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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 nineteenthcentury 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.