Educated Tastes: Food, Drink, and Connoisseur Culture

7. A Short Poetics of Cruel Food

158 A Short Poetics of Cruel Food jeremy strong Beneath the candelabra, beneath the five-tiers bearing towards the distant ceiling pyramids of home-made cakes that were never touched, spread the monotonous opulence of buffets at big balls: coraline lobsters boiled alive, waxy chaud-froids of veal, steely-tinted fish immersed in sauce, turkeys gilded by the ovens’ heat, rosy foie-gras under gelatine armour, boned woodcocks reclining on amber toast decorated with their own chopped guts, and a dozen other cruel, colored delights. Giuseppe di Lampedusa What might “cruel food” signify? What dishes, products, and practices might be assembled under such a title? It is uncontroversial to state that for both animals and people there exist countless examples of suffering and injustice in relation to the production and availability of food. The conditions of their existence, their abbreviated lives, and often-protracted deaths are the subjects of many other works and impassioned media interventions, though human and nonhuman travails are rarely considered jointly other than through the well-worn rhetorical figure of describing especially abject circumstances as “unfit for animals.” Focusing on human experience, a global economic system in which oversupply and obesity coexist with famine and starvation might justifiably Chapter Seven A Short Poetics of Cruel Food 159 merit the polemical conjunction of “cruel” and “food.” A concern for animals would likely register the short, cramped, sunlight-free lives of battery hens—obliged to stand upon wire floors, spattered in the excrement of their neighbors, and nourished with antibiotics to prevent their succumbing prematurely to the infections such circumstances encourage—as a self-evident food cruelty. The same could easily be argued for the conditions of cattle raised on concrete feedlots. Fattened on a cheap and easily transported cereal diet rather than upon the grass, for which their complex digestive system actually evolved, their topsy-turvy predicament also routinely requires chemical intervention to avoid their unscheduled demise. However, this study has a still more distinct focus. For the examples given above do not meet a criterion for what I here term cruel food; they lack a necessary and manifest connection between foodstuff and cruelty. Not necessary, in that eggs, chicken, and beef do not have to be produced by such means. Not manifest in that industrial producers do not like to reveal, and the consumers of industrially produced foodstuffs do not like to think about, the unpleasant aspects of food production. To make this distinction is not to assert that such modes of production are not cruel. They are. Rather, it is to acknowledge that the cruelty arises, at least in the main, as a consequence of industrial methods conceived to produce food cheaply for consumers who do not know, or do not wish to know, of the cruelties practiced on their behalf. There exists, I contend, another species of cruel food: culinary experiences and food items in which the element of cruelty figures not as a by-product but as a vital ingredient. In the introduction to his excellent book In The Devil’s Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food, Stewart Lee Allen observes an important aspect of how we regard food and the pleasures of eating: “We now judge a dish largely by how guilty we feel about eating it—at least judging from today’s advertising—and if it is not considered ‘sinful’ we find it less pleasant.”1 It is necessary to add a 160 Theorizing and Contextualizing Taste critical caveat; the “sin” Allen describes is largely represented and understood as a sin against oneself rather than, as is the case for the food experiences described in this chapter, a pleasure bought at the price of suffering by other sentient beings. In particular, his observation chimes precisely with that genre of food advertising in which a host of products are figured as decadent and happinessinducing because of their propensity to make consumers fat. The appurtenances of this genre are wholly familiar, especially its use of sexualized images to amplify the theme of guilty, secret, bodily pleasures. Fresh cream cakes are “naughty but nice,” for example.2 Chocolate and ice creams are consumed (and presumably expelled between takes) by slim models for whom this surfeit of ingestion provokes sexual rapture as the longed-for object threatens to, and frequently does, spill from their mouths. Lascivious voice-overs mount adjectives upon images of foodstuffs being carved and greedily deconstructed, even bursting open...