Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760 by E. C. Spary (review)

Despite its provocative title, this is a dense and serious book about the Enlightenment as a process that involved claims of authority and expertise in every area, including nutrition. While the choice of chronological parameters is never explained, it is clear that the period in question saw discoveries and innovations that sparked debates over cuisine as a subject of taste, learning, moral reflection, and political controversy. (E. C. Spary's proposal that writing about food was often a veiled criticism of the Crown strikes me as short on evidence.) The principal luxury item that did cause moralists to rail against opening the West to the intoxication of the East was coffee, that 'spiritual gasoline' (p. 211) to which Spary devotes two well-researched and brilliantly argued chapters centring on the intersection of knowledge and consumption. While she does include an indispensable development on Molière's Bourgeois gentilhomme, it is one of the rare stops as she passes over the waning seventeenth century to get to the eighteenth. Her discovery that, for instance, early eighteenth-century diners were advised to restrict defecation to once a week for better digestion would have excited the imagination more fundamentally if compared to the multiple lavements suffered by Louis XIV (see Le Journal de santé du Roi) or to the monthly outpourings of Harpagon as detailed in the first scene of Le Malade imaginaire. Without question, digestion was a major concern. Given that evidence from anatomical studies was occasionally adduced to support one or another view, Spary might have said more about the role of dissections in theological and medical discussions. She might also have been less dismissive of the treatises on 'humoral medicine' (pp. 66, 291), such as L'École de Salerne, which were surely not 'scientific' but strongly influenced opinion, if not thinking, between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries. Since Spary's speciality is chemistry, she shines in the chapter on 'Distilling Learning', where she examines attempts by chemists to elevate their status from tinkerers to thinkers. It is well into the book that the author explicitly poses the question that has been preoccupying her throughout: 'What role could reason and Enlightenment play in creating order out of consumption?' (p. 194). It became increasingly clear, amidst the incessant calls for reason, that the mind was insufficient to restrain the body, which, in turn, negatively affected taste. Evidence suggests that it was difficult for polite society to take into account all the often conflicting factors that contributed to choices of diet and consumption. In her Conclusion, Spary suggests that globalization, with its novelty, its exoticism, its medical, commercial, and cultural threats, is the logical consequence of eighteenth-century exchanges on the most important of daily concerns, ingestion. Eating the Enlightenment constitutes a signal achievement: it is at once an enormous synthesis of previous scholarship and a powerful argument for reading the history of food as a full partner with the history of science in developing the dietetic, esthetic, philosophical, technological, and medical bases for modernity.