Eating Through Time, The Culture of Food in the Mediterranean by Cassar Carmel (review)

185 BOOK REVIEWS Cassar Carmel. 2007 Eating Through Time, The Culture of Food in the Mediterranean (Mediterranean Cultural Encounters Ltd., Malta), 94 pp., €39.13 In this work, the second in the series, the Maltese historian and social anthropologist Carmel Cassar has courageously released himself from the strict confines of academic literary convention and joined one of Malta’s contemporary artists, Anthony Calleja, to produce an illustrated account of the powers, movements, religious and other ideas which have contributed over the centuries to the way Mediterranean people cook and eat. There is a timely preface from Gianni Ferrero of the Slow Food Movement and eleven chapters, of which nine from the body of the work and trace the earliest representations of food in Mesopotamia in 3000 BCE, continuing with the people of Ancient Egypt, Romans, Arabs, and the Ottomans and the subtle marks left by Byzantium. The development of the art of cookery in medieval and Renaissance Europe leads to the exciting arrival of unknown foods from the New World, the emergence of French cuisine and haute cuisine. The last course in this glorious historical journey takes us to the present—with food a commodity, moved round the world to our tables by the global giants of the advanced capitalist system and showing how the age-old interconnectedness between farmers and fishermen, land, sea and people are being eroded. It must be left to the art critics, rather than a food writer, to comment on Calleja’s work, but the written account is more than colourful enough a work of extensive research with an impressive bibliography spanning the centuries as well as recipes selected from every period—most of which can be cooked in our kitchens today. Cassar, whose interest in the anthropology of food was first expressed in ‘Fenkata: A Symbol of Maltese Peasant Resistance’ (1994) presents several threads for readers to follow. What will not surprise is that the one thing that has not changed in thousands of years, is that poor people all over the world—even when they do not die of famine of chronic malnutrition , have always had to make do with the foods they could grow or otherwise obtain or afford to buy, while wealthy people could, and still do, indulge in unimaginable luxury and more food than they need. Moreover, the affluent were able to develop the techniques and artistry which have given us such elaborate ways of not just eating to live but making food a centre of social life while the poor unknown people ‘the people without history’ as Eric Wolf described those whose labour and enslavement brought about the wealth of the West struggled to produce the food for the tables of the rich. Sometimes—in Roman times for example—the urban lower classes fared even worse than their country counterparts—much in the same way as people today who have left the country side and ‘settled’ in shanty towns close to big cities like Calcutta or San Paolo. For the Roman rich, as ever, dining was a long drawn-out social activity and during the ‘men only’ symposia philo- 186 sophical debate would take place over supper. The wide variety of foods of every kind, from every part of the globe exists because of a succession of transformations , be they of invading forces, religious movements, captured slaves, systems of hierarchy and the adventures of explorers who ventured into strange worlds and found new foods and pungent spices. What is the Mediterranean diet if it exists at all except in the minds of health spin doctors who have pointed to our wide use of olive oil, to the way we extend a small amount of meat or fish with carbohydrates and an abundance of fresh vegetables and fruit? That this is largely correct fails to take into account that many Mediterranean people today also eat unhealthy quantities of sugar, animal fats and highly sweetened drinks as well as processed foods of various kind. We frequently hear about ‘traditional foods’ but the sudden appearance of hitherto unheard of bogus ‘traditional’ dishes or drinks (often promoted by Tourist Authorities) should make us question the use of the word and remember that tradition...