Sometimes Food Is Just Food

Michael LaCombe took his title term “political gastronomy” from the following quote in Jean Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin’s classic text, The Physiology of Taste (1825): “The table constitutes a kind of tie between the bargainer and the bargained-with, and makes the diners more willing to receive certain impressions, to submit to certain influences: from this is born political gastronomy. Meals have become a means of governing, and the fate of whole peoples is decided at a banquet” (quoted by LaCombe on p. vii).

Originally published in the early nineteenth century, the quote and, indeed, the volume from which it came, reveal sharp observations on how nineteenth-century French men and women manipulated political and social power with knives, forks, and a seemingly infinite array of complex dishes, customs, and rules of table etiquette. At that time and place, the table could be a playing field tilted in favor of the host, but the guest was not without his own tools to tilt the table in his favor. LaCombe’s goal, it seems, was to show how, two centuries before Brillat-Savarin’s book, men and women on a different continent and from two sharply different cultures played the same elaborate games with the same advantages—and victory—going to the host. In his words, the study shows how Indians and English “conveyed and interpreted the intertwined symbolic meaning of food and how they manipulated those symbols for precedence” (p. 8). Although aimed at a laudable target, the effort is only partly successful, mostly because LaCombe assumes that Brillat-Savarin’s shrewd conclusion about hosting, guesting, and dining in nineteenth-century France applies universally—even in cases when a literal or figural table is nowhere to be seen, the meal has not yet been prepared (perhaps because there is no food with which to prepare it), the identities of the governors and the governed have not yet been decided, and only assumptions can be made about the thoughts and intentions of some of the participants in many of the historical incidents covered in the book. The chapters in the book present, in order, themes of food and leadership; “the art of authority;” gender, status, and food exchanges; English dependency; and status eating and meals shared by English and Indians. With the exception of the role of women in food preparation in seventeenth-century North America, the chapter themes are not clearly isolated. Leadership, status, control, food exchanges, English dependency, and shared meals appear throughout the text, making it difficult for the reader to clearly understand the point of each chapter.

Certain conclusions, supported or unsupported, pervade the book. One is that food was central to the establishment and success of early American English colonies because food is essential to survival. Well, yes, but this is not a book about what the colonists ate and how they actually produced or acquired it to keep from dying. The text states that, although food was not always the most important aspect of political interaction, it was always “a site for such interactions, giving it a unique value for historians” (p. 8). However, other parts of the text contradict this statement, claiming the premier importance of the symbolic meanings of food. Food, the reader learns in the beginning of the text, is always “more [emphasis supplied] than the sum of its symbolic resonances, however rich” because it “combined biological necessity with symbolism.” It “was never just a symbol” because it “had to be physically present—and ultimately consumed—in order to convey its full meanings, and when it was not, other symbolic assertions of legitimacy rang hollow” (p. 20).

Many scenes involving hunger and violence in LaCombe’s text simply deny the validity of this statement. Hunger, the absence of food or the looming possibility of no food were, as the text shows, present in the early months of all seventeenth-century North American colonies. The absence of food could give more importance to other...