Another reversal example is a famous Jamaica Bay feast of 1890, when ‘conservative Republicans’ (is there another kind?) flew the Jolly Roger for Thanksgiving, and forced defeated candidates to serve election winners (Reported in a New York Times). Or what about Hasidic Jews who hold occasional Trink Siyde (drinking banquets), during which the men (no women, of course) reverse their normal fastidious habits, become drunk and grossly satirize the leaders and customs of the goys among whom they reside. Then too, Hallowe’en feasts have become noted for excesses and relaxed norms in food or ghostly follies, since this one-time children’s holiday has become an adult reversal festival. What goes around comes around as the saying goes, and occasional dramatic catharsis helps relieve social tensions.
And there are also cases when cross-cultural dining jokes prevail to create craziness. One example occurred during an early banquet by British ex-patriots working for the East Indian Trading Company in what became Hong Kong. The guests for these banquets were English visitors hosted by Chinese owners of vast estates. Experienced Brits enjoyed most Chinese dishes, but newcomers to Hong Kong were suspicious of alien ‘exotic’ dishes. One experienced British wit teased a worried newcomer guest by reciting a poem about Chinese food. The last verse about a Chinese entrée ended thus:
Still cautious grown, but to be sure,
His brain he set to rack,
At length he turned to a (Chinese) behind,
And pointing, cried, “Quack, quack?”
The Chinese gravely shook his head,
And firmly said, “Bow wow.” (from Project Gutenberg, Fan Kwae ebook, 42-43)
In spite of occasional lapses into craziness, eating together is still important. Commensality, the sharing of hunted or gathered food within families, clans or tribes, was embedded in human evolution during the millions of years with selective vetting of genomic factors that support human survival. Commensality became brain-linked to empathy and self-rewarding emotions until food sharing was embedded in humanity. In one sense, we were hardwired for it, and dining together still affirms intentional sociability. Some theorists even cite the early cooking of food as not only critical to human digestion, but as having shaped the hominid cranium, as well as enhanced the predisposition for food sharing.
Reversing normal eating-together patterns occurs typically when society wishes to call attention to or deny social norms for reasons like: punishment for anti-social acts (solitary confinement); to enforce military disciplines; to enhance solitary meditation (Carthusian or Trappist monks and hermits); or to celebrate feasts that reverse social class propriety.
Since dining together presumes a measure of social trust and class-specific amiability, British mystery writers have used the country weekend dinner party as the signature occasion for murder(s). A dash of poison or stab in the back, the lights go out, the butler drops a tray and voila! Cherchez la femme, the footman, or the gouty Lord upstairs in his pink tutu.
Humans seem cursed (or blessed) with the hubris of overreaching themselves to know the unknowable, to perform beyond given needs and exceed taboos, or simply to shock and épater le bourgoisie. Thus, the human penchant for innovation can transform food and feasts – which typically enact shared sustenance – into planned or unplanned bedlam. Some feasts come disguised like Trojan horses bearing dishes that signify conquest, like the last meal of choice afforded a criminal about to be assassinated as punishment. An odd and curious twist of values at best: the solitary chosen meal served to a ‘guest’ who will never digest it, since he/she will be legally murdered by the hosts in front of an audience. An entire scenario of ultimate ostracism and indeed a crazy feast.
In spite of their typical positive emotional aura, feasts have been sometimes judged as negative or at best anti-military:
Some men are born to feast, and not to fight;
Whose sluggish minds, e’en in fair honor’s field,
Still on their dinner turn -
Let such pot-boiling varlets stay at home,
And wield a flesh-hook rather than a sword.
(Joanna Baillie from the drama Basil)
Ouch! Isn’t being dubbed ‘pot-boiling varlets’ a bit rough on gourmands and innocent foodies? Fortunately, the more typical view about feasts was proposed by Robert Burton (1577-1640) in his Anatomy of Melancholy:
As much Valor is to be found in feasting as in fighting, and some of our city captains and knights will make this good, and prove it.
We incline to the latter view, even if meals can become as crazy as two-edged swords. Food can be an aphrodisiac, a bribe, a medicine, or weapon for murder. Head-to-head talks over meals can become body-to-body sighs after dessert, or end in phone calls to divorce attorneys. Each society has its own ideas about aphrodisiacs and symbolic meanings about the social rules for food preparation and serving (see Ravicz, 2000, passim).
Some foods are thought to pollute, while others are reputed to invigorate and heal. Most humans seem perverse or simply hungry enough to consume almost any organism for food. In fact, some human omnivores create grand feasts while chiding the same practice in others. Northern Chinese satirize southern Chinese in sayings like: ‘They eat anything with legs but tables, and everything that flies, with or without wings.’ Pots calling kettles whatever?
Ben Johnson (1573-1637) satirized human omnivores in his Volpone:
The head of parrots, tongues of nightingales,
The brains of peacocks, and of ostriches,
Shall be our food; and could we get the phoenix,
Though nature lost her kind, she were our dish.
It’s true that we humans are masterful omnivores. That status calls to mind an historical menu that gives substance to Johnson’s poetry, although it satirized a period of actual starvation and necessity, rather than mere human perversity. It exemplifies a genuine albeit sad historical crazy feast.
During persistent French battle sieges in the winter of 1870, starving Parisians first slaughtered their horses for food; next sold and butchered their zoo animals (there was nothing to feed them anyway); and then moved on to devour the fish in the ornamental pools of the Tuileries. Finally, only bizarre comestibles were left to assuage their hunger. Being French, a few citizens celebrated that terrible situation with – you guessed it – a perversely crazy feast. On December 4, the journal Les Nouvelles announced the following menu for a ‘grand feast’ to be attended by the mayor and select Parisian notables:
Horsemeat consommé with millet
Brochettes of dog livers à la maître d’Hotel
Minced cat meat with mayonnaise
Shoulder roast of dog in tomato sauce
Cat stew with mushrooms
Dog cutlets with peas
Rat salamis à la Robert
Roast Leg of dog flanked by rat
Wild escarole salad
Sautéed begonias
Plum pudding with horse marrow sauce
Desserts and wine.
Generated by genuine hunger, this ‘crazy’ menu satirized the traditional French preoccupation with food. No recommendation for emulation is suggested (see Colin Clair, 166-7, menu translation by the author).
Lest we think such crazy feast menus occurred only historically or in foreign societies, think again. The New York Entomological Society celebrated its 100th Anniversary in