Insults based on others’ unusual food tastes have a long history. Jeremy Corbyn is only the latest to have perfectly legitimate breakfast habits used against him On a lovely afternoon in the summer of 1969 I sat in the smart and, for a newspaper, remarkably silent offices of the Observer being interviewed for a job on the paper’s magazine. “How would you describe our magazine’s readers?” wasn’t the sort of question I had been asked before. “How would you describe your parents?” “How would you describe your upbringing?” Intimate enquiries of that kind invited an articulate self-awareness that was then not generally available, or not to me. In any case, in journalism at that time you hardly gave a thought to the consumer – the product was the thing. I had come down from Glasgow. I said: “Maybe they’re the kind of people who eat french beans with their mince rather than peas,” a clever-clogs reply that was probably puzzling or irritating to my interviewer and yields no pleasure at all to remember. It interests me now for two reasons: one, in its implication that, in 1969, french beans could still be thought of, at least in Glasgow, as an aspirational or pretentious food; two, as an example of what might be called gastro-synecdoche, in which people are characterised by a part of their diet. I don’t know how much anthropological study has been devoted to the idea – perhaps a great deal. Obviously, it must go back a long way, possibly to the days of the hunter-gatherers and the dietary differences between tribes and localities. The ancient Greeks knew the Romans as _pultiphagonides_ – after _puls_, a pap made from coarse bread – rather as “bean-eater” is the pejorative in the US for Mexicans. Later, national rivalries played a part. The French and the English began to characterise each other in terms of roast beef and frogs in the 18th century (although the Simpsons waited until 1995 to describe the French as cheese-eating surrender monkeys). In Lilliput, Swift imagined a conflict between the Big Endians and the Little Endians over the correct way to break open a boiled egg. Continue reading...
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