxury - the abuse of it an
American failing." It was one of the first "luxuries within the reach
of everyone"; among the most successful of the rewards by means of
which the Industrial Revolution continues to justify itself.
The art of making ice mechanically was advancing rapidly by 1868, but
still ice was expensive: a ten-pound (4.5-kilo.) piece of it from a
plant cost $1 at a time when the best beefsteak was 2› a pound. In New
Orleans, bouquets of tropical flowers and silk-clad French dolls
293

were being frozen into blocks of ice as table centre-pieces for dinner
parties. Mark Twain, who appears to have been entranced by this notion,
described in 1883 how these blocks were set on end in a platter, "to
cool the tropical air; and also to be ornamental, for the flowers and
things imprisoned in them could be seen as through plate glass."

CREATING COLD

"Heat we have in readiness in respect to fire," wrote the Renaissance
scientist and philosopher Francis Bacon, "but for cold we must stay
till it cometh or seek it in deep caves and when all is done we cannot
obtain it in a great degree." It had long been known to alchemists and
early scientists that temperatures could be lowered and ice created by
means of "frigorific mixtures," some of which Bacon himself described
as employed in making ice for royal households. These included salt and
ice, and snow or ice together with saltpetre, calcium chloride, ammo-
nium chloride, and other chemicals. But these methods were costly
(common salt, as we have seen, was itself valuable) and could not,
therefore, be used "in a great degree."
Ice would continue to be found, rather than made, until a need for huge
quantities of cold became so imperious that cutting, chopping, and
lugging could no longer supply enough of it where it was wanted. It was
also necessary that the basic laws governing cold should be understood-
but even when they were, natural ice was abundant enough to cause
people to concentrate their ingenuity on getting, preserving, and
transporting ice rather than on creating it. When artificial ice was
finally invented, people treated it with deep suspicion: surely
"natural" ice was better than 'plant" ice? They refused to buy
artificial ice if it had air bubbles in it, because these
"imperfections" reminded them that the produce was man-made and
therefore quite possibly tampered with. (Natural ice itself usually
contains bubbles.) Airless ice was clear and therefore looked pure.
Ice-makers quickly adapted to consumer preference by simply removing
air (which is utterly harmless) from the ice. The age of distrust for
food processing had begun, and with it the enforced agility of food
processors, who have to keep calming what they see as the unreasonable,
even downright ignorant, prejudices of their customers.
Francis Bacon lived to glimpse - though only just - the chief benefit
which human beings have so far found in cold. He was travelling in
294 

March 1626 near Highgate, north of London, and meditating on reports he
had heard that cold could delay the putrefaction of flesh. He saw snow
from his carriage window, stopped the driver and sent him to buy and
kill a chicken. Bacon stuffed the chicken full of snow, but in the
process caught a cold, which led to his death some weeks later.
Fifty years after Bacon's ill-fated experiment, Pepys expresses in his
diary his fascination with claims from Baltic merchants that
slaughtered chickens kept in ice could last the winter without rotting.
In 1799 the Russians astounded the world with their reports of finding
whole mammoths frozen in Siberian ice, their flesh still edible by
dogs. Very soon after this date, the essential first steps were taken
which would eventually lead to the ability of man to make cold for
himself and freeze his own food. The discoveries revealed new aspects
of the nature of heat.
Heat had always seemed to be a kind of invisible liquid, which could be
forced into substances by association with fire, or transferred from
one material to the other on contact. What revolutionary scientific
thinkers, such as Joseph Black (in a work published in 1803) and James
Joule in the 1840s made us realize is that heat is a form of energy and
not itself a substance, and that temperature is not the same thing as
heat. The first two Laws of Thermodynamics were formulated: that energy
can never be destroyed or created, only transformed; and that some of
the heat (energy) in a working machine is always lost as heat to its
surroundings.
These ideas were to form the principal foundations of modern re-
frigeration technology. A refrigerator works essentially by the vapori-
zation and condensation of a refrigerant liquid. Vaporize the liquid
and it sucks heat out of its surroundings, or the things in the
refrigerator (this is the Second Law of Thermodynamics in reverse);
condense the liquid and heat is released- refrigerators being built so
that the heat cannot be released into the machine but must escape into
the air of the kitchen. It is heat-either a gas flame for absorption
refrigerators or electricity to run compression-pump machines-which
causes the expansion and condensation of the liquid.
The first ice-making machines, created in the 1850s were named after
the "refrigerator," more commonly called an ice box or ice cream cabi-
net, which was already a common article of household furniture. (Many
Americans still call a refrigerator an "ice box.") This was a wooden
chest like a large trunk which could be filled with food. It had a tin
container at the top to hold ice, and a pan into which water drained as
the ice melted. The first model, patented in 1803 by Thomas Moore, a
Marvland
295

farmer, had a casing over it made of rabbit skins. Ice boxes were
handsome, practical objects (food kept in them, especially fresh
produce, did not dry out as food can in modern refrigerators), and,
cooled increasingly often by means of ice made artificially, they
remained far more common than mechanical coolers until well after the
First World War.
The first widely distributed refrigerating machines for domestic use
were being manufactured by 1916 They were horizontal at first, like the
ice box (the vertical shape prevents the entry of warm air less
efficiently, but modern restrictions on space soon overrode this con-
sideration), and until 1928 their exteriors were of dark wood.
A Florida doctor had made the first simple cold-creating machine for
air-conditioning his hospital in 1844 The first commercial machine
which actually made ice, enormous and weighing five tons, was built in
Australia in 1855 The Australians were pioneers in the creation of
refrigerating techniques because they soon realized that Europe was the
logical market for the vast tonnages of Australian meat - provided the
problems of transporting it could be overcome. Australians had no easy
access to ice harvests, so they had no choice but to manufacture their
own cold. Gradually, with many disastrous failures, refrigerated ship-
ping evolved, and the Europeans at the other end of the long journeys
from Australia, New Zealand, and America were persuaded to eat thawed-
out meat months old- and to want more of it.
So it was that by the 1880S yet another complex and revolutionary
modern structure was in place: world-wide food transport systems, using
the preservative properties of cold. In industrialized countries, there
would now be year-round availability of meat, poultry, dairy products,
and eggs. Even beer could be made in summer and winter alike- provided
it was not ale but lager, which is made in cold conditions and lasts
(lagern in German means "to lay down" and "to store"). The factory
could now begin to impose its unending productivity and invariability
upon the ancient cycles and differentiations of rural work and farm
produce. The price of food relative to other costs fell in the first
two decades of the twentieth century, and agriculture has never again
recovered its former societal role or its status.

THE ORIGINS OF ICE CREAM

It is often said that cooking, like the incest taboo, characterizes
what almost anybody would recognize as distinctively human behaviour.
For
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some reason, (and whether or not cooking is important just because it
involves the use of Promethean fire), the actual taste of edible
substances which have undergone fiery treatment pleases us. But it is
rather rare in the history of mankind to find people eating food while
it is very hot. More rarely still do we hear of people eating anything
very cold. It was for cooling drinks as a special treat, not for
freezing them, that ice was usually so painstakingly sought. Most
people, in most places and times, have preferred eating their food
tepid, "slightly hot" and "cool" being the acceptable extremes for
temperature.
The reason for this is that health has usually been thought to consist
of balance, in temperature as in everything else: the human body should
therefore avoid anything much hotter or much colder than itself. The
ancient Greek physician Hippocrates wrote in his Re,gimen that "it is
dangerous to heat, cool, or make a commotion all of a sudden in the
body, let it be done which way it may, because everything that is
excessive is an enemy of nature. Why should anyone run the hazard in
the heat of summer of drinking iced waters, which are excessively cold,
and suddenly throwing the body into a different state from the one it
was in before, producing thereby many ill effects?" But he adds,
"people will not take a warning, and most men would rather run the
hazard of their lives or health than be deprived of the pleasure of
drinking iced liquid." When coffee first arrived in London in the
seventeenth century, it was shudderingly described as a drink "of a
soote colour, dryed in a Furnace, and that they drinke as hote as can
be endured."
People are often described as having died as a result of drinking cold
water. We may suspect that it was the unsanitary contents of the snow
water itself which might have killed Don Carlos, imprisoned in the
Palace at Madrid, in 1568 but at the time everyone said he should not
have taken in so much cold liquid. Water ices and ice cream, of course,
are frozen until they turn thick, which makes them colder still and on
this view even more dangerous. They were nearly always available only
to the few, and eating them was often thought of as an act of bravado:
most people regarded them as perilous as well as strange and expensive.
As late as 1869 Catharine Beecher warned American women that ice cream
reduces the temperature of the stomach and "stops digestion"; it should
on no account be served after a heavy meal.
Nowadays very few people take this aspect of ice cream eating seri-
ously. We know that ingesting ice cream makes the body warmer rather
than cooler, because of the work it must do to balance the
temperatures.
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But this heat is not a cause for discomfort, and not enough to spoil
the delight of a cold treat on a hot day. Eating cold, and also eating
very hot food compared with what our ancestors would have found
acceptable, is now one of the ways we experience culinary variety. We
have all learned at an early age that the cold of ice cream is not very
dangerous, and it is strange now to almost nobody. The great change in
taste and attitude in our culture is not the least of the revolutions
which the understanding and control of cold have wrought in our lives.
The water ices of the Turks and Arabs were soft and semi-liquid, rather
like slushy Italian,granita. They were often eaten between courses, as
soup is in China, to refresh and clear the palate. The sherbets which
were sold in European cafes from the seventeenth century onwards,
either by Middle Easterners or by Europeans dressed up as Armenians,
Arabs, and Turks, were often heavily laced with liqueurs and served
frankly as cold drinks. Still they were regarded as exotic and new when
first tasted in Europe. They arrived in force at the same time as did
the appetite for lemonade, which often contained alcohol as well as
sugar, and which was also kept cold with floating lumps of ice.
Three more new and exotic drinks, hot ones this time, were alcoholfree:
tea, coffee, and chocolate. The fashion in Europe for taking these
coincided with and helped to further a dawning revolution in human
mores. The consumption of non-alcoholic drinks, adopted by the upper
classes as an essential component of social gatherings, meant that men
and women could, without impropriety, consort as they had never done
before. They could meet in public places and talk. The public places
were chocolate-houses and cafes, and the first of these to achieve
influential and lasting fame was the Cafe Procope in Paris. Francesco
Procopio dei Coltelli, who founded the Procope in 1686 was of course
Italian, probably from Sicily, via Florence.
The French had by this time been learning about food and drink from the
Italians for a century and a half. The Italian Renaissance had had its
effect upon cuisine as much as upon the other arts. In 1533 when
fourteen-year-old Catherine de Medicis came to Paris to marry the Duc
d'Orleans, later Henry II, son of that admirer of all things Italian,
Francois I, she brought a retinue of cooks with her whose culinary
expertise and ultra-modern attitudes astonished the French court. One
of the cooking specialists later brought to France by Marie de Medicis
when she married Henri IV in 1600 was Bernardo Buontalenti (some say
Buontalenti came seventy-seven years earlier, with Catherine de
298 

Medicis). He showed off an Italian speciality (although we have no
reason to believe that the French had not heard of it before): iced
confections made with cream, called,gelati.
It was said that Marco Polo had learned about freezing sweet cream when
he was in China, and there is independent evidence that the Chinese
emperors ate sweetened ground rice mixed with milk and frozen in
porcelain bowls. The Indians too have an ancient iced dessert (kulfi)
made with milk boiled down until it thickens, and frozen in porous
earthenware. Certainly, Italians knew all about storing ice for
culinary use. "The meanest person in Italy who rents a house has his
vault or cellar for ice," according to the eighteenth-century edition
of the Encyclopedia Britannica; and the custom was by no means new. It
has not been ascertained (and perhaps it cannot be) whether the
Italians were inspired by travellers to ice sweetened cream, or whether
they thought of it for themselves.
The French nobility ate glaces on special occasions. At one dinner
given by Louis XIV, the great Vatel (the maitre d'hatel who was further
to immortalize himself by committing suicide when he feared that the
fish would not arrive on time for dinner) "caused to be placed before
each guest, in silver-gilt cups, what was apparently a freshly laid
egg, coloured like those at Easter. But before the company had time to
recover from their surprise at such a novel dessert, they discovered
that the supposed eggs were a delicious sweetmeat, cold and compact as
marble." This was probably ice cream, and certainly (like the death of
Vatel) the stuff of which culinary myth is made: ice-cold sweets dis-
guised as eggs were extravagantly perverse and definitely not food for
ordinary people.
Procopio dei Coltelli, after having been a prosperous limonadier for
many years in Paris, acted in 1686 on one of those insights which
occasionally enable businessmen both to understand and to promote pre-
viously latent social trends- and to make themselves fortunes. "Pro-
cope," as the French called him, saw that cafes, one of which he
already owned, were a little primitive, dull, and limited; the cabarets
populaires, on the other hand, were fun, but rough and wild. Neither
kind of establishment could be frequented by respectable women. So
Procope opened a new house in the rue des Fosses-Saint-Germain, now rue
de l'ancienne Comedie: Procope's was opposite a theatre, an important
ingredient of his success.
He provided his cafe with high-class decor: expensive and impressive
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mirrors, chandeliers, and marble tables. All of these, together with
the hundreds of coloured liquids in gleaming bottles, are still part of
the traditional appearance of Parisian cafes. He set himself up as
distiller, apothecary, liquonste, and grocer, providing also, as all
the cafes did, the news of the day displayed on the pipe of the stove
which heated the establishment. People would come to his cafe to meet
their friends, gossip, and talk politics. He sold liqueurs and
sherbets, but also perfumes, jams, conserved fruits, coffee, chocolate,
and, most luxurious of all, ice creams, which could be bought and
decorously eaten as only the nobility had previously eaten them, from
silver dishes in the most exquisite cafe in Paris. There were water
ices, many of them perfumed with flowers (as they still are in Iran and
other parts of the Middle East), "iced cheeses" incorporating sweet
cream and egg-yolks, and ,glaces, with less egg than the fromages
,glaces. To this day French ice cream is often distinguished from
others by its egg-yolk base.
There were soon many different ways of eating ice cream in France: the
bombe, made in a spherical metal mould (now it comes in a simple bowl
shape) containing a thick rind of water ice with a lighter-textured
cream centre; the many coupes glacees composed of one or more ice
creams with fruit and creme Chantilly, or whipped cream sweetened and
flavoured with vanilla, each combination bearing an honorific title;
mousses (where the cream is first whipped and then frozen); parfaits
(originally flavoured only with coffee); and the elaborate ornamental
iced confections of classic French cuisine. The omelette a la
Norvegienne (Norway was the chief purveyor of ice in Europe) was hot
meringue enclosing ice cream; in 1868 Americans rechristened this
perverse frivolity baked Alaska.
From 1804, yet another two Italians, Velloni (one of the first of the
full-time Parisian glaciers or ice-cream makers), and after him
Tortoni, ran the Pavillon du Hanovre, with gardens, balls, concerts,
and firework displays among the many entertainments. At this restaurant
was born the famous biscuit Tortoni, a frozen cream mousse with
macaroons, almonds, and rum. At Tortoni's, women were banished again,
being allowed only to sit outside the establishment, in straw chairs,
to take the ices.
The history of ice cream in England appears to begin with the eating of
"creme ice" at the court of Charles I; a probably apocryphal story
relates that Gerard Tissain, the French chef who made ice cream for the
King, was given a pension of œ20 a year to keep the formula secret.
When the King was beheaded in 1649, a group of noblemen bought
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the coveted information from the chef. The English had, in fact, always
been fond of creamy desserts: custards, syllabubs, trifles, fools, and
"whitepots" made from milk products which the English called "white
meats." There is even a record of "creme frez" (is that fresh or frozen
or with strawberries?) being served at the coronation banquet of King
Henry v. At the end of the seventeenth century the new interest in ice
houses, in combination with the traditional English taste in puddings,
must have made ice cream seem as much a natural development as an
exciting Continental novelty. As we shall see, the creaminess of ice
cream-the milk component-has always been considered more important in
Britain and America than in continental Europe.
Coffee houses in England never became as elaborate as those in France
which followed the tradition started by Procope. In 1662, a man was
selling in London "sherbets made in Turkie, of lemons, roses and
violets perfumed; and Tea or Chaa, according to its goodness." But I
have found no record of English coffee houses offering ice cream. It
was England, however, which produced the first cookery books for the
middle-class housewife, as opposed to those intended for professional
chefs employed by the nobility. One of the earliest of these, the
Compleat Confectioner of Hannah Glasse (1760), explained how to make
raspberry ice cream: a tiring and costly business, involving the
shaking by hand of a pewter pot of the cream and fruit mixture over
another pot containing salted ice, then letting it rest and
periodically stirring it until the ice cream thickened. The first
recorded use of the English phrase ice cream (previously cream ice and
iced cream) occurred in 1672.
In Vienna, ice cream quickly became a common treat for the rich in the
eighteenth century, eaten "winter and summer" as Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu reported in 1716. Beethoven complained of the warm winter of
1793-94; "The Viennese are afraid it will soon be impossible to have
any ice cream, for as the winter is mild ice is rare."
Italian coffee houses followed the French model, and sold gelati. A
great many of them were opened, including two in the Piazza San Marco
in Venice: the Caffe Florian, founded in 1720, and Quadri in 1775. Both
of these, like Procope's, are still doing business today. Italian iced
desserts included, granita and gremolata (granular water ices), coppe,
like the French coupes, Neapolitan cassata (an ice cream mould with
diced fruit, nuts, and macaroons) and spumone (several layers of
sherbets, ice creams and fruit in an oval mould), as well as the huge
class of semifreddi, or "half-cold" iced confections.
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Ice cream was known in North America at least as early as the 1740S,
when a guest of Governor Bladen of Maryland wrote in a letter: "We had
dessert no less Curious; among the Rarities of which it was Compos'd
was some fine Ice Cream which, with the Strawberries and Milk, eat most
deliciously." George Washington was an early American ice cream
aficionado, having spent two hundred dollars on what must have been a
great quantity of it at an ice cream dealer's in the summer of 1790. He
also owned "a cream machine for making ice." Brillat-Savarin, the
gastronome, tells how a French captain named Collet made and sold ices
in New York in 1794 and 1795. He describes with satisfaction the
surprise of American women at this technological and masculine feat:
"nothing could be more amusing than the little grimaces they made when
eating them. They were utterly at a loss to conceive how a substance
could be kept so cold in a temperature of ninety degrees."
Dolley Madison used ice cream to make her famous White House dinner
parties special; a guest enthusiastically described one such occasion
when "an Air of Expectancy" which Mrs. Madison had propagated among
those present was gratified by the sight, in the centre of a lavishly
set table and high on a silver platter, of "a large, shining dome of
pink Ice Cream." Mrs. Madison is said to have ordered custard pies for
her husband's Second Inaugural Ball in 1813. They arrived frozen. One
of the guests, horrified at biting into ice-cold custard, shrieked
"Poison!" and the cook was seized by security guards. Mrs. Madison,
with great aplomb, ate one herself and declared it delicious. This
story (true or not) resembles one myth which often recurs in the
history of gastronomy: that of the Accidental Discovery, preferably by
a Famous Person, of a new combination of ingredients or a new way of
cooking or eating them. Mrs. Madison was both breaking a taboo and
creating taste. According to the first-century Greek writer Athenaeus,
King Ptolemy of Egypt claimed to have demonstrated to his troops that
an icy stream could be drunk without fear by coolly tasting it himself.
In 1846, an American named Nancy Johnson invented a machine for making
ice cream which not only simplified the process but greatly increased
control over the finished product. This was the portable handcranked
ice-cream churn which beat the mixture of cream and flavourings with a
paddle (known as a "dasher" on the analogy with butter churns) as it
froze. The canister of cream sat in a wooden bucket full of the ancient
"frigorific mixture," ice and salt. About twenty minutes of cranking is
enough to thicken the ice cream. The stirring prevents
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the formation of large ice crystals and encourages the creation of tiny
"seed" crystals in the mix; the cream, milk, eggs, and honey also coat
the crystals and impede their growth by preventing water from adhering
to their surfaces. The smaller the crystals, the smoother-tasting the
ice cream. (Iced sherbets and creams made by stationary freezing
generally require the addition of gelatin or egg-whites to inhibit
crystal growth.) There is with the cranking method a single consistency
throughout, and no lumps can form. At the same time the dasher
incorporates just the amount of air required to loosen up the mix and
help it melt quickly and deliciously on the tongue.
The invention of this machine marked a revolution in the history of ice
cream: from this time on anyone could make the very best quality ice
cream at home- especially since rock salt, which came to be commonly
called "ice cream salt" until the early twentieth century, had become a
cheap commodity. The visits of the ice man, with his horse and cart and
his iron claw to heave blocks of ice, often meant the promise of a
family treat: ice cream quickly became part of American folklore, as
did the ice man himself. The new machine also made it possible to
mass-produce ice cream and to sell it commercially. Until the 1880S
even factory ice cream was turned out the same way as home-made: in
handcranked freezers.
Just why is it that salt makes ice cream freeze - the very salt that is
used to get rid of the ice on sidewalks? What takes place within the
ice-cream machine, isolated from the surrounding air by its wooden
bucket (plastic in modern versions of this system), is extremely com-
plicated. Essentially what happens is that the addition of salt to the
mixture of ice and water upsets the equilibrium of energy exchanges
between ice and water (the movement and slowing of molecules) which
naturally occur within half-frozen liquid.
The electric field of water molecules breaks up salt crystals into
positive ions (sodium) and negative ions (chloride) and causes clusters
of water molecules to form which cannot stick to ready-formed ice.
Molecules still leave the ice as they have been doing, but new ice
cannot form: the equilibrium is broken and the ice melts. The energy
required for melting has to come from the kinetic energy of the water
or liquid phase molecules; they slow down and the temperature drops to
below 0øC. (32øF.), even though ice is melting and not forming.
Therefore, when energy (heat) moves out of the ice cream mixture and
into the brine through the metal canister (for heat always moves from
the warmer
303

to the colder, and it moves easily through metal), the salty water
stays cold even though energy is being added to it. When salt is
sprinkled on sidewalk ice, on the other hand, it simultaneously melts
the ice and drives down the temperature of the resulting water; but
this temperature is quickly raised again to its previous level by the
sidewalk itself and the circumambient air.
When the crank begins to stick, the ice cream is frozen, but still
soft. Now the dasher is removed from the canister: the moment of magic
when some lucky person is allowed to lick the dasher and know the
quality of the ice cream. Next the repacked canister may be lowered
back into the brine, the whole churn wrapped in a blanket for extra
insulation, and the ice cream left to harden or "ripen" for an hour or
so before being dished out (it should not become too hard: to solidify
ice cream is to deaden a great deal of its flavour). The very best
thing to do with ice cream when it is ready is to eat it at once-all of
it. Keeping it always reduces the quality of its texture, consistency,
and taste.

THE MODERN PERIOD: WE ALL SCREAM

Ice-cream vending in the streets is recorded as early as 1828 in
America, when "a group of boisterous fellows with kettles in their
hands" yelled "I scream, Ice Cream" to attract customers in the streets
of New York. Italians had introduced the idea to Britain by 1850 at the
latest, when Carlo Gatti was peddling ice cream to Londoners from a
painted cart. He was so successful that he and others brought many more
Italians over to join them. These immigrants were grossly exploited
labour, often lodged in poor conditions and paid little; during the
winter they often worked as hurdy-gurdy men. Every morning in summer
they cranked and froze the ice cream mix they had made the previous
night, and went their rounds in London, Glasgow, Manchester, and other
growing industrial cities crying, "Gelati, ecco un poco!" It is thought
to be because of their cry that ice-cream vendors were called "hokey
pokey men" and the ice cream they sold "hokey pokey," a term which
became common also in America.
Selling ice cream in the streets testified to the increasing ease with
which ice could be obtained, and to the growing general popularity of
ice cream. The dessert once the glory of banquets at court could now be
carried about and shamelessly eaten by anybody in the street. Many are
the claims
304 

to the invention of the first ice cream cone. The French and the
Germans say they had metal and paper cones in the mid-nineteenth
century. Carlo Gatti himself is said to have invented an edible horn or
cornet (corno in Italian) for holding ice cream, by twisting pastry
round his finger and baking it. A Syrian immigrant to the United States
called Emest A. Hamwi rolled up thin Persian waffles called zalabia and
topped them with a ball of ice cream (a combination thought of on the
spot and because of an accident-again that recurring theme) at the St.
Louis World's Fair in 1904. He sold his confection as "the World's Fair
Cornucopia." Other American inventors disputed his claim to be first.
The truth is almost certainly that containers and "holders," both
edible and inedible and for many different kinds of food, already
existed in most culinary traditions. This is not to discount the
brainwave which discerned and immediately satisfied a wholly new
requirement, that ice cream should become, at least on occasion, both
portable and spoonfree. An automatic cone-rolling machine was invented
in 1909; by 1924, 245 million cones were being produced per year in the
United States alone, even though the cone had to share the field with
other containers of individual ice cream portions.
No biological fact exerts for people a fascination which can compare
with one that can underscore and therefore encourage an existing social
trend. With the dawning, in the early twentieth century, of the age of
self-sufficiency for the individual and the severing of social bonds,
one decades-old campaign for better public hygiene at last began to
make an impact: the old communal tin drinking-cups at public
water-fountains began genuinely to seem both old-fashioned and
insanitary. The Individual Drink Cup Company of New York was ready, as
early as 1909, to cash in by supplying endless quantities of paper
cups, one for each person whenever he felt like a drink. So successful
was its clean white throw-away invention that the company could soon
dispense with a title explaining its raison d'etre: the name Dixie Cup
was adopted instead because the sound of it was patriotic, musical,
snappy, clean, and modern. The company doubled its profits in 1923 by
developing a special version of its cup, each one to hold a single
portion of ice cream. The cup had a round lid with a tongue to help
pull it off; it was as deep as it was wide. Now you could either eat
your ice cream, in a relaxed but still fastidious frame of mind, with a
flat wooden spoon; or less delicately, more self-sufficiently, and in
larger mouthfuls, by bending your
305

lid into a scoop and digging the ice cream carefully, with an
inimitably delicious hollow scraping sound, out of your own individual
tub.
In 1919 a means was found of making a chocolate coating adhere to ice
cream, and the result was marketed as the I-Scream Bar. Later the name
was changed to Eskimo Pie, and the bar was provided with a holder and
wrapper combined, made of disposable silver foil. The idea of the Good
Humor Bar, an ice-cream block on a stick like a lollipop, was conceived
in 1920; it was named and first sold by a man who adhered to the
ancient belief that the humours of the mind could be controlled and
improved by what one ate. Harry Burt Sr. made marketing history by
having Good Humor Bars sold from vans equipped with bells to announce
their presence, by an army of men in white uniforms with distinctly
military-looking caps and belts. The Good Humor Man became a well-known
and reliably invariable visitor to neighbourhoods all over North
America. He had a strict code of rules and manners which his company
had recorded in a manual; if he broke a rule he could lose his place in
the ranks. The merchandising style of giant chain companies like
McDonald's owes a great deal to various aspects of the Good Humor
concept.
Pedal tricycles were one of the chief methods of ice cream vending in
Britain. Thomas Wall, whose sausage and meat-pie business had been slow
during the summer months, largely because refrigeration had not yet
become efficient enough or universal enough, started mass-producing and
street-vending ice cream in 1922. The Wall's ice cream man's slogan was
"Stop Me and Buy One." The British launched into ice cream eating with
unprecedented fervour. They began to forsake traditional English
steamed puddings and tarts for the new, cold, and easy technological
treat. By 1939, Wall's was the largest ice-cream manufacturer in the
world, as it still is today, after the company's expansion into markets
in western Europe and North America. Both Wall's and Eskimo Pie
pioneered the use of solid carbon dioxide ("dry ice") to transport ice
cream. This gas turns directly into a solid when frozen, and evaporates
(with no messy melting stage) as it heats up. Its use greatly
facilitated both street vending and the centralization of ice-cream
manufacturing.
Ice-cream parlours opened in many cities of the United States during
the nineteenth century; these echoed the tradition of Procope and his
successors in France, Italy, Austria, and other European countries,
where ice cream was decorous and to be eaten in appropriately elegant
sur
306 

roundings. Ice cream also came to be considered the sine qua non of
American festive occasions. Brillat-Savarin was responsible for the re-
pellent aphorism that "the dessert [the whole final section of a French
meal] without cheese is a beautiful woman without an eye." An American
magazine editor wrote in 1850, "A party without ice cream would be like
a breakfast without bread or a dinner without a roast." The American
comparison is less savage, but sufficiently earnest. Ralph Waldo
Emerson was to complain of ice cream's role as a lazy social standby.
"We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our
friend," he wrote, "so we buy ice cream."
In 1851, Jacob Fussell, a Baltimore milk dealer who had noticed the
rising fortunes of ice cream, decided to turn his cows' summer cream
surplus into ice cream. This meant making as much ice cream at a time
as he had extra cream; it was a much larger quantity than that of the
confectioners and hotel managers who made only small quantities of it
as required. But Fussell sold it at a much lower price- and found he
could hardly keep up with the demand. He soon gave his company up to
full-time ice-cream making (all hand-cranked), opened up plants in
Washington, Boston, and New York, and then expanded to cities west and
south. The first large-scale ice-cream manufacturing business had
begun; Fussell has a plaque commemorating his achievement on the site
of his factory in Baltimore. The young industrialist was greatly
encouraged by a new craze which was to last until the 1950S: in 1874,
cream sodas (an invention dating back to 1832) became ice-cream sodas;
soda fountains and drugstores were from now on obliged to stock ice
cream.
Meanwhile, ice-making machines were beginning to change the patterns of
food preservation and transport, for artificial ice can be made where
and when it is wanted. The Boston ice-harvesting business peaked in
about 1870; thereafter "homegrown" or "natural" ice began to lose out.
By 1914 the industry was broken, never to recover, although ice-
harvesting operations continued into the 1920S. When it became common
for many people to possess their own refrigerators, which happened
first in North America, ice cream could be marketed in halfgallon
bricks, to be taken home and kept cold until it was eaten for dessert.
A new battle began: to transform the image of ice cream from something
special, eaten as a treat, out of doors, or in fancy cafes and
parlours, into something ordinary, a part of everyday home fare.
Ice cream, as its English name shows, is made with milk products,
307

and ever since the seventeenth century in Europe (just when ice cream
was becoming well known) milk had been suspected of being often
disease-ridden, especially in the big cities. Milk, as we now know, is
nutritious not only for human beings but for micro-organisms as well.
The revelations of germ theory, and the elimination of infection in
food by heat treatment, resulted from the investigations of Louis
Pasteur into the fermentation of wine and beer in the 1860S. Milk was
not systematically pasteurized in North America and England until the
end of the nineteenth century. Before that, people preferred to add
chemical preservatives and disinfectants to milk; it was simpler than
keeping their animals and operations clean and free from contamination,
and it avoided the nuisance of having to heat the milk. Ice-cream
manufacturers relied also on the widespread belief that bacteria would
die in cold, as they had been shown to be destroyed by heat.
As ice cream was eaten more and more frequently and widely, it was
realized that it might well be a cause for outbreaks of disease. There
was a terrifying "vanilla ice cream poisoning" in Norway as early as
1848; diphtheria, typhoid, scarlet fever, and intestinal diseases also
pointed to ice cream as the culprit. In the early 1920s many careful
scientific tests were carried out on ice cream, and it was discovered
that pathogenic bacteria were not easily killed by freezing: some
survived a temperature as low as - 250øC ( - 418øF) for ten hours with
almost no effect; others grew and multiplied in deep cold. In fact, an
ice-cream mix was shown to be even more conducive to bacterial growth
than plain cream or milk.
After this, laws were passed that all commercially produced ice cream
should be pasteurized before freezing. Pasteurizing destroys 20 per
cent of the vitamin C in milk; some say that the treatment spoils the
taste of milk by robbing it of irreplaceable volatile elements. Ice
cream is now eaten on such a large scale, however, that the risk of
disease outweighs other considerations. Today, a phosphatase test is
routinely made on ice cream to ensure correct pasteurization, because
the process destroys phosphatase in milk. Routine testing of cows for
bovine tuberculosis is an important aspect of modern safety precautions
for milk. Stringent regulations have to be enforced, in addition, to
prevent recontamination of pasteurized ice cream, and to keep as
germ-free as possible utensils, employees, vendors, scoops, and
barrels, and even the air which comes in contact with ice cream.
Dangerous ice cream might have been sold without hygienic super
308 

vision from city carts in the nineteenth century, but it was always
prizedas innocent: ice cream, after all, was not liquor. As the
Prohibition era got under way in the United States, triumphant lists
were compiled in the dairy trade journals of American breweries which
had converted to the production of ice cream. The Association of Ice
Cream Manufacturers sang at their conventions in the 1920S the
following verses, to the tune of "Old Black Joe":

Gone are the days when Father was a souse, Gone are the days of the
weekly family rows, Gone from this land since prohibition's here He
brings a brick of ice cream home instead of beer!

Chorus: He's coming, he's coming; we can see him coming near He brings
a brick of ice cream home instead of beer!

Ice cream was a frivolity, however, and in the 1890S visits to soda
fountains, and "sucking soda" in particular, were frowned upon in North
America as unsuitable behaviour on Sundays. Ice cream merchants re-
sponded by selling a soda-less ice-cream concoction which they called a
"Sunday." It is believed that the name was changed to "sundae" either
to avoid any appearance of mocking the Lord's Day, or to persuade
customers that the dish did not have to be eaten only once a week.
The ice-cream industry entered an entirely new phase in 1932, when
Clarence W. Vogt invented the continuous ice-cream freezer. A
pasteurized ice-cream mix is first homogenized so that the fat will not
churn into butter. Then it is fed into this machine and quickly frozen,
while being agitated, to a slushy consistency. A controlled quantity of
air is pumped into the slurry, and the temperature lowered still
further; the whole process can take a matter of seconds, although the
mix is best left to settle between the two phases. Ice cream is
extruded continuously from the machine onto a conveyer, then passed
through a hardening tunnel, and mechanically cut and packaged. It is
never touched or handled in any way, and the rapidity of the freezing
helps ensure that the ice cream is smooth, because crystals have no
time to grow. Speed and total control over the behaviour of the
ingredients were at last within the ice-cream manufacturer's grasp.
With the new technology in place, the giant ice-cream corporations
became locked into fierce competition over prices: the public would buy
whichever ice cream cost less.
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Soda fountains, and the soda jerks who plopped balls of ice cream into
fizzy glasses, with their colourful cries, personal style, and ice-
cream-tossing skills, were quickly phased out. They had come to seem
overdone, not predictable enough, not "cost-effective." Ice cream had
been a Sunday afternoon treat, something one went "out" to eat. Now one
bought ice cream in half-gallon (1.9-litre) blocks at the supermarket
and took it home for supper, or routinely stopped by at one of the new
chain stores where scores of ice cream flavours were laid out for the
choosing. The sheer number of possibilities, ranging from chocolate to
chili con carne flavour or marshmallow, made the act of selecting a
cone a direct and awesome intimation of the power at the heart of
technological empire: it offered not only quantity, but a range and
availability which outstripped both need and imagination. The parent
company underwrote the quality of the ice cream which it supplied to
all its franchises, as well as the expertise that went into its
invention and production; every member store was like every other.
In the early 1950S, soda fountains dried up at the rate of twelve
hundred per year. Universal domestic refrigeration and the use of cold
for transport changed ice-cream making from a seasonal and local op-
eration into a year-round proposition, with nation-wide marketing.
Between 1957 and 1969, 1,656 North American ice-cream plants closed;
big companies became huge corporations. Ice cream had become something
constantly in stock, taken for granted, and above all, cheap.
Ice cream in its natural state is a complex emulsion composed of solids
(ice crystals), liquids, and air; also locked into the system are
scattered fat globules, sugar, and egg and milk proteins. It had never
been cheap to make; and as technology made the work easier, so the
ingredients became more costly. The companies therefore, with the
general goal of making ice cream more frequently consumed and easier to
afford, moved beyond machine technology and sought the assistance of
chemistry. The cream gave way to milk, and fresh milk was replaced by
dried milk, concentrated skim milk, cheese whey, casein, and other milk
fractions and derivatives. "Inert fillers" and "bullcIng agents" stood
in for the substance of cream. Emulsifiers smoothed and "texturized"
the result. Canadian scientists perfected the use of stabilizers. These
are gelatins, and also chemicals derived from vegetables and from wood
which have the property of thickening instead of relaxing as tempera-
tures rise, so that the ice cream refrains from either dripping or
melting.
One typical brand of ice cream at present on the market is composed
310 

of milk fat, nonfat milk, corn syrup, cheese whey, monoglycerides and
diglycerides, carob bean gum, cellulose gum, guar gum, polysorbate 80,
carrageenan, natural and artificial flavour, and artificial colour. By
U.S. law at least 10 per cent of the mix must be milk fat by weight,
and 2.7 per cent protein; a gallon (3.8 litres) of it must weigh at
least four and a half pounds (2 kilograms), exclusive of
micro-crystalline cellulose used as "fillers." Air bubbles (which are
known in the trade as "overrun") can make up as much as half the volume
of the ice cream. The standard is important, because all those gums
could hold much more air than that. These rules were laid down in 1960,
after a monumental battle: it took over fourteen years and thirty-eight
thousand pages of hearings for an agreement finally to be reached
between the American government and the ice-cream industry.
That there is a minimum milk component at all for ice cream seems
outrageously backward to many food technologists. They complain because
it "ties producers to particular ingredients" and "hampers flexi-
bility." The dairy industry, in this as in the butter-versus-margarine
controversy, has insisted on protection, and played on the automatic
revulsion which any consumer feels when reading on his ice-cream
package a list of polysyllabic chemicals instead of cream, sugar, eggs,
and fruit.
Pleasure can be derived from the discovery that one has been deceived.
Food is often served in disguise, or rigged to surprise the guests: an
egg in its egg-cup might turn out really to be ice cream, or a pie to
contain twenty-four live blackbirds. But the fun comes from a spirit of
play: participation, sharing in the delight, is the essential factor.
Admiration for skill was another component of such amusements, but
admiration is a personal matter, and it is impossible to proffer it
where there is a lack of trust. Today technology has tremendous
prestige, but if its aim is perceived as being deception solely in
order to turn a profit- in other words an impersonal "they" might enjoy
it, but at our expense - our reaction turns quickly to contempt and
anger, no matter how clever the trick. In addition, human beings have
always been peculiarly sensitive about what they eat. To consume
processed food is to hand over total control of one's diet to
absolutely unknown other people. Trust, in these circumstances, is
fragile. People today instinctively prefer that things should be what
they look like.
This attitude could not be more irritating to those who have with great
diffiCUlty won the power to replace all the ingredients in food
311

while maintaining a facade which looks surprisingly like the original.
They are making food cheaper for us: why are we not grateful? Why
should ice cream have cream in it just because it is called ice cream?
And why is it that people would not buy it, in spite of the low price,
if it were a  P~ P.I milk ~Priv~tive~ with ( hPm~

THE MYTHOLOGY OF ICE CREAM

In Anglo-Saxon countries, ice cream has always represented a kind of
apotheosis of milk. The northern, butter-loving cultures reserved a
special awe for milk; it is a food more than a drink, and it is
innocent, pure, white, and wholesome. To freeze cream with fruit and
sugar is to add an extra dimension of delight to the solid worth of
milk. Ice cream has been heavy artillery to throw into the battle
against liquor, a sound and tasteful alternative to the empty
vulgarities of junk food, a country and childhood tradition to console
our jaded and nostalgic city existences. In most of continental Europe,
ice cream delivers an entirely different message. It has never lost its
elite status: in Rome or Paris or Vienna ice cream is a very elegant
dessert, served in an expensive cafe from tall coupes and tulip-shaped
glasses, or moulded in layers into fancy shapes. Even when served in
cones on the street, flavours are sharp and fruity, colours brilliant,
and the milk component can be left out altogether without prejudice to
the product's image.
In North America and in Britain, on the other hand, ice cream tends to
come in pastel colours, pale because of the creamy white of milk. In
1942, the British decided to ban ice cream as part of the war effort,
largely because it was perceived as a luxury item and austerity was the
mood required. Yet even before the war, ice cream in Anglo-Saxon
countries had come a long way towards achieving exactly the opposite
image. It has concentrated deliberately on becoming democratic, uni-
versally eaten, and cheap. It is not merely a dessert, but an
extraordinarily pleasant way of consuming semi-sacred milk. Its image
is customary and comforting rather than exciting and sophisticated. In
spite of their excellence and the admiration they inspire, French
glaces and even Italian gelati are eaten in nowhere near the quantities
reached by ice cream in "milk" cultures.
North Americans in particular have adopted ice cream as a food central
to their mythology, a symbol almost of national identity. It was
312 

the Americans who had, in the nineteenth century, led the world in
learning to enjoy the benefits of ice. They were the first, too, to
insist on ice cream for everybody. From 1921, immigrants to the United
States were served ice cream on their arrival at Ellis Island; it is
related that many of them used knives to spread it on their bread. The
story was repeated with delight by Americans because it seemed to show
how distinctively American ice cream was in its luxurious modernity. It
was classified as an "essential foodstuff" in 1917, and the U.S.
Secretary of War considered it indispensable for the morale of the
army.
During the Second World War the Japanese discouraged the eating of ice
cream as behaviour which betrayed pro-western, and specifically
pro-American, sympathies. The Japanese themselves, like the Chinese,
will eat ice cream, but they do not like drinking large quantities of
milk because the lactose is difficult for them to digest; in any case,
in the view of their war commanders, the sweetness and the association
of milk with babies made ice cream children's food, entirely
inappropriate to men of military prowess. Americans, meanwhile, were
forced to cut back on ice cream for economic reasons. They expressed
their relief and joy at the end of the war by embarking on the largest
ice-cream-eating splurge in history; over nineteen litres (20 quarts)
of it were eaten in 1946 by every man, woman, and child in the country.
One American commander, General Lewis B. Puller, expressed the opinion
that his marines would be tougher and more aggressive if they were
given beer and whiskey instead of being molly-coddled with ice cream
and candy. The Pentagon disagreed: during the Korean War American
troops abroad were supplied with ice cream three times a week. Koreans
did not eat it; Americans considered it a treat, an expression of their
common identity and distinctiveness in a foreign land, and a sign that
they were being remembered and cared for at home. When the American
aircraft carrier Lexington was sinking, the crew brought all the cans
of ice cream they could find out of the hold and gorged on the contents
till it was time to go overboard.
To the connotations of purity which pertain to milk, ice cream adds the
idea of cleanliness which we assume to be inherent in snow and in cold
generally. Snow, like milk, is white, and everywhere thought of as a
symbol of purity. Chinese texts of the T'ang period allude to the rare
simplicity and cleanness of heart of the true Confucian gentleman, with
whom they compare a fine jade vase full of snow. We have seen, however,
that eating cold has been thought until recent times to be
313

dangerous behaviour; when people die they turn cold, and evil is often
pictured as exerting an icy grip. We probably still need to be
reassured at some level about our new-found pleasure in eating frozen
food.
We have also seen that milk has often been far from clean, even though
cold does keep it from turning sour. Today, when the necessity of
keeping milk contamination-free is better understood than ever before,
we surround milk, milk products, and ice cream with symbolic
affirmations of cleanliness. White-uniformed staffwielding scoops
filled with antifreeze (the very word "scoop" sounds cold, clean, and
delicious), gleaming stainless steel, polished marble, clear glass, and
white enamel surfaces all assure us that the ice cream is
technologically under control and safe, and simultaneously surround it
with visual representations of the simplicity and purity which we
desire. When one manufacturer recently tried using real vanilla beans
in his ice cream, they showed up as flecks in the mix. The idea had to
be discontinued because even that part of the market prepared to pay
for the real thing rejected ice cream which did not look immaculate.
(The incorporation of identifiable, or customer-chosen, additions such
as broken cookies or fruit, may be perfectly acceptable.)
Ice cream is itself a technological feat, one of the triumphs of Pro-
methean wit; if any society other than ours had invented it, they would
have celebrated it in mythic legend, in 'painting, and in song. The
ready availability of it presupposes all the organizational systems of
a modern industrial civilization. Mechanical continuous freezing,
pasteurization, and mechanical packing all contribute towards keeping
the product "untouched by human hands" and therefore pure. Technology
means safety. This is especially important in the case of ice cream,
which, like any powerful mythic token, is potentially dangerous as well
as beneficial.
No wonder then that people feel betrayed and more than reasonably
irritated when they discover that technology has not contented itself
with creating and preserving ice cream, but has reached a long arm into
the image of innocence itself and subverted the very substance of what
we trust it to protect. The gums, the cellulose, the casein, and the
whey might look quite a lot like ice cream, taste fairly pleasant, and
last indefinitely- but how can we be expected to approve of a symbol of
purity which is shown to be an impostor, or an expression of simple
verity which turns out to be an illusion?
Antonin Careme, the great French chef, is reputed to have remarked in
the early nineteenth century that "the fine arts are five in number:
314 

painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and architecture. And the main
branch of architecture is confectionary." This statement certainly
suited Careme's approach to his art: he meticulously designed on paper
and then erected extraordinary edible edifices called pieces montees,
entirely in order to delight dinner guests before they happily
demolished them. Ice cream was an ideal medium for these miniature
temples and monuments: it could be moulded to any required shape and
then frozen, and its brilliant fruit colours were an asset to any
design.
The fashion for elegant moulded ice-cream "pieces" lasted into the
twentieth century. Albertine tells Proust's Narrator, in words which he
considers "a little too well contrived" as well as infuriatingly sexy,
that she wants her ice cream "cast in one of those old-fashioned moulds
which have every architectural shape imaginable; whenever I eat them,
temples, churches, obelisks, rocks, a sort of picturesque geography is
what I see at first before converting its raspberry or vanilla
monuments into coolness in my gullet." And she continues describing
ice-cream pillars, lemon-ice mountains, and strawberry Venetian
churches for quite some time. Today we hear less of moulded ice
extravaganzas, but the French and the Italians still enjoy producing
complex ice cream follies.
In Anglo-Saxon countries ice cream is served in deliberately simple
shapes, with emphasis upon its ability to stand free. The preferred
form is rounded, by means of the scoop. A curled blob of ice cream
(unless it is too mechanically smooth and over-doctored with
emulsifiers) will crack deliciously and present a slightly rough and
frosty surface which anyone with experience will immediately want to
lick. Simple domed shapes are expressive of the generally mammary,
motherly, babyhood connotations of milky ice cream.
The persona of ice cream will vary, depending on where and how it is
served. Moulded, ice cream is prestigious and formal. Made at home and
eaten as soon as it freezes, after the messy salt-and-ice business, the
work, and the waiting, it is a family occasion and a treat. Served
scooped onto simple dishes, and especially in dollops balanced on cones
or in cardboard tubs, it is the food of relaxation, of crowds on
holiday. In all these cases, ice cream is festive food. It may be
flavoured outlandishly, covered in chocolate, sold on a stick like a
lollipop; ice cream is "fun food" and easily lends itself to novelty.
It can glory, too, in being perversely served with hot food - with
steaming apple pie for instance, or enclosed in hot pastry or meringue.
The idea of buying it in large bricks at a supermarket and keeping it
in the refrigerator for constant
315

servings at family meals must always represent an uneasy rejection of
this aspect of the mythology of ice cream. It is a custom which could
only have come about because of the milk myth: when ice cream is looked
upon as above all nutritious, it begins to look a little solemn rather
then festive or fun.
The sober and dutiful view of ice cream is also a consequence of
everyone's owning a refrigerator: ice cream ceases to be evanescent.
Transience, however, is the essence of festivity. The fun of being
served an ice-cream obelisk lies largely in the fact that the structure
will not last beyond this dinner-time: the shape chosen denotes
permanence, and is given precisely to what cannot last. Crowds licking
their cones in the hot summer sun enjoy themselves more intensely
because they know they must go back to normal life soon. Ice cream
melts; therefore it is perfect food for "time out."
This important aspect of what the trade magazines call "America's
number-one fun food" is used to enormous effect by the American poet
Wallace Stevens in his poem on the force which man exerts over the
transient world-a force which is ultimately absurd because man is
himself a part of the transitory world he rules. For Stevens there is
cold, naked death at the centre of all life, and man can do nothing
about this fact but see it and face it. He may divert himself while he
lives, provided he is not taken in. Let him then enjoy the tasty, the
transient, and the trivial in and for itself, for this is the only
reality: "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."
Thanks to the technology of cold, however, ice cream need no longer be
truly evanescent, even though it is still best eaten soon after it has
been made. A brick of supermarket ice cream can be kept on hand for
weeks or even months, to be served at a moment's notice. It ministers
to convenience: a need which modern man seems to find more to his taste
than festivity. Ice-cream manufacturers have a puzzle on their hands
nevertheless, deciding how to appeal both to fun and to daily habit,
for ice cream continues to accommodate both terms of the contradiction.
It has also become an expression of nostalgia, in spite of the
modernity and the technological prowess which it presupposes. There are
today two main kinds of nostalgia, and ice cream appeals to both of
them. The first looks back to past time. Ice cream is the delight of
children and therefore evocative of childhood memories; eating it makes
people feel young and at least temporarily secure and innocent.
Ice-cream stalls
316 

are decked with striped awnings and gingham, merchants use clowns,
stuffed toys, cartoon characters, and balloons, not only to please
children but also to draw adults to indulge in childhood for a while.
Ice-cream sellers also like to pretend that they are very old-fashioned
folks, and they give their premises not only a nursery air but a
nineteenth century look as well. Ice-cream parlours are making a
comeback at present, almost all of them finding it profitable to
provide "retro"-styled furnishings: black-and-white tiled floors (the
tiles preferably hexagonal), bentwood chairs, "Tiffany" lamps, mirrors,
cushioned booths, marble counters and so on. The very word parlour is
evocative: one brand of ice cream advertises itself as offering "The
Ice Cream Parlor Taste." Another finds it worth stressing that 'We've
been around since 1876."
The other nostalgia is for Elsewhere. For city dwellers, the ultimately
Other place is the country. Ice cream accordingly insists on its
rusticity- despite the continuous freezers and the polysyllabic chemi-
cals. Rusticity in modern life is of course closely associated with the
old-fashioned, so that the two kinds of nostalgia are interrelated.
Both the past and the country are perceived as being somehow more
trustworthy and certainly more natural than a modern ice-cream factory.
So ice-cream publicity gives us cows, emerald green grass, and churns,
men in long white aprons, and drawings (rather than photographs) of
mansions in the Old South. Gastronomic sections of magazines often
carry articles describing authors' memories, typically of childhood on
the farm. There is a sudden decision to crank out a barrel of ice
cream, followed by the calling-in of uncles, cousins, and friends, the
bustle of preparations, the sack of salt and the crushing of ice,
packing the cream, turning the handle, and the ecstatic moment when the
child is finally allowed to lick the dasher. These descriptions often
convey basic information to their readers, who seldom know the details
of all this folklore, let alone remember such a life. They also address
a vague but nonetheless genuine nostalgia for a long-ago country past,
with its family companionship and its simple pleasures.
Just when almost all the ice-cream parlours in America had closed,
capitulating in part to the take-home ice-cream brick, Walt Disney
opened one, in 1955, at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. This parlour
was almost certainly the first of its kind: it was built specifically
to be "old-fashioned" and advertised itself as such. True, the
establishment was a museumizing recreation of an almost dead past, but
Walt Disney, in this as in so much
317

else, had his fingers on the mythic pulse of America. Five years later
Reuben Mattus, whose story has been repeatedly described as "a
capitalist folktale," began to market Haagen-Dazs Ice Cream.
He packed it in pint-sized round containers, not large bricks, and
designed it carefully to satisfy nostalgia and fastidious taste ("an
old world delight," the tub calls it, "especially for the most
discerning"). There are no additives, emulsifiers, or stabilizers. It
melts; it deteriorates if it is not kept frozen solid. Consumers are
advised to let it soften a little ("tempering" it) before eating. It is
also much heavier than it needs to be to satisfy the ice-cream
standard, largely because it contains 16 per cent butterfat and only 10
per cent air.
On the lid appeared a map of Scandinavia; clean, sober, efficient, and
technologically advanced Scandinavia, with a star marking Copenhagen
and an arrow pointing impressively towards the star. The name
Haagen-Dazs is a complete fiction, designed of course to attract the
eye, to be seen rather than said: so much shopping is now self-service
that buyers would rarely have to ask for it by name; when it became
famous enough to be a household word, the pronunciation of it would
look after itself. In any case, Mattus said, "the type of people we
were looking for, if they mispronounced it, they'd think they were
right and any other way was wrong." The name is meant to look vaguely
but arrogantly Danish, with its double a, its hyphenation, and its
impossible zs. The umlaut is especially effective, even though Danish
has no umlaut. Mattus had absolutely nothing to do with Scandinavia;
his factory was in the Bronx and later in New Jersey.
Mattus started small, and jealously guarded the "family business"
image, even as his brilliant idea turned out to be exactly what the
public had wanted without being able to formulate its desire. The firm
prospered and spawned imitators. Frusen Gladje, a concept created in
direct competition with Mattus by his cousin Edward Lipitz, has a
genuinely Swedish name which means "Frozen Delight." (The umlaut this
time is correct, while the final French accent is a purely artistic
touch.) Lipitz took the trouble to incorporate his company in Sweden
(his tub has a map of part of Scandinavia with Stockholm marked in
black), although his factory was in Utica, New York. The new company's
innovation was an improvement in the container's design: not only small
and round like the Haagen-Dazs tub, but in more emphatically smooth
white plastic, with a raised rounded lid as well. Frusen Gladje
street-vending
318 

booths continue the smooth round white theme. The product aims at an
extremely restricted market, describing itself as "A gourmet experience
for those who prefer the best."
The Swiss and the Germans have also found their North American image
pressed into the service of ice-cream sales. The allure of imported
culinary savoir-faire does not operate everywhere in the United States,
however. In the south, Rich 'n' Creamy was found to sell far better
than a foreign name; as one Texas businessman put it, 'We don't regard
it as gourmet, but just a damn good product."
A totally different approach, "all-American" but laying much greater
emphasis even than that of Haagen-Dazs on the nostalgic, the natural,
and the rustic, was launched by "two Vermont hippies" in 1978. They
called it Ben and Jerry's Homemade, "the only superpremium [ice cream]
you can pronounce." Marketing strategy at the original store included
an old ice-cream churn with salt and ice cranking before the customers,
a honky-tonk piano, free movies, and apple-peeling, look-alike, and
lip-sync contests. Customers were made to stand in line and wait for
the ice cream to be ready. People would become frantic if a batch was
sold before they got any: the impression that "everybody wants it so
you might not get some" is one of the oldest merchandising devices on
earth. When the machine ground to a stop, the first in line got to lick
the dasher.
The company started mass-producing. The list of contents on the
container was in hand printing, and there was a photograph on it of Ben
and Jerry: the personal element enormously enhanced the natural, rural
image. A great deal of publicity was generated through an advertising
campaign by Ben and Jerry's Homemade which attacked the bullying
methods of "the giant Pillsbury Corporation" when it bought the
Haagen-Dazs company; Americans (indeed, people of all cultures) love to
see the little guy take on the faceless great. Ben and Jerry's made
millions, but continue to cherish their rustic image: a large new plant
in Vermont keeps live dairy cows grazing on the front lawn.
Haagen-Dazs ice cream and its "gourmet" competition contain real cream,
skim milk, egg yolks, sugar, and natural flavourings. It really does
taste better than milk derivatives with chemicals. It costs more,
however, than the difference in price between chemicals and natural
whole ingredients should warrant. One business magazine estimated in
1984 that "the manufacturer pays 22 per cent extra, and charges up to
400 per cent more." Stores which stock it regularly add more or less
outrageous mark-ups to the already high price, and people buy it any
319

way: the "gourmet" ice creams are created for those who wish to pay a
little more. People want to buy reality. Into the bargain they also
want a certain ambience and connotation, a je-ne-sais-quoi, which is
one of the meanings of the word "myth."
The new ice cream is designed for people who want status; and one of
the most effective methods of gaining status is to surround yourself
with suggestions that you already have it. An ability to recognize the
finest quality just might show that you have been brought up with it.
Being prepared to pay for it is an expression of certainty that it is
the best; and certainties in matters of taste, provided that other
people can be persuaded to defer to them, are part of the insignia of
status. Even now, "gourmet" ice cream is marketed as though it is a
prestige product for the exclusive and demanding few.
The figures give a very different picture. Since 1980, each of the
citizens of the United States has consumed more than fifteen litres (4
gallons) of ice cream per year; the business is worth $6 billion
annually. The world's largest consumers of ice cream are, after the
United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Britain. The market
in all these countries is considered to be saturated, only to be
influenced by the growth or diminution of the population. Within that
market, "gourmet" ice cream sales are increasing by at least 38 per
cent per year. The small heretical group of those who, unlike the great
unwashed, "prefer the best," is fast becoming a very substantial
minority. People in the First World feel prosperous and want to
experience luxury. "They may not be able to afford a Rolls-Royce," says
one market analyst, "but everyone can afford gourmet ice cream." Others
have a different perspective: "Like beer and movies, ice cream booms
when people are most troubled. It beats going to your psychiatrist."
People prepared to pay a high price for ice cream embark on quests for
the ideal brand. Food columnists frequently describe long car journeys
which they say they undertake in order to buy a particular flavour from
the honest little dealer whom they have discovered to possess that
ineffable flair. Approached from this angle, finding and eating the
very best ice cream can take on some of the mystique of antique
collecting or adventure touring, where victory is only to the
competent, the passionate, and, above all, the first.
Manufacturers understand this corner of their market. Many are the
stories they tell of long and arduous battles to achieve the
indisputably "best" ice cream. The founder of a company refused for
years to market
320 

a strawberry ice cream that does not meet his exacting standards;
intense searches and negotiations finally succeeded in running to earth
"the world's finest vanilla" for flavouring ice cream; another expert
"spent six months just perfecting his mocha," or "laboured two years to
achieve his real chocolate coating." Another demonstration of
efficiency, commitment, and extravagance in pursuit of the best is the
custom of actually mailing by air to one's friends a package of the
"ultimate" ice cream, once it has been found: happy the few who have
the means to harness technology in the service of their own taste.
One of the bemusing paradoxes of western society today is the ideal of
remaining slim, raised as it has been to dizzying heights just as we
increasingly reach for the most expensive ice cream, the heavy one with
the most butterfat. "Diet" ice creams are a new area of expansion for
the industry, to meet the demands of those who want ice cream, but not
to "pay" for it by becoming fat. The new soy-based ice "creams" use
vegetable rather than animal fat in order to encourage those worried
about cholesterol. Tofutti, for example, is marketed as "the nondairy
ice cream substitute." It was originally designed for Jews keeping
kosher dietary laws so that they could eat ice cream at a meal which
featured meat. The discovery that a large percentage of people are
congenitally lactose intolerant is also encouraging to producers of
tofu or bean-curd ice "creams." The product costs as much as the
richest "gourmet" confections: it continues the marvellous marketing
bonanza in "lite" foods which we have already looked at, where people
happily pay more for less. As one food technologist put it recently,
"All the big companies want to buy premium-priced ice cream. But there
are far stronger fads for slender waists and longevity," and he went on
to point out that over 57 per cent of North American households now
have "calorie conscious" members.
With "diet" ices, food processing comes once again into its own,
substituting, subtracting, doctoring, and reflavouring- and all, this
time, in the irreproachable name of Health. One recently created brand
of tofu ice contains the following ingredients: water, sugar, corn oil,
com syrup solids, tofu, salt, citric acid, sorbitol, glycerine,
cellulose gel, soy protein, carrageenan, guar gum, locust bean gum,
natural flavours, polysorbate 80, coconut oil, microcrystalline
cellulose, monoglycerides, diglycerides, and cellulose gum. A call went
out recently for food technologists to come up with "a low-calorie
bulking agent with pleasant
321

mouthfeel, not needing a caution label for single servings over 15
grams." All kinds of special intensive sweeteners and low-calorie fats
are already on the production lines. "Lite" frozen desserts are
expected now to parallel the enormous growth of sales in diet soft
drinks. A $10-billion industry is projected for the end of the century.
"Gourmet" ice creams, on the other hand, proudly proclaim their heavy
fat content and deliberately distend their prices. As competition among
"premium" brands becomes fiercer, we are being offered not only pints
of ice cream with silver and gold leaf mixed in at $6 a pint and up,
but more and more butterfat, less and less air. Manufacturers have had
to stoop to technology to achieve some of the new features, since
without the help of some science, less air and more than 17 per cent
fat have the effect of inhibiting the strength of flavour upon the
tongue. But, as an influential article which appeared in Time magazine
put it in 1981, "When people break faith with their diets, as they
always do sooner or later, they want to do it with a strumpet
certifiably and wickedly luxurious."
Here we have yet another contradiction contained within the mythology
of ice cream. (Contradictory messages do not undermine but rather
augment the power of entrenched symbols.) Innocent, childlike ice cream
is now an incarnation of voluptuous hedonism. It is rich and costs a
lot; the price is a consequence and almost a symbol of its "richness."
It is heavy too - which is exactly what people should try not to be,
especially if they are middle class and rich. (The small container
should not confuse us here: most people bracketed as "rich" in our
society live in households of one or two members; the pint-sized con-
tainer is designed for them.)
Ice cream, despite its childhood image, is eaten far more now by adults
than by children-three times as much more, according to one California
study - and more by men than by women. The sexy, voluptuous, even
"sinful" image of ice cream has therefore been greatly accentuated
lately. Ice cream (cold, milky, breast-shaped) has always been
mythologically "female" in northern cultures. For example, the ragged
edge which often forms where a round scoop of ice cream rests on the
cone is called a "skirt." A good scooper is trained always to provide
"a neat, inviting skirt." Ice cream can be a sexual symbol of ambiguous
gender: in the 1930S starlets licking cones were especially popular as
pin-ups. Ice cream has in fact always had adult aspects to its appeal
322 

one thinks of the sophisticated aura of formal, moulded desserts, for
example. Stendhal declared ice cream to be worthy of an adult's atten-
tion by remarking, on first tasting it, "What a pity this isn't a sin."
A new "confessional" note is struck by ice cream enthusiasts today, who
regularly speak as though their favourite dessert is some kind of
obsession, even a drug. Their eulogies remind us of Michel Foucault's
theory about sex: modern man is imperiously required to speak about it.
"I am an unregenerate ice cream fetishist"; "this decadent delight, my
drug of choice"; "when it comes to ice cream, my taste-buds know no
shame"; "it is outrageously heavy and rich, sinfully delightful"; "I
stood in line for my multi-calorie fix." There is, in addition, a
constantly reiterated insistence on the "satisfaction" which ice cream
affords.
At least some of these words, and many more like them, which pour daily
into TV copy and magazine columns, are designed of course to make
people buy more ice cream: a drug addict, after all, never has enough;
he keeps buying. The obsession with the enjoyment of ice cream's
"voluptuousness" sounds as though modern mores have changed, relaxed,
become free at last from constraints and from the "uptight" past. But
there is a sense in which the substitution of food (and especially food
so easily bought) for sex constitutes a false and knowing ingenu-
ousness, and even a flight from the challenges and responsibilities
which sex entails. It could be the "puritanical" attitude to sex
reasserting itself in a twentieth-century, comfort-obsessed guise: a
modern version of the Victorians' reputedly having found piano legs
suggestive.
It is likely that there is as well another truth: that ice cream has
become a great indulgence precisely because its "innocent" myth remains
intact. It is a safe drug, an antidote to anxiety - to the stress, for
example, of having to be thin. We feel that reality is now something
for which we have to pay a high price; but we doggedly, even touch-
ingly, wish that reality could be innocent.
323

References

ENCYCLOPEDiAS AND DICTIONARIES

CONSIDINE, D.M. and G.D., eds. Foods and Food Production Encyclopedia.
N.Y.: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982.
COYLE, L.P. JR. The World Encyclopedia of Food. N.Y.: Facts on File,

1982 .
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OLIVE OIL: A TREE AND ITS I:RUITS

COUTANCE, A.G.A. L'Olivifr. Paris: J. Rothschild, 1877.
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HOFMEISTER, P. Die heili,gen Ole in der morgen-und abendlandischen
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JASHEMSKI, W.F. The Gardens of Pompeii. N.Y.: Caratzas, 1979.
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KLEIN, M.B. The Feast of the Olive. Berkeley: Aris, 1983.
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336 

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MITCHELL, R.W. Castile Soap. Boston, the author, 1927.
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LEMON JUICE: A SOUR NOTE

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337

ICE CREAM: COLD COMFORT

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pp. 10-11.
338

Index
Aborigines, Australian, 65
Abstinence from food, 70, 76, 109,
151-52, 210
Acid, 238, 239, 240, 257, 259, 260, 265, 268, 269-70, 273, 275, 276,
279-81, 282, 283; lactic acid, 87, 88, 236, 238
Additives, 42, 62, 66-67, 89, 104,
105, 108, 137-43passin~, 146,
149, 153, 216, 218, 220 21,
237, 275-76, 277, 279, 307,
309-11, 313, 314, 317. 320-21
Advertising, 42-43, 62, 105,
106-107, 109-11, 114, 186,
193, 209, 215, 218-19, 220,
238-39, 248, 275-76, 278, 292,
304, 305, 306, 315-20, 322
Aelian, 135
Africa, 27, 36--37, 39, 65, 67-69, 104-105, 120-21, 124, 145, 158, 169,
177, 180-82, 183, 202, 226, 267, 268, 275, 288. See also names of
Atrican countries.
Alchemv, 76, 293
Alcohol, 34, 39, 187-90, 215, 244, 273, 274, 280, 297, 308, 311, 312.
See also Beer, Bmlld!, Liqueur, Rum, Whiskev, Win~.
Alexander the Great, 288
Algonquin Indians, 39
Algeria, 236
Allergies, 59, 181, 187, 220, 279

338

Almonds, 150, 236, 299 Ambrose, Saint, 125 Amino acids, see Protein
Anchovv, 236 Anderson, Alexander r., 186 Angelica, 201 Animal teed, 23,
26, 39, 40, 48, 51, 104, 134, 137-38, 139-40, 141, 143, 148, 280
Animals, 31, 36, 58, 65, 84, 85, 86, 88-90, 94, 95, 98, 100, 102, 110,
115, 119, 144, 158, 163, 168, 170, 178, 194, 291-92, 307; domestication
of, 65, 119, 285. See also Factory Farming. Anointing, 92, 94, 224, 242
43, 248, 249-54. See also Cosmetics. Antibiotics, 137, 140, 146
Aphrodisiacs, see Sex Appert, Nicolas, 245 Apples, 150, 226, 239, 261
62. 273, 277, 283, 314 Arabs, 37, 67, 68, 69, 73, 86, 91, 97, 178, 180,
181, 197, 234, 263, 264-65, 273, 288, 297. .~~also individual Arab
coulltries. Archaeologv alld tood, 27, 29-30, 56-57, 97, 122, 178, 240,
262 Archestratos, 215 Argentil1a, 158, 267 Aristophalles, 127
Aristoxem)s of ('.vrelle 2().
339

Armenians, 59, 297
Aroma, 13, 88, 92, 97, 98, 104,
108-109, 150, 165, 166, 175,
188, 239, 264, 265, 266, 267,
279, 280, 284, 299, 300
Arterio Sclerosis, see Atherosclerosis
Artichokes, 16
Arugula, see Rocket
Ash, 32--33, 38
Aspartame, 275
Assam, 262
Assyrians, 122, 263. See also Iraq.
Athenaeus, 151, 301
Atherosclerosis, 110
Auden, W.H., 21
Augustus, Emperor, 204
Australia, 65, 158, 177, 226, 267,
269, 295, 319
Austria, 56-57, 86, 88, 271, 300,
305, 311
Azolla, 170-71
Aztecs, 31, 34, 39, 72, 197

Bacon, l:~rancis, 293--94
Bahamas, 205
Baking powder, 23
Bali, see Indonesia
Bananas, 177, 267, 271, 283
Bangladesh, 145, 156
Barley, 95, 155, 157, 178, 187,
1~9, 282
Barthes, Roland, 152
Battery Hens, see Factory Farmillg
Bay leaves, 248, 255
Beans, 30, 31, 32, 38, 155
Beecher, Catharine, 100, 296
Beecher-Stowe, Harriet, 100
Beet; 51, 56--57, 70, 102, 103, 110,
117, 148, 151, 152, 221, 222,
292
Beer, 23, 34, 90, 98, 109, 169, 187,
220, 235, 295, 307, 308, 312,
319. See also Sake, Chicha.
Beethoven, Ludwig von, 300
Betu, Harumi, 188
Belgium, 40, 88, 146, 204, 218

Belize, 33-34 Ben and Jerry's, 318 Benedict, Saint, 152 Bentley, E.
Clerihew, 78 Beri-beri, 184-85 Berkeley, William, 290 Bioflavonoids~
283-84 Black, Joseph, 294 Blaga, Lucian, 41 Blancmange, 150 Bleaching
tood, 44, 104, 107, 220, 241 Blood, 65, 66, 67, 70, 75, 95, 101, 127,
128, 130, 143, 150, 151, 152, 154, 170, 215 Bodin, Jean, 57 Boiling,
19, 39, 65, 151, 163, 165, 198, 254 Bolivia, 275 Boorde, Andrew, 89--
90, 195 Bouillon cubes, 143 Brand lovalty, 209, 278, 292 Brandy, 274
Braudel, Fernand, 287 Brazil, 37, 103, 104, 124, 180, 267 Bread, 14,
39, 42, 62, 67, 96, 102, 103, 104, 128, 155, 168, 184, 199-200, 213,
225, 229, 235, 239, 284, 306, 312 Breaktast, 42-44, 173, 186-87, 277,
306 Breast-t eding, 33, 166, 167, 187, 196-97 Brillat-Savarin, Jean
Anthelme, 179, 301, 306 Brine, see Salt Britain, 15-18 passim, 24, 37,
57, 61, 69, 71, 73-75, 86, 87-88, 96, 98-99, 101, 103, 106, 108, 122,
123, 129, 136, 139, 142, 146, 147, 150-51, 152, 165, 179, 180, 202,
204, 218, 222, 252, 253-54, 255, 260, 267, 273-74, 281-83, 287, 289,
290, 292, 294, 296, 299-300, 303, 305, 307, 311, 319
340 

Broomcon1, 41 Brown, 23, 165, 184, 192 Brunsing, Rex L., 208 Buddhism,
95, 96, 121, 129, 170, 171, 187 Buontalenti, Bemardo, 297-98 Burma, 37,
119, 120, 156, 160, 167, 262 Burt, Harry Sr. 305 Butter, 14, 18, 19,
23, 38, 83-114, 128, 147, 232, 243, 254-55, 256,273,292,311,317
Butterfat, see Fat Buttermilk, 85-87 Byron, Geor~c Gordon, Lord, 40

Cabbage, 70, 204, 212, 221, 260 Cabot, Sebastian, 36-37 Caesar, Julius,
61, 123 Cates, 255, 274, 297, 298-99, 300, 305, 311. See also Ice Cream
Parlours. Calcium, 64, 91, 130, 138, 279 Cambyses, King of Persia, 203
Camerarius, 25, 230 Canada, 16, 40, 47, 48, 54, 70 71, 80, 105-106,
109, 111-12, 137, 146, 206, 210, 212, 213, 218, 281,291,309,311,319
Canary Islands, 226 Candler, Asa Griggs, 275 Candy, 23, 169, 192, 201,
263, 265, 273, 279, 312 Cannibalism, 34, 144, 151 Capons, 117, 123, 150
Careme, Antonin, 313-14 Caribbean, 37, 71, 129, 274, 279-80. See also
individual countries. Carletti, Franccsco, 164 Carlos, Don, 296
Carrots, 16, 89, 212 Cartier, Jacques, 281 Carving, 17, 115, 116, 152,
153 Cassava, 181 Cellini, Benvenuto, 281

Celts, 56-57, 86, 93, 123
Chain stores, 118, 305, 309
Charlemagne, Emperor, 252
Charles of Anjou, 73
Chavez, Cesar, 209-11
Cheese, 14, 18, 24, 64, 70, 87, 88,
90-91, 95, 97-98, 101, 151,
179, 235, 255, 279, 299, 306,
309, 310
Chevreul, Michel-Eugene, 78
Chewing gum, 279
Chicha, 34, 39
Chicken, 14, 16-17, 19, 23, 43, 51,
63, 84, 115-54, 155, 163, 184,
218,220, 222, 273, 276, 294,295
Chicory, 199, 201
Chile, 124, 267
China, 37, 46, 73, 91, 96, 120,
121-22, 145 46, 150, 160 61,
162, 163, 164-66, 170, 173,
178, 181, 197, 202, 226, 262,
264, 288, 289, 297, 298, 312
Chloride, Chlorine, 63, 77-79, 82,
302
Chocolate, 274, 297, 299, 305, 309,
314, 320
Cholesterol, 108, 110-12, 113, 114,
117, 146, 153, 222, 256-58, 320
Chopsticks, 164, 172
Christianity, 70, 76, 77, 91-92, 96,
125, 133-34, 151-52, 227-28,
234, 237, 244, 247, 248-49,
250, 251, 252-54
Churning, 85-87, 90, 93-94, 96,
100-102, 301, 303, 316, 318
Cinnamon, 97, 179
Citrons, 261, 262-64, 265, 266
Civilization and tood, 12, 67,
76-77, 151, 155-91 passim,
198-99, 224-26, 234, 247, 248,
249, 252, 285-87, 312-14
Clovis, King, 252
Coca-Cola, 275-76, 279
Cocaine, 275
Cocktighting, 119-20, 122,
123-29. 133. 168
341

Coconuts, 103--104, 111, 169, 277
Cod, 70, 71, 152
Coffee, 23, 235, 260, 274, 296,
297, 299, 300, 320
Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 73
Colgate Company, 45
Colour and food, 33, 35, 39, 43, 47, 8~, 104, 107, 109, 137, 158, 220,
237, 239, 265, 268, 270, 275, 310, 311. See also individual colours.
Columbus, Christopher, 30, 205
Columbus, Diego, 32
Cone, ice cream, 304, 311, 314-15,
321
Confucius, 164
Cookbooks, 40, 98, 179, 255-56,
300
Cooking, 38-40, 65, 107, 147, 151, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 198, 285,
295--96, 297--98. See also Boiling, Fryil1g, Roasting, Stewing.
Copts, 101-102, 280
Corn, 14, 16, 18, 19, 22--55, 83,
103-104, 117, 134, 146, 150,
161, 181, 187, 219, 273, 291
Corn Flakes, 41-44, 277
Corn oil, 23, 111, 255, 256, 258,
320
Corn starch, see Starch
Corn syrup, 23, 45, 310, 320
Cosmetics, 92, 242-44, 265, 279,
280-81
Cottonseed oil, 103, 113, 241, 255
Cream, 86, 87, 88, 96, 101, 179,
254, 298-300, 301, 302, 306,
307, 309-11, 316 19
Creoles, 255
Crete, ancient, 240
Crispness, 42, 44, 187, 193,
200 201, 216
Cuba, 30, 291
Cucumbers, 198, 221
Cups, 188-90, 304-305
Curacao, 281

Custard, 96 97, 300, 301
Cyprus, 244, 279
Czechoslovakia. 158

Da Gama, Vasco, 179, 268, 281
Da Vinci, Leonardo, 77
Dairy products, 16, 87, 102, 105,
110, 113, 217, 295, 300, 310.
See also individual products.
Dandelion, 199, 202
Darwin, Charles, 119
David, Elizabeth, 12
David, King, 251
Davy, Humphry, 77-78
Deboning, 117, 148-49
Democritus, 242
Denmark, 98, 317
De Quincey, Thomas, 15, 16
Desalination, 63, 80, 181
Dessert, 19, 179, 216, 222, 279,
298, 300, 305, 306, 314, 321.
See also Ice Cream.
Detienne, Marcel, 199
Dirt, 66, 92, 98, 242. See also
Pollution, Purity.
Disney, Walt, 316-17
Divinatiol1, 120, 123
Dixie Cups, 304-305
Dogs, 32, 119, 122, 151
Dormice, 123
Dudley, Paul, 25
Dumas, Alexandre, 179
Dumplings, 188
Durrell, Lawrence, 235

Ecuador, 30, 32
Eels, 163
Eggplant, 256
Eggs, 101, 108, 110, 119-20, 121,
123, 124, 128, 129-132, 133,
136, 137-39, 140, 146, 150,
151, 153, 166, 295, 298, 299,
302, 309, 310, 318
Egvpt, 80, 140, 158, 195, 202, 235,
264, 280
Egyptians, ancient, 13, 45, 57, 69,
342 

70, 73, 92, 122, 123, 125, 128,
140, 194, 201-202, 234, 243,
244, 251
Eijkman, Christian, 184
Eison, 187
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 234, 306
Endive, 198
Equatorial Guhlea, 37
Erasmus, 62
Eskimo Pie, 305
Ethiopia, 68-69, 92, 120
Etruscans, 57
Evelvn, John~ 204

Factory tarming, 51, 123, 129, 130,
131, 132, 136-39, 140-49, 163,
212
Farnham, J.M.W., 46
Fat, 23, 78, 83--87, 88-90, 92-93
97, 99-100, 101, 102, 109,
110 11, 117, 147, 151, 155,
183-84, 189, 239, 250, 256-58,
308, 309, 310, 317, 320, 321
Feedlot operating, 51, 80
Fenllel, 199, 236
Fertilitv rites, 31, 34, 40, 94, 101-
102, 162-63, 167, 169-71, 194
Fertilizer, 28, 31, 34, 53, 55, 140,
159, 162, 170-71, 172, 173-74,
175, 181, 204, 206, 266
Figs, 255
Finland, 97
Fish, 23, 31, 34, 38, 69-70, 150-
53 passim, 163, 175, 179, 181,
183, 222, 245, 260, 273, 289,
298. See also Cod, Salmon
Fish Oil, 103
Flavour, 88, 104, 108, 110, 111,
113, 114, 117, 118, 142, 149,
155, 175, 187, 192, 224, 234-
36, 237, 238, 241, 258, 259-60,
277, 278, 279-80, 303, 310,
315, 318, 321
Food: babv, 23, 179, 187, 279,
312; canned, 23, 67, 143, 148,
214, 237, 245; changillg the

appearance of, 12, 89, 107, 108-- 109, 117, 147, 152, 220, 237, 239,
298, 301, 310, 313, 315; tast, 109, 117-19, 148, 149, 151, 200, 212,
234, 255; "temale" and "male," 19, 24, 27, 76, 87, 101, 150-52, 164-65,
166-68, 19699, 215, 216, 222, 314, 317-18, 321-22; festive, 19, 94-95,
97, 116, 118, 153, 163, 305-306, 308, 311, 314-16; trozen, see
Freezing; hand-held, 19, 39-40, 83, 116, 149, 192, 234, 255, 303--305,
311, 314--15; healtll, 41-42, 106, 112, 113, 184, 320 21; insects as,
144; invalid, 150; "light," 109-110, 113, 116, 15253, 187, 320 21;
medichlal, 4041, 92-94, 111, 150-51, 178, 195-98, 203 4, 244, 252-53,
256 57, 265, 274-76, 279-84; "natural," 83, 112, 113, 216, 220, 293-94,
307, 318-19; poisoning, 241 42; preserv;ltio of, 70-71, 76, 77, 93, 97,
192, 286, 289, 294, 306-307, 316 22. See also Freezillg, lrradiatioll,
Shelt:lite; processed, 99-100, 103-105, 148, 149, 152, 192, 220, 221,
236-37, 238, 277, 279, 293, 310-11, 320-21; street velldillg ot,
303-306, 308, 318; timing by, 24, 34, 169; trade in, 57, 68-69, 70, 71,
72, 74, 28790; transportation ot, 28, 37, 61, 67-69, 97, 202, 206, 207,
212, 213, 216, 221, 225, 237, 239, 268, 271, 286, 287, 289, 290, 291,
295, 305, 306-307, 309; tor travel, 27-28, 34, 39, 56-57, 70-71, 98,
100, 117-18, 121, 124, 281-83 Fork, 19, 116, 164 Forman, Harrison, 95
Forrest, William, 222 Foucault, Michel, 322
343

France, 16, 17, 18, 22, 40, 57, 70, 71, 73, 86, 91-92, 99, 101-103,
106, 116, 123, 141, 146, 150, 152, 156, 158, 165, 195, 202,
214,216,218,222,228,229, 233, 236, 237, 238, 241, 243, 252-53, 254,
263, 271, 273, 274, 282, 284, 287, 297-99, 300, 301, 304, 305, 306,
311, 313, 314, 318. See also Ga-lls.
Freezing, 23, 26, 71, 143, 152, 193, 201, 277, 279, 286, 294, 301, 302,
305, 307, 308, 311, 313. See also Iee.
Freshness, 26, 89-90, 193, 200,
214, 219-20, 222, 269
Frogs, 163, 165, 179, 218
Fruit, 16, 20, 23, 151, 195, 216, 218,221,222,275,276,281, 289, 299,
300, 301, 310, 311, 313. See also hldividual truits.
Frusen Gladje, 317-18
Frying, 16-17, 19, 117, 151, 198,
254
Fuchs, Leonard, 204
Fugard, Athol, 267
Funk, Casimir, 185
Fussell, Jacob, 306

Gabon, 37
Gandhi, Mahatma, 74-75
Garlic, 13, 97, 128, 187, 229, 255,
256, 282
Gatti, Carlo, 303-304
Gauls, 123, 243
Geertz, Clittord, 128
Gelatin, 279, 302, 309-310
Genetics, 29, 44-49, 138-39, 147.
173--77, 193, 200. See also

Hybridization .
Gerard, John, 198
Germany, 37, 40, 84-85, 86, 88,
98, 100-101, 106, 125, 146,
186, 271, 272-73, 295, 304, 318
Ghana, 39, 180
Ghee. 93-95, 96. 101

Gin, 23, 260
Ginger beer, 275
Glasse, Hannah, 300
Goat, 256
Goethe, Johann Woltgang von, 273
Goitre, 62
Goldberger, Joseph, 33
Golden, see Yello~v
Gond-vanaland, 177
Good Humor Bar, 305
Gooseberries, 203, 273
Gourds, 198
Grafting, 225, 226, 227, 237, 263,
268-69
Granita, 297, 300
Grapetruit, 261, 266, 269, 273
Grapes, 210, 229, 267, 273
Greece, 91, 183, 233, 235, 237,
255-56, 288
Greeks, ancient, 69, 76, 90, 92, 96,
99, 115, 122, 123, 125-27, 128,
133, 135, 151, 168, 178, 196,
197, 198-99, 203, 215, 233,
236, 242-43, 244-47, 248,
249, 250, 255, 261, 264, 272,
285-86, 288, 295-96, 301
Green, 193, 198, 214, 216, 220,
221, 227, 228, 239, 265
Green Revolution, 49, 52-53, 55,
79, 174-76, 181-82
Gregon~ the Great, 221
Grijns, Gerrit, 184
Guatemala, 32, 33-34, 51-53
Guinea-Conakr!~, 181
Guzman, Ratael, 29
Gv~vnn. Nell. 274

Haagen-Dazs, 317-19
Hallstatt, 56-57. 72, 86
Ham, 71, 149, 284
Hamburgers, 12, 117, 152, 200
Hamv~i, Ernest A., 304
Harvesting, 26, 28, 38, 52, 144,
157, 158, 162, 167, 168, 172,
173, 174, 193, 194, 206, 207,

213. 225. 228-31. 233 239
344 

263, 269--70. See also Mechanization.
Heart disease, 64, 110, 113, 256. See also Atherosclerosis.
Hedonism, 43, 101- 102, 114, 203,
317, 318, 320, 322
Henri IV of France, 116
Henry IV of England, 253
Herbicides, 28, 49-50, 55, 79, 172,
206, 225, 232
Herbs, 97, 199, 213, 221, 225,
235, 236 37, 255, 256, 281
Herodotus, 96, 203
Hinduism, 94, 121, 129, 169
Hippocrates of Cos, 197, 203, 29
Hoabinhians, 178
Holland, 37, 71, 80, 88, 90, 96, 98,
99-100, 102-103, 184-85, 204,
218, 281
Homer, 99, 122, 151, 244, 246
Honev, 84, 94, 101, 204, 242, 273,
302
Hopi Indians, 35
Hopkins, Frederick, 185
Hormones, 141
Hors d'oeuvres, 14, 215-16
Horseradish, 203
Horses, 96, 151
Hospitality, 15, 67, 96-97, 190 91,
249, 250
Humoral Medicine, 197-198, 203,
204, 305
Hungary, 37, 158, 282, 283
Hybridization, 29, 35, 44, 46-50,
53, 54, 81, 174-77, 205, 261,
262
Hydrogenation, 103-104, 111
Hydroponics, 214
Hypertension, 64

Ice, 61, 71--72, 198, 207, 279,
286-96, 297, 300-301, 302,
303, 305, 306, 312, 314, 316
Ice Cream, 12, 14, 18, 19, 23, 71,
260, 279, 286-87, 290, 295-322
Ice Cream Parlours, 305-306, 316, 317. See also Cates.

Ice houses, 288-89, 290 91, 300
lceland, 97
Ice man, 302
Illumination, 94 95, 224, 234, 238,
244, 248, 251
Incas, 34, 124, 170
Incubation, 122, 123, 131, 140 41
India, 69, 74-75, 92-95, 104, 119,
121-23, 127-28, 129, 145, 158,
160, 169, 173, 176, 178, 179,
185, 262, 264, 265, 267, 268,
273, 288-89, 291, 298
Indians, American, 24-39, 46, 47, 51-53, 65, 66, 91, 124-25, 182, 196,
197, 269, 281. See also tribal names.
Indonesia, 119, 128, 162-63, 166,
168, 169, 176, 177-78, 184
lndusVallevCivilizatioll, 119, 121,
262
Industrial Revolution, 74-79, 99,
102-103, 111-12, 287, 292, 313
Insomnia, 195, 198
Instant puddings, 46, 66-67, 150
Inuit, 65
Iran, 120, 122, 178, 196, 203, 245,
263, 264, 299, 304. See also
Islam, Zoroastrians
Iraq, 146, 178, 197, 262, 263, 264. See also Assyrians, Sumerians.
Ireland, 40, 96-97, 101
Iroquois, 31
Irradiation of tood, 194, 217-20
Irreplaceability, 73, 75-76, 84-85,
104-105, 113, 210, 248-54
I.R.R.I., 174--76
Irrigation, 80--81, 156, 158--63, 165, 166, 172, 174, 177, 178, 179,
181, 214, 232. See also Water.
Islam, 121, 125, 250, 264
Israel, 218, 227--28, 273, 288. See also Judaism.
Italy, 16, 22, 37, 40, 57, 68, 72, 92,
125, 141, 150, 169, 179-80,
183, 202, 205, 208, 225, 229,
230, 233, 234, 236, 238, 239,
345

243, 247, 264, 265, 267, 269,
271-72, 273, 279, 289, 297-98,
299, 300, 303-304, 305, 311,
314. See also Romans.
Ivor~ Coast, 39, 180

Jam, 23, 265, 280, 299 Jamaica, 291 Japan, 54, 62-63, 91, 92, 166, 170,
172, 173, 186, 187-90, 254, 262, 312 Jetferson, Thomas, 179-80, 290
lohnson, Nancy, 301 Jones, Orlando, 45 Joule, James, 294 Judaism, 62,
67, 69, 70, 91, 101, 122, 125, 130, 150, 168, 199200, 225, 227, 229,
234, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 263-64, 320

Kampuchea, 119, 182
Kellogg, J.H., 41-42
Kellogg, Will, 41-44, 277
Kenya, 126
Kimber, John, 136
Knite, 19, 62, 107, 116, 164, 312
Kirchotl; G.S.C., 45
Kitchen, 17, 107
Kola nut, 275
Korea, 312
Kramer, E., 282
Kumquats, 261, 262
Kumvss, 96
Kwashiorkor. 33

Labelling, tood, 67, 218-19,
220 21, 238, 317
Lactose, 90-91, 312, 320
Lamb, 199, 288
Laos, 160, 173
Lard, 84, 89, 92, 98, 103, 107
Lawrence, D.H., 272
Leblanc, Nicolas, 78
Lett-overs, 17
Lemonade, 273--78, 297
Lemons, 14, 19, 20, 75, 167, 200,

237, 255, 259-84, 300, 314;
Lemon juicers, 276-77
Lentils, 94, 155
Leo, John, 37
Lettuce, 14, 18, 19, 192-223, 238,
260
Libya, 235
Limes, 167, 261, 262, 264, 265,
267, 273, 276, 280, 283
Lind, James, 282
Lipitz, Ed-vard, 317-18
Liqueur, 263, 297, 299
Liver, see Offal
Lobsters, 151
Logan, James, 25
Luther. Martin. 92

Macaroons, 299, 300 Madison, Dolley, 301 Maize, see Corn Malagasy, 156,
169, 177, 180, 281 Malaria, 182-83, 244 Malaysia, 145, 156, 167, 168,
183, 197, 262 Mali, 68, 72, 180 Mandarin oranges, see Tangerines
Manzoni, Alessandro, 40 Margarine, 23, 85, 99, 100, 102-14, 153, 233,
256-57 Marigolds, 89, 153 Marmalade, 265, 273, 280 Martial, 243
Martini, 236 Martinique, 290 Mattus, Reuben, 316-18 Mauritania, 68
Maya, 32, 33-34, 51 McDonald's, 118, 305 Meals, structure ot; 14-20,
116, 150, 152, 163, 164, 181, 18890, 215-16, 221-22, 235-36, 274, 276,
284, 293, 305-306, 320. See also Breaktast.
Meat, 23, 32, 51, 69-70, 96, 102-
103, 141, 146, 150, 151, 152,
153, 163, 164, 165, 193, 200,
207. 217. 218. 220. 221. 222.
346 

235, 255, 256, 260, 273, 279, 286, 289, 295, 305, 306, 320. See also
Bcet; Chickell, Lamb, Pork.
Mechanizatioll of tarming, 48-51,
54, 112-14, 144, 145, 148, 171-
72, 173, 174 75, 181-82, 193,
207, 209, 210, 211-12, 213-14,
231, 232, 270
Mege-Mouries, Hippolyte, 102
Melons, 198
Mendel, Gregor, 46
Mexico, 29, 30, 33-34, 36, 72,
197-98, 207-14, 237, 267
Milk, 23, 33, 36, 39, 40, 44, 84, 85, 86-88, 89-91, 94, 96, 100,
102-104, 110, 131, 140, 150, 151, 167, 179, 192, 196, 215, 222, 287,
298, 300, 301, 302, 306-307, 308, 309-15, 318. See also Breast-teeding.
Millet, 40, 155, 160, 181
Milne, A.A., 172
Minerals, 193, 222
Mining, 56-57, 58-60, 66, 285,
288
Mithraism, 125
Monasteries, 95, 152, 204, 221,
271-72
Monev, tood as, 68, 69, 164
Mongolia, 92, 120, 273
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 30u
Montesquieu, 179
Moore, Thomas, 294 95
Morocco, 37, 68, 72, 97, 236, 265
Mutfett, Thomas, 151, 152
Musa, Antonius, 203
Mvrrh, 198--99

Naming of animals and trces, 144,
228
Nasturtium, 196
Natchez Indians, 36
New Zcaland, 105-106, 158, 295,
319
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhclm, 179

Nigeria, 39, 104, 142
Nitrogen, 49, 53, 162, 171
Norwav, 135, 292, 299, 307
Nostalgia, 102, 106, 113, 272, 311, 315-17, 318

Oath-taking, 67, 77
Ottal, 143, 149, 256
Ojibway lndians, 35
Olive oil, 14, 19, 90-92, 99, 103, 111, 113, 179, 213, 224-58, 260
Olives, 224-26, 228, 229, 233-37, 255, 272
Onions, 12--14, 198, 207, 218, 236, 288
Opposites, Cosmic Systcm ot; 76, 125, 164-65, 197-98, 296 97, 305
Oranges, 207, 220, 237, 261, 262, 263, 264-69, 271, 273, 274, 276-79,
281-84
Osmotic Pressure, 63, 200
Oxidation, 88-89
Ovsters, 98, 151, 163

Packagillg, 23, 28, 42-43, 55, 89, 90, 102, 106, 118-119, 143, 172,
193, 207, 208-209, 212, 213, 214, 277-78, 305, 313, 317-18
Pakistan, 121, 173, 175. See also lndus Valley Civilizatioll.
Palm oil, 39, 103, 111
Parboiling, 185
Parkes, Famly, 288
Pasta, 16, 155
Pasteurization, 87, 90, 237, 277, 307, 308, 313
Pastn~, 113, 128, 153, 222, 314
Peace, 101, 108, 231, 247, 248, 249, 252, 254
Peanuts, 39, 103, 241, 255
Peas, 46, 198
Pectin, 276, 280
Pellagra, 32--33

Index ~47

Peppers: red hot, 39, 128, 198, 237; sweet, 236, 279 Pepsi-Cola, 276
Pepys, Samuel, 294 Persia, see lran Peru, 34, 39, 124, 289-90. See also
Incas. Pesticides, 23, 49-50, 55, 79, 158. 175, 176, 181, 206, 210 11,
225, 232, 270 Petroleum, 59, 60, 82, 104, 174 Philippines, 104, 129,
160, 168, 176, 177, 178, 207. See also

347
Phoenicians, 123, 243
Pickling, 233-38, 289
Pithvllos, 203
Planting, 28, 31-34, 49, 51-52,
158, 159, 162, 166, 169, 172,
180, 227, 232, 264
Plant libraries, 54, 176 77, 286
Plato, 245-46, 259-60
Plinv, 92
Plums, 262
Plutarch, 255
Pocock, David, 15
Poland, 58-59
Polenta, 16, 40
Pollutioll, 20, 46, 50, 51, 60,
78-79, 80-82, 121, 140, 175,
176,183, 214, 217, 219, 225,
286
Polo, Marco, 72, 96, 298
Polvnesians, 124
Pomelos, 261, 262
Pop, see Soft drinks
Popcorn, 26, 27
Pope, Alexander, 198
Poppv seed, 195
Pork, 51, 70, 84, 87, 151, 163,
218, 291
Portugal, 36, 37, 70, 71, 124, 179,
181, 233, 236, 264, 268, 269,
273, 281
Post, Emilv, 200, 215
Potassium. 64. 162

Potatoes, 16, 23, 25, 96, 152, 155,
207, 218, 222, 279
Pots, tor cooking, 17-18, 85-86,
163, 164-65
Prawns, 218
Procopio dei Coltelli, Francesco,
297, 298-99, 300, 305
Protein, 32-33, 48, 65, 93, 149,
175, 184, 218, 309
Proust, Marcel, 153-54, 314
Pruning, 225, 230-32, 266
Pueblo Indians, 31
Pulcher, P. Claudius, 123
Puller, General Lewis B., 312
Pumpkins, 32
Punch, 273
Purity, 35, 61, 62, 74, 77, 84, 94,
101-102, 107-108, 121, 134,
166, 169, 216, 248, 275, 292,
293, 311, 312-14, 317. Seealso
White.
Purslane, 198
Pvm, Barbara, 19
Pythagoras, 61, 196

Quaker Oats Company, 186-87
Quinces, 262, 264, 273

Rabelais, 203
Radicchio, 202, 213
Rancidity, 88-89, 93, 98, 100, 101,
183, 257
Rapeseed oil, 103, 241
Raspberries, 300, 314
Rats, 163
ReaLemon, 278
Reaumur, Antoine Ferchault de,
141
Refrigeration, 71, 79, 90, 110,
206-208, 285-322 passim
Refrigerators, 294--95, 305, 306,
309, 314 15
Reid, J. and R., 47
Reindeer, 65
Restaurants, 15, 22, 188-89, 215,
220, 222, 299
348 

Rice, 14, 16, 17, 19, 25, 33, 40, 94,
150, 155-91, 225, 282, 298
Richard 1l of England, 253
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 284
Roasting, 16-17, 19, 38, 116, 147,
151, 163, 199, 306
Rocket, 196, 213
Romania, 37, 40-41
Romans, ancient, 16, 40, 45, 57,
61, 69, 72, 119, 123, 178, 196,
197, 203-204, 215, 225, 233,
234, 242-43, 244, 263, 264,
288. See also Julius Caesar.
Rubber, 194
Rum, 71, 180, 282, 299
Russia, 45, 59, 67, 90, 95, 96, 107,
183, 218, 284, 290, 294

Sacrifice, 31, 34, 120, 127, 144, 164, 169-70, 288 Saffron, 89, 153
Sake, 187-90 Salad, 16, 152, 196, 200, 204 5, 222, 238, 274. See also
Lettuce. Saliva, 63, 259 Salmon, 289 Salt, 14, 18, 19, 23, 38, 56-82,
83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 95, 97-98, 100-101, 164, 181, 200, 214, 216,
225, 236, 237, 238, 260, 265, 289, 293, 300, 301-303, 314, 316 Sao
Tome, 37 Saturation of fats, 103-104, 107, 110 111 Saudi Arabia, 146,
263 Sauerkraut, 70 Sausages, 69-70, 143, 148, 149, 305 Scandinavia, 40,
62, 97, 317. See also individual countries. Schjelderup-Ebbe, T., 135
Scurvy, 281--83 Scythians, 90, 96, 123 Sea-water, 60-63, 64 65, 226,
245, 282

Seeds, 103-104, 176 77, 180-81, 198, 201-202, 227, 233, 241, 256, 261,
268-69, 280, 281. See also Planting.
Seminole Indians, 269
Seneca, L. Annaeus, 288
Seven-Up, 276
Seventh Day Adventists, 41
Sex, 76, 93, 94, 100-101, 126,
128, 130, 133, 135, 138, 160,
167, 179, 194-99, 205, 216,
243; roles, 31, 86-87, 116, 125,
133-36, 159, 166-67, 187, 188,
189, 209, 216, 222, 244, 297,
298, 299, 300, 301, 321-22
Shakespeare, William, 75-76, 125,
251-52
Shelf-life, 23, 27, 103, 109, 110,
112, 183-84, 185, 188, 192,
193, 216-21, 269-70, 271, 276,
277, 279, 295, 314-15
Sherbet, 274, 288, 296, 297, 299, 300, 301, 302. See also Granita.
Shinto, 187
Shish-Kebab, 255, 256
Shull, George H., 46
Sierra Leone, 39, 180
Signatures, Doctrine of, 195-96
Skordalia, 255, 256
Slaves, 36-37, 68, 71, 96, 180,
182-83
Smen, 97
Smith, Sydney, 205, 260
Smollett, Tobias, 98
Snow, 288, 289, 290, 294, 296,
312 13
Soap, 23, 78, 243, 265, 279, 280
Socrates, 125
Soda Water; Sodas, 274-75, 306,
308, 309
Sodium, 63, 71, 77-78, 79, 82, 302
Soft drinks, 23, 109, 260, 273-76,
279, 321
Solomon, King, 252
Sorghum, 160, 181. See also Broomcorn.
349

Sorrel, 199, 273
Soup, 99, 150, 198, 276, 297
South Africa, 37, 218, 226, 267,
281
Soy Beans, 103-104, 108, 111,
146, 149, 241, 245, 256, 258,
320
Spain, 22, 36, 37, 40, 57, 68, 70,
71, 72, 90, 126, 146, 178-79,
182, 183, 197, 230, 233, 234,
236, 237, 238, 241-42, 243,
252, 264, 265, 268, 269, 273,
287, 289, 296
Spices, 179, 199, 218, 250, 255,
256
Spoon, 19, 62, 150, 253, 304-305
Sport, 119--20, 126-29, 242 43,
246, 247
Squash, 31, 32
Sri Lanka, 95, 169
Staples, 16, 18, 24, 32, 34-35, 38,
40, 112, 155, 167, 175, 181
Starch, 19, 23, 25, 26, 27, 45-46,
150, 155, 186, 277
Status, 16-17, 19, 67, 77, 84, 85,
88, 94, 97-100, 105-107, 109,
110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118,
134, 135, 144, 151, 152, 153,
165-66, 181, 183, 190, 193,
213, 221-22, 225, 235, 239,
254, 255-56, 257-58, 295, 311,
316-22 passim
Stendhal, 322
Stevens, Wallace, 315
Stewing, 34, 151, 256, 273
Stickiness, 172-73, 179
Stones, bladder and kidney, 98
Strawberries, 206, 222, 300, 301,
314, 320
Succory, 198
Sudan, 120
Sugar, 23, 26, 33, 45, 67, 71, 84,
94, 150, 173, 179, 180, 221,
254, 268, 273, 274-75, 277,
280, 282, 297, 309, 310, 311,
318, 320

Sulphites, 220
Sumerians, 121, 195, 262
Sunflower oil, 103, 111, 256
Supermarkets, 22-23, 55, 89, 194, 208, 219-20, 269-70, 309, 314-15. See
also Chain stores.
Sweden, 317, 318
Swift, Jonathan, 49
Switzerland, 40, 62, 88, 208, 274,
318
Syria, 274, 304
Szent-Gyorgyi, Albert, 283

Table manners, 15, 16, 19, 62, 77,
164, 188-90, 200, 244, 248
Taboos, 76-77, 90, 92, 120, 121,
122, 124, 126
Taiwan, 174, 175, 176
Tanaka, T., 262
Tangerines, 261, 262, 266, 269
Taoism, 170
Taro, 157, 178, 187
Taste, 109, 259-60, 301, 319; acquired, 234-35, 256; of children, 43,
118, 150, 179, 235; tastings, 238-39
Taxes, 72-75, 105 6, 107, 108
Tavlor, Jeremy, 198
Tea, 75, 95, 187, 260, 273, 284,
297, 300
Teosinte, 29
Thailand, 119, 120, 160, 161, 167,
173, 176, 182
Themistocles, 126
Theodorakis, R.J., 255-56
Thinness, 99, 109-10, 112, 117,
153, 193, 200, 222, 256, 280,
320 22
Third World, 52--53, 54 55,
104-105~ 111, 140, 145, 148
Thracians, 90
Tibet, 72, 92, 94-95, 96, 120, 121
Tissain, Gerard, 299-300
Tobacco, 30, 44, 73, 180, 235
Totu, 320
Tofutti. 320
                 350                                     !              
        Index

Tomato, 81, 193, 279                                               200,
201, 204, 217, 218, 220,
Tomato ketchup, 23, 67, 152             221, 260, 279, 281, 282, 283~
Wlld rlce, 157                         Yaks, 95-96
Tongue, human, 65, 203, 259 60          309. See also b~ name.~
Williams, Robert R., 185               Yams, 178, 181
 302, 321                              Vegetable oil, 103, 104, 114,
201                                    ~Wine, 14, 20, 90, 128, 152,
179,                                   Yeast, 23, 76, 188
Tonic water, 275                        241, 320. See also oils by
name.                                   187, 213, 220, 222, 235, 239,
Yellow, 23, 40, 43-44,
Tortoni, 299                           Vegetables, 12, 18, 23, 65-66,
151                                     242, 244, 250, 274, 282, 288,
108-109, 116, 153,
Town versus countn~, 103, 112-13,       156, 163, 175, 193, 197-98 307
265-66, 267, 269,
 162, 163, 234, 286, 311, 316           200, 201, 204, 217, 218, 220,
Wisdom, 66, 77, 82, 225, 247, 248,     Yoghurt, 91, 95
Trans-tam~ acids, 111                   221, 260, 279, 281, 282, 283
249, 251, 252, 254                     Yugoslavia, 57, 235
Trollope, Frances, 292                  309. See also by name.i
Witchcratt, 77, 100-101
Tsampa, 95                             Vegetarians, 41-42, 74, 151-52,~
Wok, 163                               Zambia, 27
Tudor, Frederick, 290-91                204, 221Zen Buddhism, 187
Tunisia, 233, 235, 263. See also       Velloni, 2991Xenophon, 288
Zoroastrians, 122, 125
 Phoenicians.                          Venturi, G.B., 208~
Xerophthalmia, 98                      Zuni lndians, 36
Turke~, 37, 40, 178, 233, 235, 274,    Vemon, Admiral, 282
 288, 297, 300                         Victoria, Queen, 287
Turkeys, 17, 37, 116, 132, 138,        Vietnam, 38, 160-61, 171, 178
 147, 149                              Vikings, 93
Twain, Mark, 17-18, 113, 293           Vinegar, 20, 23, 200, 204, 238,
                                        273, 274, 280, 282
Uganda, 120                            Virginit!~, 238, 248
Unitormit\~, 22, 43, 47, 48, 54, 55,   Vitamins, 32--33, 91, 93, 98,
108,
 90, 97, 104, 117-18, 175, 176,         184-85, 193, 222, 281-84, 307
 181, 187, 206, 230, 295, 304,         Vogt, Clarence W., 308
 309                                   Volanti, Agostino~ 146
Unilever, 104--105, 108
United States of Ameriea, 16-18,       Wall, Thomas, 305
 22, 24--25, 28--31, 33, 38, 40,       Walnuts, 195; walllut oil, 91,
238
 41-44, 45, 46-51, 54-55, 58,          W~shillgtoll, George, 290, 301l ~.
 59, 62, 80, 99, 100, 103, 106,        Water, 28, 34, 38, 50--51, 58,
60,                                    .
 107, 108, 116, 122, 126, 129,          80-81, 98, 157, 158-62, 182-
 134, 137, 142, 146, 147 49,            83, 200-201, 206, 214, 227,.
 153, 171-73, 179-80, 182-83,           228, 235, 254, 266, 274, 275,
 184, 185, 186-87, 192-93, 202,         292, 296, 301, 302-303, 304,:
 205--15, 217, 218, 219, 222-23,        320. See also Irrigation, Se.~
ter.                                   ,
 226, 233, 237, 241, 255--56,          Watercress, 196, 199
 263, 267--69, 275-77, 278, 284,       Weddillgs, 14, 40, 94, 101,
169-70,
 287, 290-92, 294, 299, 300,            187-88.
 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306-         Wee~ling, 31, 38, 162, 166,
180,                                   .
 307, 308, 310, 311-13, 315,            193, 207, 211
 316-22                                Wheat, 24, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42,
45,
Vanilla, 299, 313, 314, 320             128, 157, 160, 174, 178, 185,
Varietv, 22, 35, 46, 54, 87, 158,       186, 199, 225
 176, 200, 261, 309                    Whiske!, 312
Vatel, 298                             White, 43, 76, 84, 107, 137,
139,
Vegetables, 12, 18, 23, 65-66, 151,     150, 152, 153, 167, 172, 173,
 156, 163, 175, 193, 197-98,            184, 188, 311, 313, 318

84, 89, 107, 108-109, 116, 153, 248, 260, 265-66, 267, 269, 270, 272