Food for thought | 7 July 2016

Elisabeth Luard has a fascinating and rich subject in the relationship between food and place. Humans eat differently according to where they live. Their diets both in daily life and in feast-day magnificence are influenced by seasonal and regional availability, sumptuary laws, convention, history and even political diktat. I was in Norway last week, and was repeatedly tempted by the offer of grilled whale, though less so by the pseudo-cheese Brunost or Gjetost. (When a lorry carrying Gjetost crashed and burst into flames in a tunnel in 2013, the load of sugar in the ‘cheese’ fuelled an inferno that the firefighters could not approach for four days.) I’m writing this in Geneva, where there is still a bucherie chevaline within walking distance, and where the ordinary supermarket shelves hold horse steaks, usefully indicated with a silhouette of Black Beauty, as well as the most recherché offal, such as rabbit kidneys. Despite many historic attempts, however, the Swiss have never succeeded in eating their largest rodent, the Alpine marmot. We eat different things, and in that difference lies a good deal of what interests us in other people, making us gawp and stare.

It’s worth admitting that a lot of what other people eat is going to strike us as disgusting, either because of unarticulated taboos or because it just doesn’t fall within our experience of taste. A lot of anthropological work has gone into trying to discern why we eat some meat and not others. Domestication seems to have something to do with it, and distance, so we eat cows, sheep and (most of us) pigs and goats, but not cats or dogs; horse is a disputed case, and donkey is made into sausages. You can buy the latter in Clapham, I discover. The exotic is an articulator of disgust, too: kangaroo and crocodile are delicious, but not familiar to us, so many people regard them as disgusting in prospect.