In Our Time - Food

Episode Date: December 27, 2001

Melvyn Bragg explores the history of food in Modern Europe. The French philosopher of food Brillat-Savarin wrote in his Physiology of Taste, 'The pleasures of the table belong to all times and all ages, to every country and to every day; they go hand in hand with all our other pleasures; outlast them, and remain to console us for their loss' . The story of food is cultural as well as culinary, and what we eat and how we eat has always been linked to who we are or whom we might become, from the great humanist thinker Erasmus warning us to 'Always use a fork!' to the materialist philosopher Feuerbach telling us baldly, 'You are what you eat'.But what have we eaten, and why? In Europe since the Renaissance how have our intellectual appetites fed our empty stomachs? With Rebecca Spang, Lecturer in Modern History at University College London; Ivan Day, food historian; Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the French philosopher of food, Brea Savarin, wrote in his physiology of taste, The pleasures of the table belong to all times and all ages, to every country and to every day.

They go hand in hand with all our other pleasures, outlast them and remain to console us for their loss. The story of food is cultural as well as culinary, and what we eat and how we eat has always been linked to who we are and whom we might become. From the great humanist thinker Erasmus, warning us to always use a fork, to the materialist philosopher Feuerberg telling us boldly, you are what you eat.

But what have we eaten and why? In Europe, since the Renaissance, how have our intellectual appetites fed our empty stomachs? With me to explore the history of food in modern Europe is Rebecca Spang, Lecture in Modern History at University College London, an author of The Invention of the Restaurant, Ivan Day, food historian, an author of Eat, Drink and Be Mary, the British at Table from 1600 to 2000, and the historian Felipe Fernandez Amesto,

Professor of History and Geography at Queen Mary University of London, an author of a new book, Food, a History. Philippe, you write in your new book, The Movement known as the Renaissance transformed quarterly cookery as it transformed other arts. Can you give us some idea of what that transformation was? Yeah, sure, although I'm a bit reluctant to do that because I look across the table at you, Melvin, and I see an intellectual

and so you naturally think the Renaissance is terribly important and actually 500 years ago. The most important thing that was going on in the history of food, indeed probably in the history of the world, was the vast ecological exchange, which saw foodstuffs being transplanted from one continent to the other for the first time in history, you know, since Pangaea, was shattered and the continents were sundered. And that was a huge, you know, human intervention

evolution which substituted for the divergence of biota from continent to continent, a new model of convergence. But the Renaissance was going on as well. I grant you that. And the Renaissance essentially is a movement of the recovery of antiquity, antique models of how to think and how to live. And just as humanists were recovering ancient models of thought. So eaters were discovering what they thought were classical ways of eating. And you've got, perhaps lagging a bit behind the other arts, but in the art of the preparation of food, just as in the arts of painting and sculpture. You've got this reception of what people thought were antique models. And weren't always accurate in their understanding of what ancient eating was like.

But certainly in the 17th century, with a bit of time lag, my comparison, with the other arts, you've got something of a revolution in taste, the substitution of a style, particularly of high status eating of courtly food, which instead of being modelled on Islam, which was the main model that was followed in the Middle Ages, now came to be modelled on a vision of antiquity, albeit not necessarily an accurate one. So what was the model of Islam that they followed? What was it to do with how? Oh, it was all lush. It was lush. It was, it was a greek. Gilded, you know, everything was coated with saffron, everything was flavoured with rose petals.

It was really sort of gungy, almond milk was splashed everywhere. These were dishes which sort of suppurated with exoticism. And there was a sort of reaction against that in favour of the sort of flavour that people most desensated with antiquity, which of course was that which you found in the recipes of a peasant. a flavor which was much cruder, much more direct, which in ancient recipes, it was dominated by liquehmin, by garum, by the fish sauce that the Romans made out of rotting, tunny, and mackerel entrails. A source rather like, I mean, you know, for modern eaters, the best thing to think of is something like the Thai nam plar. That was the supposedly authentic taste of antiquity. And you get a reversion to flavors which are acidic and salty in tribute to that supposed antique tradition.

You brought in the word courtly. Can you briefly tell us what was the picture how food arrived at the state of it in Renaissance France, at the courts, a great Louis court, the Sun King's court. Where are we there with food? After your first pass with the Renaissance, we can. and sort of settle on the bull charging, take it by the horns in Renaissance France. You know, my instinct is always to set everything,

the vast global context and put it in a really long time frame, long running time frame. And one of the really interesting things about the history of food is that in remote antiquity, and in what we think of in heavy inverted commas, primitive as art,

what differentiates people socially in terms of food is how much they eat. It's their, you know, what the economists call their food entitlement. And the higher up the ranks of society you are, the more you eat. And antiquity is full of these images of heroic eaters. It's eating a lot is almost a sort of act of redistributive justice because it creates crumbs from the rich man's table. It recycles wealth.

It's a share of your wealth, didn't it? Yeah, absolutely. But very interestingly, in some cultures, including very notably ours, that changes. And courtly cuisine comes to be differentiated, not by quantity, but by the ingredients and by the style of preparation. So it's a long process, but a big moment in it, I think, does occur in France in the 17th century. You've got a succession of three kings,

Enrique, Coutre, who, you know, wanted every peasant to have a chicken in the pot. And although he was a man of relatively frugal tastes himself, and like plain, simple fare, he was also a big kind of patron of cuisine, and he succeeded by Louis XIII and Louis XIV, who are both gigantic eaters, but also who employ chefs, professional chefs, to create dishes worthy of a prince in the antique tradition. And their cooks begin to diffuse these court. recipes through society by writing cookbooks.

Rebecca Spang, the excesses of the French court and the huge eating that they engaged in or something a bit of slight of face pretended to engage in. It was a shows of power, shows of strength. There was a reaction to that. With Castellione is the book of the court, Guadagiano. Can you just tell us about that reaction and how it came about? What I would think would be crucial is to look both in the 17th century, really coming out of humanism, the development of books of good manners,

of the idea of civilization in the way that one interacted with other members of court society, culminating in a way at the Versailles of Louis XIV, where, of course, very importantly, the aristocrats who have been fighting a civil war against the monarchy in the middle of the 17th century, have all been centralized, brought together at Versailles to be impressed by a particular, model of courtly life, which of course includes courtly food. So one of the most important things that happens once the major aristocrats have been brought to Versailles is that you can get the beginning of an establishment of a single model of good taste in food, in dress, in dancing,

in music, all of it is to emanate from the single person of the king. But that is continuing the idea of what we would nowadays think of as grossness, the heroic appetites which go with heroic and powerful beings. There was a reaction against it. The reaction is best expressed in this book of the court of by Castellione, which comes from a different tradition, which one can reach far back and say it's the ascetic tradition. And this is to do with restraint, isn't it? And that begins to dominate the courts, and that begins to be a rival tradition.

It's a rival tradition that gets worked out in several different contexts. It's going to get worked out in a religious framework with the distinction of a sort of inward-looking Protestantism that is not about display, but which of course will be made illegal in France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. It's also a tradition that gets elaborated within more of a social or political framework by the encyclopedists in the middle of the 18th century, who argue throughout most of the encyclopedie. that the sort of splendor that was suitable for so-called Eastern or Asian courts was actually a source of decadence and decline just exactly because it was an exchange between cultures. And they're really making an argument that we would today recognize as a sort of bioregionalism. They're saying, no, we as the French, must eat what we have natively here. and the importing of food stuffs and models of diet from Persia,

which is, of course, the Great East in antiquity, that's actually the cause of the collapse of the Roman Empire, and it could be the cause of the collapse of our civilization as well. I think it's important to remember one of them. Can I stay with Rebecca? Sure. And I've got to bring in iron here. Erasmus involved himself in this as well.

Again, it would seem to us rather overstidiously for the great humanist scholar, becoming obsessed with the use of the fork. Was it usual for people of that intellectual and social power and dignity to involve themselves as much in manners and food? Oh, yes, because it's about how people are in culture, in society. It's not really until the 19th century that one begins to see the emergence of a completely distinct, separate and in some ways marginalized discourse about food and eating. Certainly in the 16th century, cookbooks,

are also medical books. And for Erasmus, because the table is one of the main sites for the exchange of ideas, to be able to behave in a mannerly fashion with one's equals, is a sign of respect to them. So it's absolutely crucial to the whole humanist project. I'm in day to come across you and with that idea of meals perhaps coming to mean something different in the Renaissance. And as they're reaching back, if they've reached back to Plato,

the symposium is a great discussion, it's also a great meal. Is there any sense of going back to the time when conversation was around that sort of table and therefore to take the table itself as seriously as the conversation became a natural thing to do? Yes, I think even culinary artists were involved in conversation pieces. During the Renaissance, you start to see the emergence of table centrepieces in the form of works of art. sculptures made of food materials like marzipan and sugar, which can act as a focus to conversation, so that the diners are actually having a symposium in the classical sense,

and not only enjoying the food and the conversation, but they're directing their attention to a particular theme. This lasted right through into the 18th century. I was involved in a reconstruction recently of a dessert by Menon, from 1749, where there were sugar sculptures of the myth of Sursi, where she was turning Odysseus' men into swine. It was an allegory of greed, an ironic subject for conversation at a meal. So even the food itself could act as a vehicle for the expression

of higher ideals and just the corpulent aspects of food. Before we move on, can I just get, as it were, not rid of, but deal with a small and obvious point. We're talking about a very small percentage of society here. One presumes that the sort of 95% just went on eating what they could get their hands on in an extremely and literally local sense throughout this period. Yes, I mean, coming back to the Renaissance,

this idea of the rejection of Arabic food. Actually, it was rejected for regional Italian food, which was based on local produce, Platina who wrote the earliest cookery book in the early modern period actually stole recipes from a friend called Martino from Como who was actually promoting quite simple country food which was appearing on the tables of Renaissance humanist scholars

rather than a self-conscious revival of Roman food. I mean Episius' text wasn't disseminated for very long time. So I think actually ordinary food during the Renaissance is very important to these provincial scholars living in places like Urbino and other outposts.

Yes, but just to conclude that little digressive digression of a thought really, the people are making the experiments and bringing this in and changing me. We are talking about a quarterly group or within the smaller cities and smaller towns of the more powerful and richer group. I just want the idea of which flow

I should imagine this is a top flow, but the undertow is very slow and very slow to change and still eating much the same as they've been eating for decades. Absolutely, I mean, ordinary country people and urban poor always subsisted on what they could get hold of. But there was a gradual percolation down the social scale of courtly food through the cookery texts. After the Reformation, in this country at least, there was a feminization of cookery as well. The monastic establishments which had provided the service of charity and medicine was taken over by gentlewomen who eventually started to write cookery books themselves. And these were targeted at the merchant classes and the middle classes rather than the wealthy.

But by the 19th century, I mean, the court food of the 17th century is actually beginning to percolate into the middle classes of London, for instance. I'd like to keep in the 17th century for a minute. The Puritan movement in 17th century of Britain, is that a marker of a distinction which began to develop between a Protestant and a Catholic menu, as it were, a diet? Well, a number of very important things happened. I think one of them was the loss of a lot of folk food customs,

for instance, wedding food, which was considered by Puritans to be an aspect of going ameing. It was associated with paganism. a lot of our folk traditions of food were purged and not to be recovered after the restoration. I think probably the best example of this is the cookery book that was published just after the restoration, which was allegedly written by Elizabeth Cromwell's wife.

And there's a long preface to it which actually satirizes her actual rather mean cookery, but it seems really that Cromwell ate quite well. The other aspect of this, I think, is that the Catholic European monarchs like Louis XIV, expressed their absolutism through the way in which they dressed their table. I mean, the best example of James II, who not only had the most splendid coronation feasts since the medieval period, rivaling that of a very famous feast in the 15th century given to Archbishop Neville, but also had a feast which he didn't attend in Rome

where the table was laid out again with sculptures of his virtues and he was I think trying to assert the absolutist idea through food as an artistic medium Philippa you wanted to comment earlier in our... Yeah well I mean all these changes are gradual obviously one searches the key moments and representative moments quarterly food isn't instantly transformed anymore than the food of the people is.

But I do think a new era of abundance does begin with this ecological exchange that I began by mentioning right at the beginning because there are really tremendously productive. This 14-15 century. Well, no, I mean, this really happens from the discovery of America onwards because it's the great voyages of exploration

which really shift these biota around the world and you've got huge differences made, for example, to peasant diets in China, admittedly very gradually in the course of the 17th and 18th century by the reception of things like maize and sweet potatoes. A great explosion of Chinese population in the 18th century I think wouldn't have been possible without this. The case everybody knows about in Europe is the potato, which admittedly it doesn't really impact on population levels and begin to generate potentially in Europe for huge new initiatives like industrialization until the late 18th and 19th centuries. But again, you know, Mays is also important in some parts of Europe as a new food stuff.

And there's things like tomatoes and avocados. You can't imagine the Italian national dish the tricolore without tomatoes and avocards. And both of those came from the new world. Tomato and avocado are two of the very few words. English which are derived from narwhatl. Avacarde is derived from the narwhato, well, the language of indigenous language of the Aztecs of Mexico. In their language, the word for avocados is aquacatl, which literally means a testicle. And the English word tomato is derived from the narwhatel tommotle. So, you know, you can't imagine the cuisine of Malaya without peanuts or of

Thailand without chilis. So there are a lot of cuisines at very low social level which are benefiting from the infusion of new ingredients and that means more food, more calories, better fed peasantries and more people. The point I wanted to come in on earlier when you very properly stopped me was about Castiglione and this new Renaissance aesthetic of restraint. And it's true there was a sort of Renaissance. aesthetic of restraint in some ways, the reaction against

Islamic food was in favour of a simpler kind of cuisine. But Castellione also talked about spressatura. You know, there's something phony about Renaissance restraint. It's really all to do with contriving an appearance of restraint, but, you know, putting a lot of effort into it. I think that's where, you know, these two aesthetics need in the table. I think that's absolutely crucial because it's a lot like the 18th century Nouvelle Cuisine movement

and very much like 1970s Nouvelle Cuisine. Both are about having less on your plate per se, but making quite a show about what it is that is on your plate. Well, let's come to the restaurants, as you've written about restaurants. How did the restaurant go from bringing a broth to a place where people went to eat? Well, of course, in the beginning, ironically enough,

people go to restaurants specifically not to eat. A restaurant is a restorative broth and what you need to have restored is your appetite. It's the idea that because you've been leading such an overcharged, busy, sensitive, high-paced, intellectual life in the 18th century, all of your nervous fibers are overcharged and you just couldn't possibly eat. So instead, you go to a place, called a Saude de restaurateur, a restaurateur's room, where you can have your restorative broth. But fascinating, though, that is, and of course the whole point is about displaying, it works in very well again with what we were just saying about the Nouvelle Cuisine, displaying the idea that you're too weak to eat. Once you've shown that you're too weak to eat, well, then maybe actually you could just have, well, you know, maybe a biscuit and, well, a glass of wine. And even after that, the particular changes in the form of presentation,

everything that we today take completely for granted, like small separate tables, a menu, all of those innovations, which initially have almost medicinal connotations, begin to appeal to people who feel that they are sensitive. Sounds like ladies who lunch all this. That's right. Well, it is. I mean, it's very much about the development of... Did this get a kick start after a great number of aristocrats had been guillotines,

leaving their chests with nowhere to go except set up their own... That's so frequently said. Yeah, well, I'm saying it again. Well, what do you think? I think it's very popular in the 19th century because it's an idea of the democratization of privilege. No, it's not right. If it's 1794, the last thing you want to do is to hang out a sign saying, I used to be Marie Antoinette's cook.

I mean, that's just a guarantee you're going to get hauled before the rest of it. It's not right. So these chefs did not set up at the restaurant. No. Ivan, what do you think? Do you think it's right? Well, I think there are some aspects of this happening. I mean, the restaurateur bovilliers, for instance. Exactly. Goes into business in 1780.

Well, he went into business actually imitating, I believe, a Bishop's Gate tavern called the London Tavern. I think his first establishment, was it not called the... It's called the Hotel de Londre. Yes, right. That's right. So again, it's the importance of this sort of cosmopolitan community. Yeah, but there was a dissemination of culinary staff throughout Europe. I mean, there was a sort of diaspora, if you like.

For instance, in this town at the beginning of the 19th century, there were quite a few cooks and confectioners. Jaran, a French confectioner who had actually, well, he had actually worked for Napoleon at one point, but he came here with the kind of skills that have been forged in French 18th century grand houses. So when did we get the idea that the restaurant was a place where still we're talking about pretty rich people would go to eat instead of eating at home and would go in a sense of a lot of people going and not just one or two of the odd chap or the odd lady? When did it grow as a... When are we talking about getting a grip on the way that society behaved? Well, I mean, I find that a lot of culinary history tends to be frank and centric,

and I will always make an argument to look at other food cultures, particularly of this country. I mean, people went out to eat in this country and they went to places where they could, too, as in the early 19th century restaurants, sit at private tables. I mean, peeps, for instance, and Evelyn frequently dined in this city in establishments called ordinaries where they could discuss letters or business quietly in a corner and eat actually very good food. In fact, I mean, there was a cult, I believe, at the end of the 18th, early 19th century, in France,

there was a sort of Anglo interest, wasn't there, in English culture, which was reflected, I think, in some cook's offering a sort of Nouvelle cuisine that was based on English food. To localise this, which is restrain this just to a century or so, Philippa, which is, I know, sort of not the sweep that you'll enjoy, but just to keep it to a mere century or something. Do you think that...

Oh, that's cool, because I was going to say, you know, this restaurant culture, you know, the real first great effervescence of it is in ancient China, the wonderful descriptions of restaurant meals in Tang texts. And, of course, in the Song Dynasty, the most famous painting of the Sun Dynasty, Shea's Kaifeng at dawn with all the sort of traders bringing their goods in and the restaurants opening up and the diners sitting down to their first meal of the day. If we can fast forward and head west though,

the idea of a distinction between the British diet and the French diet brought into play an idea of national character. The British were the stout persons strong and meat eating. The French were the scraggy people, shifty and fishing. eating. And this was represented in a lot in Gilroy and Hogarth and so on. But it would become part of the national identity as well as perhaps part of the national eating culture. Now, could you address that? Well, you can almost detect this in Ivan's very mild and scholarly reproof to French historiography for concentrating too much on the innovative characteristics of

French cuisine. You know, Ivan's really putting in a word for the good old honest plain English Fair reminds me very much of what Lord Rochester said about the inferiority of French kickshaws over a good joint of beef full horseman's weight. I think that all cultures have their prejudices about food. One of the great stories of world history is about how, you know, cultures get to be permeated by the tastes, the savers, the ingredients, the cooking and serving styles that come from a brood. And there's, you know, interplay of... But it isn't so much just... ...I'm looking for it. It's almost building a national character around the food,

isn't it? That the British were stout, fierce people, far less populous than France, but we could take them on and biff them, partly because they were sort of thin and meagre people who merely trifled with fish. You're describing, aren't you, the cartoons of Gilray and Coupshank,

where you've got, you know, the Ros Bif, Anglis, resisting the battery de cuisine of Napoleon. And that's right. Of course, there are also French countries. Rebecca's book's got a very good one, which, you know, inverts this joke and shows the thin Englishman arriving in France and getting graciously fattened up by the dubious attentions of French restaurateur.

One of the areas in which the British excel was at roasting in front of an open fire. And the French envied those skills, and they also envied the good cuts of meat that we had through improved agriculture and husbandry in this country. And the sirling of beef became the symbol of the British stout, obstinate, independent, loving man. Even the Lord Mayor's Banquet in London on the sideboard,

there would be a great sirloin of roast beef, which was planted with the English standard, in fact, as a symbol of being English. But this idea, Rebecca Spang, of the being what we eat, in some way, links with two things. Russo, in 762, in Emil, eulogising locally produced food and saying, this made you what you are. I mean, he said,

our organs of thought are formed by our diet, which is not very far from Feuerbach saying you are what you eat. So that idea coming in, what do you make of that? I think the most crucial thing there would be to look at the spread, the diffusion, really, I suppose, from the period historians often referred to as the scientific revolution of the 17th century, but also with Descartes through the 18th and 19th century of a sort of materialist common sense. it's a growing perception, whether your marks and angles or your Bismarck, that things are really made out of blood and iron. They're not made out of ideas.

It's not made out of divine inspiration. That there is a material basis to the world. And I think from that, the way in 18th century models it works, it's by the way that your nervous fibers are actually from your food. In the 19th century, there are certainly many people, food reformers, physiologists, some of the most important chemist of the 19th century, talking about how different dietary makeups will make a certain population, perhaps more energetic, very much the same sort of thing

that in the 20th century people might say about the need to have a particular sort of diet if you're training to run marathons or if you're playing football. All of that, I think, has just become diffused as common sense today. Filippa, you've said, tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are, which is very much in the same area. Do you take that idea seriously, the Feuerbach idea and the Russo idea? Well, I do if you said that. Well, no, I take it seriously in a cultural sense.

When I said that, I meant that, you know, I can tell from your plate what culture you belong to because there's actually no sign is so representative of one's culture. It's funny going to a London restaurant today and having a look around, and all these people from London, let's presume that our old London is eating goodness knows what from all over the place. But why would you presume that it's a restaurant? Lots of them are probably tourists. I don't know. If you take any headcount in most restaurants in London, most of them are.

But you know, we're into a pluralistic, multicultural, diverse culture today. And the, you know, internationalisation. I was just picking up rather niggily nagging now. I want to get back to what you really mean, Melvin, which is this question of how does food, you know, affect your whole personality, your whole morality, and the whole life of society. And I think that's also a terribly ancient idea.

You know, to me, it's represented best, actually, by social cannibalism, because cannibals don't normally, except in the West actually, eat for nutrition. They eat to appropriate the moral qualities of their victims. And in the late 18th century, you can see this kind of thinking

becoming very prominently the thought of intellectuals and it's manifested not only in Rousseau's view that by eating local produce by going back to milk and honey you can somehow be a better person. That's the greatest example in the late 18th century is the rise of vegetarianism

which is all to do with this appropriating the moral qualities of what we... Shelley said that Napoleon wouldn't have been a tyrant if it's stuck to a vegetable diet. Can we talk about that? Romantics coming in, particularly Shelley, who's very, very interesting on this.

He goes back to Pythagoras. He calls himself a Pythagorean, and Pythagoras thought that eating meat could lead to murder. And Shelley said that eating meat would lead to slavery, tyranny. He haven't got the list in front of me. He goes on and on a bit like that. And where did that come from, Ivan Day, and why did he find it so powerful? I would actually go back a little bit further than the Romantic movement. I think that the idea of vegetarianism and its purity goes back actually to the 17th century.

And a number of eccentric medical men, I think, were propounding theories. One Englishman called Thomas Triand, who called himself a Pythagrin also propounded that to eat meat was to take on gross humours that would disturb your bodily functions and advocated just eat. eating pure grains and vegetables. But he was a voice in the wilderness, and it wasn't really until the 18th century and the early 19th century, that this idea of food being something which is corpulent. I mean, there's a wonderful example which you give in your book about the oyster and the way that biting into a raw oyster

is the only civilized version of raw food that we indulge in. And I think this sensuality of food was something which, sensitive romantics like Shelley reacted against, actually. I think it was distasteful to them to sort of eat what everyone else was happily doing at the time, which was to indulge in the inner organs of beasts and fowls with relish. And I think that's something that we've learnt from the romantics, a kind of squeamishness about food. I mean, we do not like the display of food when we go on holiday to Spain and a Spanish butcher

and we see the pancreas and the gizzards and the livers there in front of us. The Spanish housewife will rummaged through them quite happily. But here we like to have on meat in a neat packet, a little portion of brown material, which is divorced from its origins. It's about urbanisation. Why do you think this link between vegetarianism and a political position came about so strongly

that meat eaters could be murderous, putting it as and people said that and have said that and that if you didn't meet you are unlikely to be or less likely to be why do you think that came from?

You find it in 18th century efforts at cross-cultural comparison looking at South Asia and saying that the Hindus where the most

prominent members of society are vegetarian were easily conquered by the meat eating British and French so you certainly see it there in cross-cultural comparison. I think it's also because until perhaps the 19th century and the industrial revolution in food, eating meat is a marker of social prominence.

Isn't it rather simpler explanation, forgive me, but eating meat means you have to kill living things. And killing certain living things leads you on to kill other living things. And that's where it all goes wrong. Isn't that there? Isn't that the notion behind it? Well, butchers are sort of social outcasts in at least any European culture I can think of. They're not. But Pythagoras has said, I haven't got the quote in front of me, Philippe, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but Pythagoras said if you start killing one thing, it leads to killing another and it will lead to killing each other and therefore kill nothing, eat of the fruits of the trees like Frankenstein did. He turned from meat to eating egg, causing birds, didn't it?

advised against eating beans on the grounds that they would inflame excessive passion. I think all the factors that you, Rebecca and Ivan have mentioned, are highly relevant here. But, I mean, I think one which we haven't mentioned, which probably ought to bring into it, is sex. You know, a lot of these, this early vegetarian movement is also to do with the promotion of chastity. It's to do with a revulsion against these sort of lubriciousness of fats.

if I can offer the listeners quite such a revolting image for a programme which gays out in the mornings. And it's to do with restraining the sexual appetite. I suppose one of the great gurus of the low protein diet in the early 19th century was the Reverend Sylvester Graham, who thought that sex wasn't only morally bad. it was actually unhealthy, and he likened orgasmed to diarrhea. And this was his main reason for advocating a low protein diet and for promoting the great cereal movement, which then, you know, became a major influence on the history of food,

which is still with us today, and I expect, you know, listen to this program may just be finishing up their cereals right now. And I hope that their enjoyment will be enhanced when they think back to the origins of this movement and realize that it started amongst moralists who wanted to repress excessive sexual appetite. Well, I think that was a wonderful digression.

As many of your... Well, it's obviously to the point, for it. But I'm going to just be a little bit of an egg here, and ask you, I'm... Why do you call it a digression? Well, look, it's a lovely loop. Bringing the orgasm into why people turn it to vegetarian. I enjoyed it.

I know people who didn't enjoy it. Well, there you go. Well, I take that as the highest phrase. I want to stick that... Has there been any research? Is there any evidence that people who do not eat meat are gentler and kinder and less likely to engage in wars and murders than people who do it meet? Not as I know of.

I mean, I'd like to turn one idea on its head here about vegetables not being provocative in terms of their sexual stimulation. I mean, the Renaissance medical theories, the potato from the new world was because, considered to be a stimulant, in fact, one German medical... It's a promotion for the potato.

I mean, often the case, I mean, coffee was another thing that was promoted like this, as was tea. But, I mean, people believed it. I mean, in the 18th century, one German medical writer, I forget his name, actually told parents that they shouldn't

let young people eat potatoes because they would encourage masturbation. And I, I think that the whole rationale for these root vegetables, particularly parsnips, garrits, potatoes, having so-called Afrodisiagall properties was through their morphology. They resemble sexual organs. Let's just finish this on asking you whether you do think that diets do make substantial differences to the way people behave. You said earlier on, Rebecca, you mentioned that we were still, we were very much,

into the idea of specialized diets now if you ran a marathon, you were recommended to, I'm no idea what sort of diet you have been a marathon, but you were recommended to do A, B, and C, and drink D, E, and F, and so on. If you're a heavyweight boxer, you do something else and so on. And these things clearly are forced to work and probably do, so if they work in those cases,

how far do we go in turning food, the intake into the outcome? Well, I mean, as I said, I think it's almost, generalized common sense. And except for the most resistant pro-pharmaceutical sorts of physicians, everybody, if you say, oh, I just feel sort of tired and run down, somebody will say, well, you know, you probably need to be eating better.

And it's just generalized common sense, I think. And I'm not sure if I think it's right or wrong, but I know that it's intuitive, certainly in middle-class European culture. But do you think there's a distinctive relationship, Philippa, just as a concluding thing between what people, because you really do range over-word cultures, and I do tease you a bit, but I admire it enormously, between the way that the diets in the East, for instance,

take huge generalisation, were so very different from the diets in the West at one stage. Did this mean that the development of cultures, ideas, was different, and would you put that down to the food they ate? No, I wouldn't. I mean, I would put it down to the total culture of the food. At least I'd say that it's very intimately connected with the total culture of food, but not specifically with the type of food or the ingredients or even the cuisson. But when you add to all of those things, table rituals, the kinds of socializing which go around food,

the way it's produced, the way it's distributed, the way it's processed. I think all of those are inseparable, you know, from the general features of society. The two great, you know, revolutions of our time in food have really been the green revolution, the introduction of new strains of staple foods which are encouraged by chemical pesticides and fertilizers, so-called green revolution, there's a very green about it, and the new sort of threatened revolution, GM foods. And it's very interesting that people are saying about these things, the sort of things which we've detected them saying in the past about rival kinds of eating. There's a big moral debate about the Green Revolution and about GM foods,

which gets confused with a sort of health-orientated debate about the sort of effects which eating this stuff can have on you. And I think the health dimension and the moral dimension seems to be inseparable in the way people respond and react and think and feel about food. Well, thank you very much to Felipe Fernandez. to Ivan Day and to Rebecca Spang and thank you all very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.