Tell Me What You Eat, and I Will Tell You What You Are

So Popeye is green, slimy and comes in a can, then.

This phrase is a bit of a canard these days, ever since it was adopted as the strapline for mad-as-a-box-of-frogs hardman cooking-comp Iron Chef (starring Mark Decascos, who I have happy memories of since watching Crying Freeman at university, and who has made the leap from martial arts eye candy to terrifying campy chef character in only ten short years). But - here comes the surprise - it doesn't mean what you probably think it does. It's from Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste (1825), which I've previously discussed on these pages. TPoT, as it shall henceforth be known, is intended to be a scientific manual: a study of gastronomy intended to carry the spirit of Enlightenment and the scientific revolution into the culinary sphere, with lots of delightful nineteenth-century windbaggery thrown in for good measure. J.-A. can never resist telling a good story, and some of his anecdotes are actually funny, but his analysis of physiology leads a bit to be desired. 

When J.-A. says 'tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are', although he is making a point about how culinary likes and dislikes can pinpoint you geographically and by social class, like a sort of gastronomic Henry Higgins, he genuinely believed that people's tastes were affected more by their anatomy than their experiences and culture. Take this gem: 

'The persons predestined to gourmandise are in general of medium stature. Their faces are either round or square, and small, their noses short and their chins rounded. The women are rather pretty than beautiful, and they have a slight tendency to obesity. Those who are fondest of friandises [sweet things] have delicate features, smaller, and are distinguished by a peculiar expression of the mouth. Agreeable guests should be sought for among those who have this appearance. They receive all that is offered them, eat slowly, and taste advisedly ... Those, on the contrary, to whom nature has refused a desire for the gratifications of taste, have a long nose and face. Whatever be their statures, the face seems out of order. Their hair is dark and flat, and they have no embonpoint [bosoms].' 

Although J.-A. did say that there were a few gourmands who had, as it were, had gourmandise thrust upon them - those whose professions led them to it (financiers, men of letters, doctors, and devotees, if you are interested, although I've read the explanations why several times and his arguments really don't hang together at all) - fundamentally he reckoned that you were born a gourmand, or not. He wasn't a relativist when it came to tastes food - 'tell me' wasn't a neutral device that would help one to marvel at how it takes all sorts to make a world, as it is often used today, but a way of ranking people by class according to their gastronomic sensitivities (e.g. peasant or blue-blooded gourmand). Amusingly he also proposes 'gastronomical tests' - 'dishes of so delicious a flavor that their very appearance excites the gustatory organs of every healthy man. The consequence is, that all those who do not evince desire, and the radiancy of ecstasy, may very properly be set down as unworthy of the honours of the society and the pleasures attached to them.' 

J.-A. clearly hasn't considered the idea that there may be foreign foods he isn't aware of that taste better to foreign people - that culture and experience plays a role in taste, and that it's not as objective as all that. The food he eats and enjoys is just the best. But then, he was French.

Man v. Food, Eighteenth-Century Style

This James Gillray print is of greedy Germans. But really, they could be from anywhere.

I’m reading Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s absolute classic, The Physiology of Taste (1825), about the new science of gastronomy. It’s a hoot – full of brilliant apothegms, from the old chestnut ‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are’ to the lesser-known, but to my mind still just as true, ‘the most indispensable quality of a good cook is promptness.’ Ha! Anyway, while reading old J.A.’s fact-packed fun-ride through the science and culture of good eating at the turn of the nineteenth century, I came across this anecdote of a late-eighteenth-century Man v. Food-style feat. We love to think that eating competitions and challenges are a modern phenomenon indicative of the downfall of society, consumer culture, overly cheap food et cetera, but it turns out men have been proving their manhood through competitive overeating for centuries.

‘This anecdote recalls to me my townsman, General P. Sibuet, long the chief aide of Napoleon, and who was killed in 1813 at the passage of the Bober.

He was eighteen years old, and had at that time the appetite by which nature announces that its possessor is a perfect man, and went one night into the kitchen of Genin, an innkeeper of Belley, where the old men of the town used to meet to eat chestnuts and drink the new white wine called in the country vin bourru.

The old men were not hungry and paid no attention to him. His digestive powers were not shaken though, and he said ‘I have just left the table, but I will bet that I eat a whole turkey.’

‘If you eat it I will pay for it,’ said Bouvier du Bouchet, a rich farmer who was present, ‘and if you do not I will eat what is left and you shall pay for it.’

They set to work at once, and the young athlete at once cut off a wing, ate it at two mouthfuls and cleaned his teeth by gnawing the bone and drank a glass of wine as an interlude.

He then went into the thigh which he ate and drank another glass of wine to prepare a passage for the rest. The second went the same way, and he had come to the last limb when the unfortunate farmer said, ‘Alas! I see it is all over, but Mr Sibouet as I have to pay, let me eat a bit.’

Prosper was as good a fellow as he was a soldier, and consented. The farmer had the carcass at spolia opima, and paid for the fowl with a good grace.

General Sibuet used always to love to tell of this feat of his youth. He said that his admitting the farmer to eat was a pure courtesy, and that he could easily have won the bet. His appetite at forty permitted none to doubt the assertion.’