"Homo Gluttonous"

From Aeon:

Humans have evolved with little resistance to abundant, easy food. Will we gorge ourselves and our planet to death?

Ten thousand desert rats, 10,000 fish, 14,000 sheep, 1,000 lambs, 1,000 fat oxen and many more creatures slaughtered, cooked and served: that is how Ashurnishabal of Mesopotamia (883-859 BCE) pampered almost 70,000 guests for 10 days. The Archbishop of York’s enthronement feast in 1466 CE required 104 oxen, 2,000 geese, 1,000 capons, 1,000 sheep, 400 swans, 12 porpoises and seals, and a great number of other birds and mammals. In an appropriately grandiose sidebar to his ornate reign as king of France, Louis XIV became incapacitated by overeating at one of his own weddings.

Nothing pulls at the imagination like extremes – overwrought banquets and orgies, epic battles, devastating natural disasters, glorious human triumphs. Our omnivorous appetites find extravagant feasts awe-inspiring and enviable, and occasionally disconcerting.

During our hunter-gatherer past, which constitutes 99 per cent of our history as a species, those omnivorous tastes served us well. We routinely dined to capacity on a wide variety of nutritious fare to save us from malnutrition and starvation. (We also, quite frequently, went without food for days or weeks at a time.) Food quality and quantity were unpredictable, as contingent upon human forces such as trade routes as upon the vagaries of weather and natural cycles. Very early on, we adapted to periodic scarcity, leaping at any chance to pile on calories and storable nutrients – for instance, when we found a bush laden with ripe berries, or a rockpool full of tide-stranded shellfish. Those who were quick-witted enough to see an opportunity when it presented itself, and had the physiological means to convert extra calories into fat, were more likely to survive long stretches between meals, and to raise healthy offspring.

These adaptations had long been in place when humankind began its first huge revolution, the agricultural, which allowed food storage. As civilisations sprang up, the main beneficiaries of stuffed grain bins and successful herding – pharaohs, kings and other rulers – could stage banquets to repay political favours, or use them as a sign of power over the have-not majority. The fantastic feast became part of folklore, for the elite.

Alas, socioeconomic inequality was a fact of life in Europe, Asia and many other parts of the civilising world. ‘Food became a social differentiation – a signifier of class, a measure of rank – at a remote, undocumented moment when some people started to command more food resources than others,’ explains the food historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Some of the first food-utopia stories emerged in medieval Europe, a time of deeply entrenched religious belief and feudalism, as well as famine and epidemics. Dreaming of a paradise of easy eating became a popular escape for beleaguered peasants.

Versions of this ideal place include the German Schlaraffenland (‘lazy land’), the Dutch Luilekkerland (‘lazy-luscious land’) and, most familiarly, the Land of Cockaigne, which first appeared in 1250 as a poem in France. All three had in common lavish quantities of food, plenty of leisure time, and an implicit or explicit challenge to the class system.

The land of idle overeating was as surreal as a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Trees were festooned with comestibles or houses were constructed from them. Various farm animals, already cooked and occasionally stuck with convenient knives and forks, sported about seemingly alive – a benign variation of the undead. Eels and meat pies tumbled from the sky like rain. Rivers ran with wine or milk. Everywhere were animals ready for the eating, sometimes jumping right into the diner’s mouth. The gruelling work of raising domesticated beasts and fowl, slaughtering and cooking them, disappeared.

In his book Dreaming of Cockaigne (2001), Herman Pleij, emeritus professor of medieval Dutch literature at the University of Amsterdam, describes the period’s fear that an ‘already-wretched earthly existence would suddenly take a turn for the worse’. To cut the anxiety, fantasy food-utopias spliced the daily fight for survival with ‘the humour of hyperbole to produce hilarious topsy-turvy worlds’. Cockaigne was a return to the Garden of Eden, a terrestrial version of Heaven, perfecting upon Nature, eliminating pain, discomfort and want of any kind. In that magical land, the human struggle within the food chain was finally over, and we were free – not only of being prey, but also of being fully predatory too. It also removed the backbreaking and miserable labour involved in farming for the benefit of overlords.

The willingness of animals to be food in Cockaigne echoes some Native American stories in which prey such as deer or rabbits offer themselves to hunters who treat them well. For Native Americans, the idea of a mutually respectful arrangement could be called enlightened self-interest; a sustainable hunt would ensure a future for subsequent generations of both the animals and the hunters who want to eat them. By contrast, the mostly domesticated animals in the land of Cockaigne are willing no matter how the diners behave. As in any fantasy, natural laws do not apply.

One constant seems clear: Gluttony – shameful or proud – persists as exuberant overeating at social gatherings, eating contests, and shopping sprees at price-club MegaMarts. But by any other name it is still a reminder of the polarised privilege inherent in agrarianism and our more precarious past.

Pleij contends that, if the people of medieval times could see us now, ‘Modern-day Europe [would represent] in many respects the realisation of Cockaigne: fast food is available at all hours, as are climatic control, free sex, unemployment benefits, and plastic surgery that seemingly prolongs youth.’ Without having to be all that historically savvy, today’s marketers can exploit consumer lust based on human nature alone. In fact, it might be one of the easiest ways to get consumers to part with their money: boggle their minds with food worthy of a feast, making it easy to acquire and consume....

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