THE GASTRONOMY OF HUNGER

Nameless Plants

“At the end of winter and the beginning of spring it was said proverbially among women that every green plant goes into a salad.” This was written, around 1570, by Costanzo Felici in his treatise “On Salads and Plants That in Some Way Become Food for Humans,” addressed to his teacher, the famous botanist Ulisse Aldrovandi, professor of natural sciences at the University of Bologna.

The passage quoted above is the introduction to a long description of particular interest because it allows us to open an essential chapter on the history of food that always runs the risk of disappearing from the written documentation on which the historian bases his work, namely, a knowledge of the land and the plants it generates spontaneously, and the oral transmission of knowledge shared by common people, recognized as extremely important even by official science (as indicated by the attention Felici gives it). A fine thread ties the academic works of Aldrovandi—who studies and draws the plants in his herbarium—to the daily practices of the women who scour the fields in search of “green herbs” and always find new ones for their salads, “because they mix into them many plants without names or scarcely used.” Just that: plants without names. Felici seems to be admitting that peasant women gather plants whose existence even university professors ignore.

Women: Even this is an important admission. Felici attributes a privileged familiarity, a special relationship with food born of their intimacy with the earth and its products. It is through comments like these that a treatise on botany can open unexpected windows of anthropological thinking.

Which herbs go into these end-of-winter “mixtures”? Felici’s women (he is referring to the customs of his region, between Rimini and the Marches) “gather among the vines a kind of wild lettuce, which they call fat herb, that has bitter leaves spotted with white, and yellow bell-shaped flowers … they also call it ‘fat hen’ and ‘wolf’s testicles’”; and “the whole rib of young scabiosa”; as well as many other herbs and flowers also good in salads; and “a tiny branched creeping herb, with little yellow flowers and small leaflets like three-leaf field clover” that they call “hare’s ear.” (Felici often lists the popular names of plants, comparing them with the scientific names.) He lists and describes dozens of plants “and I have heard of many others which I no longer remember.”

To remember them all is practically impossible, as it is impossible to catalogue the diversity of foods that went into those salads “according to their fantasy.” These are fantasies that sustain the daily diet and are doubly useful in times of famine, “because at such times one gathers everything, and everything, they say, fills the stomach.” Hunger stimulates ingenuity, every resource is put to use.

How many of us would still know how to do that?

Field Herbs

If someone says “field herbs” you think of ditches, meadows, spontaneous vegetation. You think of a food created by nature, not by man. You think of plants that during the cold season (and beyond, all the way to spring) cheer the table with various flavors, wilder, more bitter, at times tastier. You think of the herbs that provide us with infusions for a sore throat and cold winter afternoons. Medieval monks called it Providence and assigned many alimentary needs to it, without forgetting that the largest share of such provisions came from Work.

This is the ancient dialectic between nature and culture that recurs in the domain of food. Produce our own food or wait for Someone to take care of us? Count on the generosity of God, climate, soil, or roll up our sleeves to earn our daily bread with the hoe and the spade? Some (like Saint Benedict) upheld the first option, celebrating the value of fatigue and labor. Others preferred to isolate themselves from the world, become hermits in wooded solitude, and rely on Providence (or alms) for their survival. Most played both sides. They cultivated the land, the fields, the orchards, but at the same time assisted nature’s signals. They learned how to recognize plants, how to distinguish edible plants from poisonous ones, how to care for a vegetable heritage that was useful “both to feed us and to keep us in good health,” as the monk Cassiodoro wrote in the sixth century. The vegetable gardens and orchards of the Middle Ages (cultivated by monks, assuredly, but also those of nobles and peasants) were extraordinary sites of experimentation where a knowledge of agronomy and farming practices blended with a knowledge of wild plants. Much of the alimentary and gastronomic culture of our past emerged from these two kinds of knowledge.

This is why we speak of field (a word that evokes agricultural labor, the cultivation of the land) even when we mean meadows or ditches in which wild herbs grow. This can happen because a millennial culture has taught us not to raise rigid barriers between the two worlds. The domestic is more productive, more reassuring, gentler than the wild, but when joined to the wild it becomes complete and tastes better; moreover, whatever is domestic has wild roots. It is fortunate in the case of cardoons and fennel that the genius of farmers and horticulturists was able to transform them into sweet, succulent vegetables; but the bitter aftertaste of the cardoon and its graceless shape are the mark (much appreciated by gastronomes: “the uglier, the tastier”) of untamed wildness. The intractable fennel, which no wine can accompany, demonstrates a nature only partly domesticated. As for radicchio, mallow, borage, beet greens, chicory, we must admit that domestic and wild species are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they complement each other. As the botanist Felici wrote in the sixteenth century, “Chicory or sunflower or radicchio … are plants much appreciated in the salads of every season, thus the cultivated … like the wild.”

Bitter and sweet go well together.

Forgotten Fruits, or Rediscovered?

There is often a confusion between history and memory, as though they were one and the same. Not so, as Jacques Le Goff taught us in a well-known essay. Memory is short and selective. It only recalls the most recent events or those that for whatever reason we chose to extract from the pile. Memory is not a receptacle of what happened; it is an ability, a mental organ, a function that tends to atrophy if not used constantly. Moreover, memory deforms. What we believe it remembers is not the truth, but an image we have made of it. It is for this that the work of a historian is useful: to stitch together the fragments of a distracted memory, to verify them, confront them with the traces carried over by the past. Those traces are within us, one has only to look to find them. Then we become aware that what seemed to be lost, in reality was only forgotten and was worth the effort to recall because the best of all possible worlds is not our own, nor that of a hundred or a thousand years ago, but the one that succeeds in treasuring the best that all worlds possess.

Even a fruit can serve this purpose: a medlar, a jujube, an arbutus, a vulpine pear. If we have relegated them to a dark corner of our memory, because other things, more important, more urgent, weighed on us, it would not be pointless to recapture their flavor. These forgotten fruits were not the great protagonists of history. Even the quince, the sorb, the cornel, the crab apple, can be turned into marmalade or jam, but that is clearly not the way to remedy the cramp of hunger. However, their function was precisely to introduce something unusual, different, strange into the monotony of life and the daily diet, which has always been essential to good living. A taste for the superfluous and enjoyment of what is beautiful (and good) are not strictly limited to the well-to-do. Tribal societies consider certain useless objects necessary because their sole, and extremely important, function is to keep the spirit happy. If the spirit is bored, it will leave the body, and without the spirit there is no survival.

It has happened that certain things fell into oblivion simply because they were useless. Let us go back to our fruits. Their yield is small, they are neither big nor beautiful, they do not keep, they are even somewhat sour. Above all, they are not profitable: a mortal sin in a consumer society. Those fruits are not lost, merely forgotten. If reviving their memory becomes (as often happens today) a commercial success as well, it is because the search for memory grows increasingly. Above all, there is greater demand for those useless things that make life happier and more interesting, that follow the passing of the seasons without anxiety, that make one feel at one with the world. Beware, this is not a whim of the rich, the umpteenth caprice to add to a table already overloaded with food. This is the retrieval of differences, of respect for the variety of things, of an ethical (yes, ethical) value that in the end does not exclude self-interest and pleasure.

Given the success of initiatives concerning “forgotten fruits,” we should henceforth call them “rediscovered fruits.”

The Struggle Against Time

The fear of hunger has always naggingly affected the history of eating. This fear has at times turned into reality and has brought death. Attempts have been made to cohabit with hunger by organizing a defense against the hardships waiting in ambush. The first of these was to fight time, to invent a personal one, more trustworthy and more secure than the changing and often unpredictable rhythm of the seasons that incessantly assails us.

Of course, humans have adjusted to the rhythm of the seasons and have tried to reap the greatest possible profit. When they imagined a perfect world, they thought of one in which there were no seasons and in which weather was not given to change. Paradise on earth, or the Land of Cockaigne, is a place without seasons in which eternal spring flourishes, food is always available, and its quality is always consistent

To stop time was not only utopian but also the concrete objective of this culture of hunger, which devised efficacious methods to be used for preserving foods outside the “natural” cycle of their growing season. Over the span of centuries, peasant food was based precisely on products that could be kept for long periods, such as grains and legumes that were stored in dry places, open to air or below ground, and could last for many months or even years. Meat, fish and vegetables, which spoil quickly, were subjected to treatments intended to keep them edible longer. This was the primary guarantee of subsistence in a rural economy that could not rely on a daily market or on the capriciousness of the seasons. To preserve food, human ingenuity gave its best: salting, drying, smoking, fermenting—all techniques inspired by the fear of hunger. To the same end, foods were modified by immersing them in vinegar or oil, cooking them in honey or sugar, ingredients that can transform fresh vegetable and animal products into different but preservable products. Cheese and marmalade evolved in this way, as did cold cuts and fish in a barrel.

These techniques later allowed the processing of high-quality foods destined for the marketplace, which also requires preservable foods, given their shipment from one place to another. So many “local specialties,” which today constitute the gastronomic patrimony (cheeses and cold cuts in first place) result from skills and techniques that were first developed to conquer hunger. Here is a link, perhaps unsuspected, between the world of hunger and that of pleasure. The cuisine of poverty may have been the laboratory for the creations of haute cuisine.

Diversity as a Resource

There is much talk of biodiversity in ecology and culture: how to preserve the wealth of plant and animal life on Earth, how to safeguard the variety of cultures that have respected that wealth. The diversity of species is not only a “natural” reality to be protected, but an outgrowth of human action, an instrument of defense for daily survival.

The primary concern of agricultural societies has always been how to stave off hunger. At times it was a question of real famine caused by poor harvests. More often it was the fear of hunger that could appear at any moment—a perpetual threat against which protection was necessary. The defense strategies were principally two. The first, to figure out methods for keeping foods beyond their natural life cycle. The second, to study biodiversity, to diversify the species so that they might last throughout the year; to select plants of various types so that their presence in the fields and on the table could be extended.

During the Middle Ages, peasants cultivated many different grains (wheat, rye, barley, oats, millet, spelt) precisely to extend the seasons of growth and harvest, and thus obviate the adversities of weather. This prudence was repeated in market gardens where innumerable herbs, root vegetables, and legumes were cultivated. Animals were also raised in large numbers and of various species.

Throughout the centuries, this biodiversity has been one of the primary systems of self-defense of agricultural societies. It came dangerously close to extinction when the concerns of power and profit took precedence over those of local communities. For example, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many Italian farmers in the northeast were forced to cultivate corn for their own use because the entire wheat harvest was being shipped to urban markets; in Ireland, at the same time, farmers were eating nothing but potatoes, while choicer products were flowing into the markets of neighboring England. On a global scale, this was one of the greatest disasters caused by the political and economic colonialism of the European powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which impoverished their subject countries by obliging them to concentrate agricultural production on a few products intended for the international market. The monoculture of coffee, cacao, bananas, sugar cane replaced the variety of local cultures and exposed the farmers to hunger far more dramatic than had ever been experienced in the past.

The lesson of biodiversity is a lesson for all humanity.

Bread of Earth

The chronicler Raoul Glaber relates that during the years 1032–1033, during a terrible famine, “an experiment was attempted that has never been seen before.” Many people were digging up a kind of white sand, similar to clay, and mixing it with whatever flour and bran was available to produce loaves, in the hope of surviving their hunger.”

Faced with accounts of this kind, our most immediate sentiment is one of commiseration: how much effort, how much suffering have humans endured to survive. Such suffering was not confined to the Middle Ages. Similar accounts can be found in texts from the Modern Era, and many articles in today’s newspapers are no less dramatic. It is also possible to see this differently: to make bread with earth was nevertheless a controlled response, “rational” in reaction to imminent starvation, before slipping into other types of behavior induced by panic or madness. “To eat plants the way animals do,” without preparing or cooking them, was seen as a turning point that signaled the abdication of identity and culture. They were not debased by recourse to makeshift products, but by renouncing customary practices of preparing and cooking food. To make bread out of earth was still a cultural gesture that utilized techniques of survival devised and transmitted orally by generations of hungry people.

In times of crisis it was form that guaranteed the continuity of the alimentary system. In 843, according to the annals of Saint Bertin, “People in many places were reduced to eating earth mixed with a bit of flour and made into the form of bread.” Notice the expression of the chronicler: Earth was turned “into the form of bread” (in panis speciem). An illusory continuity, this would imply, but life is also made of illusions, images, feelings. Form leads to substance.

Substitute breads are the rule in the history of hunger. Only in extreme cases did people resort to earth. This is not a rhetorical exaggeration: In many parts of the world there are types of clay that really are edible. Used more commonly were inferior grains, higher in yield and more resistant than wheat. Rye, today cultivated primarily in colder regions, either in latitude or altitude, was the first among grains to be used in bread-making. Then there was spelt and farro, barley and millet. There was sorghum, used today solely for forage or to make brooms, but long used as food for humans. Along with grains, vegetables were made into bread, particularly broad beans. In regions of the Apennines flour for bread was made of chestnuts, called “tree bread” in the peasant tradition. In times of great penury acorns were used. This is what the peasants of southern Italy used for bread during the famine of 1058, as the chronicler Goffredo Malaterra informs us.

It was only at this point that wild plants intervened, but they were not necessarily eaten “the way animals do,” without preparing them or reducing them to a customary form. “During that year,” wrote Gregory of Tours, referring to events that had occurred at the end of the sixth century, “a terrible famine befell Gaul. Many made bread out of grape seeds or with hazelnut flowers; others with the roots of ferns pressed, dried and reduced to powder, mixed with a bit of flour. Others did the same thing with plants cut in the fields.” Finally nothing remained but earth, and the metaphor of “Mother Earth” took on a new meaning, no longer abstract but material, organic.

All this was the mark of hunger, real, deep hunger. No less deep was the culture out of which these practices grew: skills consolidated out of experience, the lessons of generations driven by need; an impoverished culture but highly refined. “As is habitual among the poor, they mixed plants with a bit of flour,” we read in a German chronicle of the twelfth century.

Scientists and intellectuals as well were concerned with these substitutive practices, teaching the poor what the poor already knew only too well: how to use every available resource in the event of need; how to use, in such cases, products never tasted before. In the recommendations of these authors one recognizes a fundamental principle: the operations of adaptation are all the more intricate the farther one moves away from the norm. For example, in the making of bread, greater attention, greater prudence is required as one goes from wheat to inferior grains, legumes, forage, greens and domestic fruits, and finally wild herbs and roots, pits, and medicinal plants.

In these complicated operations, taste plays a primary role. Ibn al Awwam, an Arab agronomist in Spain, taught how to use fruits that normally would not be edible: Their nature had to be modified, guided by a careful evaluation of their taste. “It is necessary to determine the basic taste of these plants,” he wrote, “and try to eliminate it by using suitable procedures; when the taste is gone, the fruit is dried, ground, and then one can begin making bread.”

Taste is thus regarded as an infallible guide in the choice and treatment of natural products. Even the world of hunger requires taste to survive.

The Right to Pleasure

I read in La Repubblica (August 28, 2008) that the government of North Korea, or rather the dictator Kim Jong-il, was examining an unusual method for combating the hunger that afflicts many inhabitants of his country. The idea is not to eat more and better, but to eat less and worse. Kim Jong-il ordered his scientists to perfect a new formula for making noodles. By adding soy flour and other ingredients to the traditional ones, these noodles could attenuate and diminish hunger “to a considerable degree,” leading people to eat less. In essence, this would be dough that bloats the stomach, reducing the stimulus of appetite.

This is not the first time that the problem of hunger has been approached this way. The eighteenth-century agronomist Giovanni Battara postulated that bread could be made with potato flour and presented this new food in terms not unlike those regarding the extraordinary “invention” of the North Korean government: a bread “somewhat hard to digest” and for that very reason suited to peasants who would feel more sated.

The tone of this account might seem ironic, but the idea that the hunger of peasants can be dealt with through bouts of indigestion, with heavy, rough foods that diminish the desire to eat, is one that recurs often in literature from the Middle Ages all the way to the present. As though by coincidence, it is always the landowners who speak in these terms, and even when the peasants seem to be speaking (as in Battarra’s text), it is the landowner who puts his own words into their mouths. That eating may also be a pleasure and that this pleasure is a universal right is an idea that for centuries remained outside the thinking of members of the ruling class, which chose to imagine pleasure as their exclusive privilege. To include “the right to pleasure” among the alimentary objectives of future generations (as appears in the founding manifesto of Slow Food, written by Folco Portinari in 1989) is an act that might look innocuous but is revolutionary.

Rivers of Milk and Giant Tomatoes

In the film Nuovomondo (2006), Emanuele Crialese showed America as imagined by some Sicilian peasants preparing to emigrate in the hope of escaping their misery and hunger. For them, America is the land of plenty, where one swims in lakes of milk, where tomatoes and carrots are gigantic.

These grandiose and surreal images are not a gratuitous invention. Ever since the Middle Ages they recur in descriptions of the Land of Cockaigne, the locus of utopia where rivers transport wine (half white, half red); where the walls of houses are made of bass, salmon, and herring, the roofs of prosciutto, and the gutters of sausages; the wheat fields are fenced with pork shoulders and slices of roast meat, and on the street, fat geese are turning on a spit, accompanied by delicious garlic sauces. Descriptions of this kind appear in literary texts of the major European countries with varying characteristics according to the culinary culture and tastes. In Italy, the Land of Bengodi, as described in a novella by Boccaccio, has at its center a mountain of grated parmesan, and on its summit a cauldron brimming with capon broth in which an endless supply of macaroni and ravioli continue to cook. In later centuries this magnificent land will be shown in drawings and prints, always with a mountain in the center, and all around, lakes of butter and milk, while roast pigeons rain down from the sky ready to be devoured.

When Europeans discovered the existence of an unknown continent on the other side of the Atlantic, they imagined it on the model of the Land of Cockaigne. In some way it incarnated Utopia, and they localized it in a specific place, albeit remote and mysterious. In the first half of the sixteenth century, an anonymous poet from Modena hailed it as “The Land of Happy Life,” without imagining it could provide new and exotic foods, but rather, in great abundance, the ones he knew and wanted. There “a mountain of grated cheese is all one sees from the plain, and on its peak a cauldron that was brought there,” exactly as in Boccaccio’s Bengodi. That cauldron, a mile wide, “is always boiling, cooking macaroni,” and “no sooner cooked than they are doled out” so that the ones below are covered with cheese. The fountains pour wine, and rivers of milk make tasty ricotta; partridges and capons are everywhere, and when it rains, “it rains ravioli.”

This New World remained in the popular imagination for centuries. Italian peasants who set off for America in the nineteenth century still thought of it as the place where milk flowed in rivers and tomatoes and carrots were enormous. Hunger inspires gastronomic dreams.

By Massimo Montanari (translation Beth Archer Brombert) in "Let the Meatballs Rest, and Other Stories About Food and Culture" (Riposo della Polpetta e Altre Storie Intorno al Cibo), Columbia University Press, USA, 2009, excerpts p.69-81. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa. 

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