But again, not one of the above-mentioned factors necessarily makes a feast crazy. Why, then, would anyone want to learn about or emulate crazy feasts? One short answer to that question is simply ‘for the fun of it.’ We enjoy learning about dramatic human follies, especially if we did not create or experience them ourselves. And when the stakes are not too high, a bit of feast-satire is not only tolerable, it is satisfyingly humorous.
After these meandering alternatives then, let’s be serious: what can make a feast crazy? Sometimes craziness happens because of: over-the-hill or zany guests; poor entertainments; crummy environments; or tasteless and badly served cuisine. Sometimes craziness results from the cultural inappropriateness of the menu, or the crashing boredom of the guests. And sometimes craziness results from excessive formality or crude informality with its usual rude interactions. And lastly, craziness can also happen when plans go awry for uncontrollable chance reasons; or when clashes result from misreading social cues and make behaviors offensive. Who has not read about State Dinners during which ‘unnamed diplomats with negligent cooks’ served ham to Muslim guests and beef Wellington to Hindus?
Even excellent cooks and hosts cannot control the world that impacts them, so feasts become crazy when unanticipated or accidental events occur. When the outlandish or inevitable happens, the original purpose of a feast may become its least memorable aspect. Instead, guests will recall the bizarre happenings that made the feast crazy, because memory is as notoriously selective as a high class hooker. And last but not least, a crazy feast always makes good gossip.
History offers a rich harvest of notable bizarre feasts, and even contemporary banqueting is not exempt from this category. Remember when the dogs ate your marinating steaks, and you had to serve pizza for the Country-Club Fundraising dinner? Or when the woodwind trio you contracted on-line for your daughter’s wedding reception turned out to be a Punk Rock band you clicked on by mistake? Or when you arranged a surprise birthday banquet for The Boss, and the guests arrived to learn he’d run off with his secretary that afternoon? Or when schedules went awry and workers ripped up your dining room carpeting while you were at the market buying ingredients for that special lovefest dinner?
The possibilities are endless and their results magnificently serendipitous. Usually Asians don’t serve Westerners snakes or still-living entrées that thrash about on their platters, but it can and does happen. After all, living or rare ingredients are costly fare to serve honored guests in parts of Asia. And annual hospitalizations still occur among Japanese gourmands who ate costly fugu (poisonous pufferfish) prepared by maladroit chefs who failed to excise the deadly parts. These few examples suggest that we are moving closer to understanding how and why some feasts are or become crazy.
Most adult taste preferences result from cultural food patterns shaped during childhood, and only curiosity, willingness, or genuine hunger drive most adults to taste unusual dishes or ingredients. So remember, it is easy to transgress when setting menus, because not everyone is a food adventurer. And then there are those food taboos and endless allergies to consider. Sometimes I think printed invitations with ‘please check the following forbidden foods, or note them on the blank line’ should be tendered. That could save lives, facilitate planning and relieve the worries of allergy prone guests.
Culinary patterns and food taboos – often grounded in outdated or unsafe historical practices – become ritualized into religious rules of acceptance or rejection, like all that business about pork and other carnivores. Indeed, ancient myths and beliefs can endow food ingredients with positive values or profound taboos, especially if they include purity versus pollution ideas. People in western industrialized countries tend to dislike the idea of eating insects; however, in the Moroccan desert I’ve seen the happy harvesting and quick-fry meals of scooped-up locust infestations, even without honey. When locusts darkened the sky in whirling humming clouds and settled in heaps to crunch their way through brush, they were gleefully gathered, prepared (wings off), salted and quick-fried by Berbers. For days the welcome harvest was carried in burnoose hoods as a welcome protein snack, the edible analogue of potato chips. Desert dwellers know better than to waste good protein. Important components of the Prehispanic Mexican indigenous diet included dogs, insects, worms, grubs and their eggs. And not to be outdone by the Native Americans, I know a pizzeria in Malibu, California, which occasionally serves rattlesnake pizza to culinary dilettantes or showbiz customers with ‘foreign’ guests to titillate. I’ve even heard their retorts of that old adage: ‘Why, it tastes just like chicken!’
On a psychosocial level, motivations for sponsoring feasts range from alleged piety to tooth-and-nail biological imperatives to gain personal power and wealth. Please note that power and wealth are typically allied, and often rise or fall together. Other motivations for hosting feasts include: the need to express unified personal ties and family status; the need to display religious dedication through ritual celebrations; the need to consolidate memberships within peer associations; the need to express gratitude; and/or the need to gratify such murky goals as erotic lust, revenge or thinly veiled satire. Then too, there is the simple and more compelling need to have a good time with chosen friends.
In sum, feasts or dining-together-celebrations are meant to satisfy and embellish an actual or desired social consensus of needs and emotions through the sharing of food with intentional sociability. That’s it in a nutshell.
Eating is basically a mundane daily activity that is necessary for life. In many belief systems, even gods, goddesses and spirits need to eat, and priests are assigned to feed, dress, and care for their needs. Even the earliest monotheisms without a depicted god were known to offer such clever contrivances as burnt offerings to be savored by the One but apparently still hungry Great Being.
Lust-for-power-and-influence feasts typically emphasize the conspicuous consumption of huge amounts of food, over-the-hill entertainment, or even the purposeful ritual destruction of valued goods. Typical examples of the latter were the potlaches given by northwest Native American Haida and others to celebrate rites of passage. During these feasts, participants not only consumed yards of oily blubber, the host often gave away or destroyed much of his wealth. Some Anthropologists cleverly suggested that staged potlatches are not actually crazy feasts, but function as economic levelers, through a kind of covert Socialism, against economic inequality in areas with few natural resources. Perhaps that was their subconscious function, but I doubt asking the Haida would net that verbal democratic justification. I think any host would have admitted that the feast simply made him a ‘Big Man’. Anyway, potlatches were honored ritual feasts until invading foreigners, who didn’t relish blubber or wasteful generosity, made them illegal through alien colonial rules and Statutes.
Wealthy imperial Romans were renowned for excessive feasts. Tacitus and Dio Cassius describe one of Nero’s crazy feasts held on a huge pleasure barge decorated in ivory with gold fittings. Loaded with drunken guests, it was slowly towed across Agrippa’s Pond by smaller vessels. The youthful crew, rouged and garbed in gilded loincloths, dropped guests off at shore locations where they could indulge in bacchantic sex with their choice of partners – male, female, undetermined, prostitutes, virgins, or even children. All this while dining on wine, braised flamingo tongues, puréed brain of pheasant, sautéed sows’ udders and other rich tidbits. Yum, yum! Nero’s celebrations were often staged as eighteen-course orgiastic feasts, and he was not alone in this custom.
Historians also mention the allegedly fantastic feasts sponsored by Cleopatra and Marc Antony during their periodic dangerous liaisons. Antony’s penchant for dressing and acting like the god Bacchus amid Alexandrian wealth was matched by Cleopatra’s ritual role-play as the goddess Isis. The chronicler Athenaeus (see Book IV) describes Cleopatra’s feasts for Antony as served on golden plates inlaid with gems, and staged in huge twelve-couch rooms whose walls were hung with gold-worked tapestries. She often gifted Antony with whatever knickknacks he saw and liked. These and periodic barge feasts on the Nile became perfect paradigms for crazy feasting. Why crazy? Because, instead of enhancing Anthony’s political image and power, these ‘Oriental’ banquets were