Food by Flandrin Jean-Louis; Montanari Massimo; Sonnenfeld Albert

Author:Flandrin, Jean-Louis; Montanari, Massimo; Sonnenfeld, Albert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: CKB041000, Cooking/History, HIS054000, History/Social History
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 1999-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

Food and Worldview

These distinctions through food, whereby the upper classes were meant to eat more “refined” foods, leaving coarser foodstuffs to the lower classes, were commonplace. Sixteenth-century treatises on the nobility examined this problem and reminded their readers that the “superiority” of the more refined part of the society was due, at least in part, to the way in which they ate. Thus, Florentin Thierriat in his Discours de la préférence de la noblesse asserted that “we eat more partridges and other delicate meats than they [those who are not of the nobility] do and this gives us a more supple intelligence and sensibility than those who eat beef and pork.”

All of the examples cited above suggest that there was something like a code that made a meal noble or poor and that this code was not a personal one but rather one known and shared by most people. The idea that the rich and poor were meant to eat in very different ways may seem more or less senseless to us today, but in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance the idea was grounded in a set of theories that were believed to be objective. According to the prevailing worldview, there existed a series of analogies between the natural world created by God and the world of human beings. It seemed self-evident that God had created the world as well as the laws that governed human society, both being structured by a vertical and hierarchical principle. Human society was, quite obviously, subdivided in a hierarchical way, but it was also thought that nature itself had been created as a kind of ladder, usually referred to as the Great Chain of Being (see above). This great chain was thought to give a particular order to nature since it not only connected the world of inanimate objects to God but also linked all of creation together in a grand design. Between the two extremes of the chain were to be found all the plants and animals created by God (including even mythological animals such as the phoenix). Furthermore, God’s creation was thought to be a perfectly hierarchical entity in which everything respected an ascending or descending order. Each plant or animal was thought to be nobler than the one below it and less noble than the one above it, so no two plants and no two animals could have the same degree of nobility.

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