excess | Neither Kings nor Americans

Outside of reviews on restaurant windows, this may be the first piece of food journalism I have ever read. I have never cared much about food nor believed that food was a very important thing to spend one’s money on (compared to opera, books and booze anyway). Indeed, as a vegetarian, I always found the “foodie” craze a rather vile celebration of excess, undertook at the cost of violence against animals. A. J. Liebling’s Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris did not convince me to start caring about food but I find myself in agreement with Liebling on one important point: that a life centered on pleasure and appetite is certainly better than one of restraint. Between Meals is a book that actually documents an entire host of appetites, not confined just to meals.

When you did a Google search for this book by its title–neglecting the author–you find a host of pages calling for restraint. This suggests Liebling’s theme, that taking that extra meal is not a sin.

Liebling begins nostalgically (as he often does) of the time before the First World War when heroic eating was a respected pastime in Europe. “I have known some of the survivors, octogenarians of unblemished appetite and unfailing good humor–spry, wry, and free of the ulcers that come from worrying about a balanced diet–but they have had no emulators in France since the doctors there discovered the existence of the human liver.” (558) A common theme running through his work is that excess is not as unhealthy and restraint. This is probably a clearer case to make with sex, which he does in the second chapter on a M. Mirande. Liebling connects the new regime of restraint on eating with the emerging sexual restraint he saw in France. “He had the pleasure of women. Currently pleasure and women are held matters incompatible, antithetical, and mutually exclusive, like quinine water and Scoth. Mirande also gave women pleasure; many women had pleasure of him. This is no longer considered a fair or honorable exchange.” (574)

One of the major points running through Between Meals is that food is a subjective experience and in this runs some of its power. While the rich can certainly explore food more freely than the poor, there are many foods that the poor enjoy that the rich will rarely get to try. It is an experience shaped in no small degree by class. Tastes in food, wine, lovers, and cities are all ultimately individualized. Interestingly, Liebling is interested not only in the food and his company but in the chefs, who all tended to be colorful, emotionally expressive figures.

The story in Between Meals does not have a moral tale at the end. He does include a chapter about his time at a weight loss “prison,” which failed, as we might expect. (When was the last time a prison rehabilitated a criminal?) The book ends with a narrative of Liebling’s love life during the 1920s in Paris, again connecting the consumption of food with sexuality. Both have been labelled as evils, reflective of excess unsuited to the cultivation of a thrifty, diligent working class. Malthus more of less says this when condemning both charity to the poor along with the the working-poor’s reproductive lives.

Liebling died a very fat man, probably his interest in food played a role in his weight. It is not clear from the biographical details I have that this slowed him down at all. From the 1940s until his death in 1963 he traveled all around the world, spending much of his time in Europe. He continued writing until the end. He tried a few times to lose weight but failed. However, it was not the weight that directly killed him, he died of heart and renal failure after a bout of pneumonia. Perhaps the weight did not help matters, but I do not get the sense that he regretted his appetites at the end. This work, published a year before his death is not a biography of the appetites that killed him. Instead it is a celebration of appetite and a call for a certain degree of professionalism, based on the idea that if you want to write about something (including food) you best know it well.

Personally, I am a bit conflicted about consumption. Taking the world as it is, I think working people should certainly be allowed to consume more. As the producers of the real wealth in the world, they have a right to consume at least as much as they produce in addition to their right to the commons (‘the common treasury of mankind’). Social inequality and stagnant wages has made it more difficult for working people to consume, although they are producing more than before, and more efficiently. However, I am also a believer that we should move toward less work and less consumption. In my own case, I am now working 6 hours a day but making more money than my modest lifestyle requires. I would much rather work 1-2 hours a day but take home a larger cut. As is commonly remarked, we have moved from to a consumer society which directed increased productivity into disposable goods rather than in time off. However we got here, and David Graeber makes a good argument about this in his article on “bullshit jobs,” I think that moving away from work, spreading it out (so that the unemployed and underemployed can contribute meaningfully), redefining what meaningful and remunerative work entails (so that service, raising children, homeschooling, etc. are not second shifts), and ending Puritanical prohibitions on healthy excess are important components of a free society.