the world i ate: the prophets of global consumption culture

Eighteenth-Century Life 25 (Spring 2001): 214–224 © 2001 by The College of William & Mary

The World I Ate: The Prophets ofGlobal Consumption Culture

How can one explain the transformation of values in the West at theend of the eighteenth century, when the passion for happiness and socialfelicity that moved the thinkers of the Enlightenment1 mutated into aglobal appetite for pleasure? How did an elite’s Epicurean ethics turn intoa population’s pragmatic hedonism? Harvie Ferguson argues that early inthe nineteenth century the bourgeois psyche sought a mastery over thecosmos by means of consumption.2 Yet noting the renovation of classicalhedonism by the English utilitarians does not explain how appetite, solong demeaned as a human motive in Western thought, became the regnantforce animating the world system. Here I suggest who the oracle of appe-tite was in the West and reflect on the peculiar manner in which he pro-posed a new hedonics of consumption free from the moral arithmetic ofutilitarianism.

He was the most agreeable of prophets—one who predicted a parousiaof pleasure. He did not haunt the wastelands proclaiming woe to the world.He was not an angry dreamer. Nevertheless, he had the one requisite of atrue prophet: his visions came to be. One could argue that this unabashedhedonist had greater powers of foresight than Karl Marx, Jeremy Bentham,or John Stuart Mill. He alone of that era saw the triumph of a globalculture of consumption, the regnant world system at the close of themillenium. How did it happen? Why did this man see with the greatestacuity?

His career does not explain much—perhaps only his disenchantmentwith ideologies. A native of the east of France, he gravitated to Paris whenrevolutionary politics began to disturb the provincial status quo. He be-came a fixture in the salons, a noted lawyer, bureaucrat, and legislator.When the Revolution collapsed into the terror, he was fortunate in suffer-ing banishment rather than execution. He spent three years in the newUnited States fiddling, hunting, and drinking. When the halls of govern-ment ceased to run with blood, he returned to Paris. After the 18thBrumaire, he was appointed a counsellor in the Court of Cassation. There-after, until his death, he served in the judiciary. When not at the bench, hehaunted the cafes accompanied by a dog that became a Parisian celeb-rity.3 He made time for occasional literary exercises, such as an Essaihistorique et critique sur le duel;4 and in 1825, at the end of his life, he pub-

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lished the work that would make him famous, a series of thirty transcen-dental meditations on gastronomy with the misleadingly scientific title,Physiologie du Gout.

Mennipean in its messiness, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiol-ogy of Taste; Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy5 reveals as no othervolume of that era—the period after the wreck of Europe’s first imperialsystem—the premises then organizing a world system based on consump-tion. It alone proclaimed that the “interests” that moved commerce andpolitics were truly “appetites.” It alone declared that the appetites de-sired more than the pleasures of mere satisfaction. Both anatomy andprophecy, The Physiology of Taste was and is the baldest exposition of thepoetics of global consumption in the modern world. What had been re-pressed, half spoken before, came fully to view in its pages. Brillat-Savarin’sbook also explored the signal role that the United States would play inthe sumptuary turn of the world. Here I will reflect upon the peculiargenius of this oracle of appetite and briefly consider the place of Americain his sense of the voracious world coming to be.

The Physiology of Taste is a Romantic text, for all its gestures at naturalphilosophy, for all its sideways glances at the chemistry of soups and themechanisms of the tongue. It mocked the ideology of the French Revolu-tion and the Enlightenment’s claim that reason elevated man to the higheststation in nature. It located human supremacy in the rapacity andpleasurability of appetite: “Man...is omnivorous. Everything which is eat-able is subject to his enormous appetite; hence, as a consequence, hisgustatory powers must be proportionate to the general use he has tomake of them” [“Supremacy of Man,” Meditation II, Section 14]. Man’sdominion over the globe serves his physiology, not his mind. Humanecommunity is founded upon shared appetites, not common ideals.

Brillat-Savarin reanimated the principles of hedonism. His book re-enacted the ancient attack by adherents to the pleasure-principle on Pla-tonic abstraction and Aristotelean analytics. In Meditation 27, a “Philo-sophical History of Cooking,” the author coyly alludes to the classicalthinker who served as his intellectual model, Archestratus of Gela. In 350B.C. Archestratus composed the first global poetics of consumption in“Gastronomy,” a versified experiential survey of the cuisines of all thecultures in the known world. “Gastronomy” proposed that the stomach,not the mind, was the organ that permitted understanding between dif-ferent cultures. Writing in the wake of Alexander’s oikomene, Archestratusapplauded the skepticism of Pyrrho (the philosopher who accompaniedAlexander on his conquests) and the intellectual relativism of Protagorus,finding no grounds for universal principles in ethics or religion. YetArchestratus resisted Pyrro’s claim that common understanding couldnot be had among persons of widely different cultures. What were com-mon among all peoples were the senses.6 What was most flexible andleast constrained by rule or prejudice of all humane capacities was taste.Thus by consuming the food of foreigners and learning how they servetheir appetites, one came closest to bridging cultures. Though the text of

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“Gastronomy” did not survive the destruction of the classical world, itsideas and excerpted passages came down to modern times in a later work,Atheneus’ multi-volume survey of “Virtuosi of Dining,” the Deipnosophistai(circa 280 CE), a book cited by Brillat-Savarin.7

Brillat-Savarin acknowledged the classical origins of his thought in thename he adopted for his wisdom, gastronomie, a derivitive of the Greek,gastronomia. This knowledge of all that relates to man as eater becameBrillat-Savarin’s master science. “Gastronomy rules the entire life.” “Ithas to do...with all the states of society.” It connects with natural history,physics, chemistry, cookery, commerce, and political economy. It treatsthe biology of nutrition and the aesthetics of taste. Finally, it is gastronomythat directs the modern world system, for “It is gastronomy which exam-ines men and things for the purpose of transporting from one country toanother everything which is known, and which orders that a feast skill-fully arranged should be like the world in miniature, where each quarteris typified by its representatives” [Meditation 3, Section 19.] This was noinflated claim. Brillat-Savarin was seriously cosmopolitan in taste and glo-bal in his studies; the foods that commanded his attention in the Physiol-ogy of Taste were not France’s native produce, but Arabian coffee, SouthAmerican chocolate, West Indian sugar, and the North American Turkey.Truffles were the sole French comestible worthy of extended comment.

Brillat-Savarin’s politics were formed to allow his stomach maximumrange in its ingestion. He reviled barriers to trade and the free flow ofcommodities, damning the old mercantalist order for the imperial jeal-ousy that drove the creation of monopolies and restricted markets. Hedenounced in particular Spain’s restrictions on the circulation of the NewWorld’s potato, indigo, vanilla, cinchona, and chocolate. The overthrowof the mercantilist system by free trade capitalism, and the resultant ex-pansion of commerce from imperial dominions to the entire globe wouldin his view result in an explosion of commodities and an expansion oftaste.8

If these discoveries have taken place in spite of the barriers that a jealousnation has erected to prevent inquiries, we may reasonably hope that theywill be tenfold increased during the following years, and that the researchesof the scientific men of old Europe in so many unexplored countries willenrich the three kingdoms of Natures [i.e., air, land, and sea] with a greatmany substances which will procures us new sensations, as the vanilla beanhas done, or will increase our alimentary resources, as the cocoa bean hasdone. (Meditation VI, Section 47, X)

The world and the body in this politics of free enterprise and scientificgastronomic inquiry resume their ancient tension as macrocosm and mi-crocosm. The desire for new sensations impels global exploration, whilethe experience of the world’s consumable commodities intensifies andexpands one’s taste. The mercantilist system, despite its restrictions upontrade, had broadened commerce, and consequently had improved the

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senses as more of the sensorium became available to experience. “Thelast centuries...have given to the sphere of taste important extensions;the discovery of sugar and its diverse preparations, alcoholic liquors, ice,vanilla, tea and coffee, have given us flavours whereof the whole worldwas previously ignorant.” Exploration, exploitation, exchange, and expe-rience seemed endlessly expansive enterprises, for the globe seemed noclosed system for Brillat-Savarin. Gastronomy, like capitalism, was drivenby an ethic of material liberation with the end of perpetually enriching anindividual’s life. Whereas capitalism’s enrichments were in wealth, power,and conditions, gastronomy’s were in the senses.

Physiology, not politics, would govern the world system of consump-tion. Appetite—because of the interminable recurrence of hunger andthirst, the limits of one’s capacity to eat and drink, and disease’s atten-dance upon its over-indulgence or perversion—had moderating forcesbuilt into its natural operation. Yet sumptuary indulgence did occur, andthe natural moderation of physiology could be overturned by human dis-position. When violation of the natural government of physiology be-comes an issue, the United States obtrudes in the text. The new republicis for Brillat-Savarin the place where political hypocrisy—the disparitiesbetween republican ideology and libertine practice—become dramatic.The most memorable instance occurs when Brillat-Savarin confronts uswith a monstrous embodiment of gluttony in the person of Edward, ashockingly obese man displayed sitting in an enormous armchair in atavern window on Broadway in New York City:

Edward was at least six feet four in height, and as his fat had puffed himout in every direction, he was almost nine feet round the waist. His fingerswere like those of the Roman emperor who used his wife’s bracelets asrings; his arms and his thighs were tubular, and as thick as the waist of aman of ordinary stature, and he had feet like an elephant, covered with thethick fat of his legs. The weight of fat kept down his lower eyelids and madethem gape; but what was hideous to behold were three round chins hang-ing on his breast, and more than a foot long, so that his face appeared to bethe capital of a truncated column.... Thus Edward passed his life, sitting ata window on the ground floor looking out on the street, drinking fromtime to time a glass of ale, of which a pitcher of huge capacity stood alwaysnear him. So extraordinary an appearance could scarcely fail to arrest theattention of the passers-by; but they had to take care not to stop too long,as Edward quickly put them to flight by saying to them in a sepulchralvoice: “What are you staring at like wild cats? Go your way, you lazy bodies!Begone, you good-for-nothing dogs!” and other similar amenities.

(Meditation XXI)

What is the meaning of this cursing sumptuary monster? What problemsof government and physiological desire does he embody? Who is thismost memorable, most arresting American to appear in Brillat-Savarin’smeditations?

As a historian of early American literature, I cannot help seeing Ed-

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ward as a symbol. He is precisely what Puritans and virtuous republicansdid not wish to see on the American landscape, a beast of the flesh. Muchof seventeenth-century New England literature in particular seems hauntedby the dire effects of indulging the appetites. Sermons, poems, histories,and jeremiads lament the slide of communities into excess. As early as1650, William Bradford worried over the indulgences of Boston:

O Boston, though thou now art grownTo be a great and wealthy town,Yet I have seen thee a void place,Shrubs and bushes covering thy face;And house then in thee none were there,Nor such as gold and silk did weare;No drunkenness were then in thee,Nor such excesse as now we see.9

The condemnation of sumptuary excess became a dominant feature ofthe Puritan jeremiad, the literary form that reminded New Englanders oftheir original errand. Samuel Danforth asked, “to what purpose came weinto the Wilderness, and what expectation drew us hither? Not the expec-tation of Courtly Pomp and Delicacy. We came not hither to see menclothed like Courtiers.”10 Yet commercial success in an imperial economybred carnal idolatry and worldly yearnings. New England’s protestantwork ethic did not call up the spirit of capitalism so much as its body. Thecommoner luxuries circulating in the global trade networks, exotic co-mestibles particularly, flooded into British America. By the 1670s anxietyabout excess had grown so intense that Benjamin Tompson attributed thecause of King Philip’s War to New England’s involvement with consump-tion. Tompson warned that there would be no remedy to Massachusetts’stravails until the golden age of holy simplicity was restored:

Twas ere the Islands sent their Presents in,Which but to use was counted next to sin.Twas ere a Barge had made so rich a fraightAs Chocholatte, dust-gold and bitts of eight.Ere wines from France and Moscovadoe tooWithout the which the drink will scarsly doe,From western Isles, ere fruits and dilicacies,Did rot maids teeth and spoil their hansome faces.11

During the Puritan century, the flesh supplanted the devil as NewEngland’s great enemy. When Reformed piety in the 1690s was refur-bished by Whiggish moralism as the Reformation of Manners movementspread across the Atlantic, the critique of sumptuary indulgence receiveda new civic resonance. Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius (essays to do good) and,later, Benjamin Franklin’s “Father Abraham’s Speech,” argued that one’sindividual interest and the social good were simultaneously served byrepressing appetite.

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Nevertheless, the imperial system promoted the serving of appetiteand luxury. Religious scruples and ethical reservations had little power tocountermand the directives of political economy. Indeed, the potency ofthe economic imperative to serve physiology was such that it could distortthe benevolent schemes of religious and moral reformers. Consider theexquisite political contradictions surrounding the founding of the colonyof Georgia, intended as a workhouse in the wild where the deservingpoor of Britain would be habituated to industry in a wilderness far fromthe temptations of the shop and alehouse by engaging in the manufac-ture of silk and wine.

Wasn’t it more honest to confess one’s implication in the economicscheme and accept that the demands of the flesh, necessities and desires,need be served? Or did embracing the imperatives of physiology meansurrendering moral self-government and welcoming the tyranny of ap-petite? The American Revolution’s political liberation did not resolve thedilemma. Radical republicans attempted to reform manners toward greatersumptuary rigor, attacking pleasure-seeking and institutions such asBoston’s Sans Souci dining club.12 Others asked what the meaning of therevolution was, if one were not free to spend the proceeds of one’s laborany way one pleased.

The fat man in the tavern window, in a way, incarnates public fearsabout a libertarian pursuit of physical cravings. He is what happens whenone permits physiology absolute rule over will. Brillat-Savarin rendersEdward as monstrous (monstrous in its primitive sense as demonstrative)as a Puritan minister or a republican moralist might. He displays Edward’sbody metaphorically as a ruined temple and an elephant, images thatapproach being admonitory clichés. But Brillat-Savarin doesn’t permitthe reader to rest easy in comfortable common judgments. First, he hasEdward usurp the inner accusations of the passersby, throwing them backat Broadway’s gapers in his curses: they are beasts; they are lazy. But thetruly subversive move of his account is its final moment, when he human-izes Edward:

I often bowed to him and called him by name, and even several timesconversed with him. He assured me that he did not at all feel dull or un-happy, and that if death did not intervene, he would willingly remain as hewas to the end of the world.

If the pursuit of happiness were, truly, the purpose of the land of liberty,then Edward fulfills the raison d’être of the republic. Why condemn obe-sity, or the appetites that gave rise to it, if neither misery nor injury re-sults? (If misery discomfort and poor health did arise, Brillat-Savarin, ina later chapter, recommended a constrictor belt to hobble indulgence.)1 3

While I find Edward symbolic in an American context, seeing him asthe heroic embodiment of liberal individualism defying the virtuous aus-terities of republicanism, we can’t ignore his service in Brillat-Savarin’scritique of French revolutionary ideology. Postrevolutionary America of-

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ten serves as an analogue of postrevolutionary France. In Meditation VI,section 38, “An Exploit of the Professor,” we see the utopian claims of theFrench revolutionaries displaced to the countryside of Connecticut, andMr. Bulow, a farmer, made to speak the vision of republican felicity thathad stirred France to a bloodletting.

You behold in me, my dear sir, a happy man, if there is one on earth;everything you see around you, and what you have seen in my house, isproduced on my farm. These stockings have been knitted by my daugh-ters; my shoes and my clothes come from my herds; they, with my gardenand my farmyard, supply me with plain and substantial food. The greatestpraise of our government is that in Connecticut there are thousands offarmers as content as myself, and whose doors, like mine, are never locked.

Mr. Bulow is represented as being a satisfied beneficiary of a successfulrevolution and a republican utopia of self-sufficiency and gustatorial com-petence. Yet Brillat-Savarin undogmatically shows why this is not enough.

During the whole time of our return-journey I was absorbed in deep reflec-tion. Perhaps it may be thought that I was meditating on the last allocutionof Mr. Bulow; but I was thinking on something quite different, namely, howI should get my turkey cooked.

The human imagination will not be satisfied with a virtuous competence—with a Connecticut Cato spooning hasty pudding from his modest tren-cher. There must be something more.

One suspects that Mr. Bulow here is really Mr. Barlow, that Connecti-cut Cato best known to France because of his residence in Paris and in-volvement in revolutionary politics. Citizen Joel Barlow’s famous paeanto plain fare, “The Hasty Pudding,” was written in revolutionary Franceand published in New York in 1796 during Brillat-Savarin’s residencethere.14 Canto I of Barlow’s mock epic explicitly rejected a cosmopolitanculture of consumption, surveying the world to rebuke “corrupted” BacchicParis, tea-drenched London, and “morbid” Turkey, and to laud the do-mestic charms of corn pudding and “Succatash.” Barlow with great witlinked culinary simplicity to republican simplicity and local sovereignty.Thus New England’s native dish nourished its common people with theunadulterated essence of nature.

The self-conscious localism and primitivism of Barlow’s celebrationdirectly opposed the cosmopolitanism of Brillat-Savarin’s sense of food.For the modern founder of gastronomy, a comestible’s ultimate worth wasmeasured in its capacity to permeate the diets of persons around the globe.Turkey was not meaningful as a manifestation of the American geniusloci. Rather, its importance lay in its being taken up by other cultures andacclimatized to other lands. For this reason, the bulk of his account con-cerns the Jesuits’ introduction of the bird into French animal husbandryand how it became the favored celebration meat of every class of Frenchsociety.

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The disparity of views between Barlow and Brillat-Savarin can be un-derstood as an illustration of the difference between Epicurean andCyreniac-Aristarchan hedonism. Epicurus discovered the greatest plea-sure in the removal of the most pain. Since hunger is counted a primaryform of pain, nothing can exceed the pleasure of its entire removal. Thusnothing is more savory for a starving man than the taste of food, of what-ever kind. The fullness of this pleasure is not enhanced by the novelty orquality of the food being consumed. Hence his famous saying, “I am gorgedwith pleasure in this poor body of mine living on bread and water.”15

When one keeps the pangs of hunger assuaged and manages a stablecondition of well-being in the flesh, one attains the feeling of satisfactionthat was designated the highest good, “ataraxy.” Health of the body andsoundness of mind constituted the dual ends of Epicurean practice.Epicurus denied the idea that any embellishment or variation of diet en-hances physical pleasure. “It is the ingratitude of the soul that makes thecreatures endlessly lickerish of embellishments in diet” (Vatican saying69). Here we find the philosophical warrant for Barlow’s celebration ofthe simplest dish of New England cuisine. Barlow in verse puts a moderngloss upon Epicurus’ ancient barb, “I spit upon the pleasures of a luxuri-ous diet, not on account of any evil in these pleasures themselves butbecause of the discomforts that follow upon them” (Fragment 37).

If one had to point to the crux of Brillat-Savarin’s disagreement withEpicurean hedonism, it would be the limitation and unity of sensate plea-sure. Brillat-Savarin views pleasure as pleasures, variable in quality andcapable of amplification.16 Like Arristipus, the founder of the Cyreniacschool of hedonism, Brillat-Savarin said the wise man is he who maxi-mizes pleasure while minimizing pain, and like the Cyreniacs (who weregreatly influenced by Protagorus’ critique of the relativism of knowledge),views the senses rather than rational principles as the grounds of plea-sure. Like Aristarchus, Brillat-Savarin recognized variety, multiplicity, andsensate intensity as desiderata in experiencing pleasure.17 Indeed, Brillat-Savarin’s embrace of a notion of the enrichment of the senses led to hisadding a sixth to the canonical five: the “genesic” sense, a sensitivity tosexual attractiveness. Of the senses, however, the greatest was taste, be-cause it supplies the “greatest number of enjoyments.” Gastronomy wasconceived by Brillat-Savarin as a lens for taste, by which the enjoyment ofeatables and potables would be focused to a maximum of pleasure. Theintellect would serve in enhancing pleasurable sensation, because taste asa sense lent itself to experience reflexively as well as directly and com-pletely [Meditation II, section 8]. Judgment and memory partake natu-rally in one’s sense of the quality of a meal.

One can see in the Physiology of Taste the “man of taste” made literal.We should remember the eighteenth-century observation that the man ofreason is not necessarily the man of taste. The Enlightenment savant sub-ordinated appetites and imagination to the rule of rationality. Theman of taste used reason and judgment to refine and intensify the plea-sures of the senses. The man of taste emerged as a figure of repute in

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early modern Europe in the pages of Baltasar Gracian y Morales. Theauthor of Oraculo manual y arte de prudencia (“The Art of Worldly Wis-dom,” 1647) proposed a new ideal of education, departing from the Chris-tian courtier, with the image of a man cultivated in mind and taste. Thequalities that distinguished this man of taste were a gusto for life anddiscretion in the face of the world. Gracian was singularly clear on thepoint that such cultivation was not dependent on class, but was a processof refinement available to all who possessed sense and will to improve-ment. Prior to the Enlightenment’s elevation of reason as the great sol-vent of human distinction on the basis of class, ethnicity, and to a limiteddegree gender, Gracian and a line of worldly philosophers andaestheticians had made taste and its cultivation the great democratizingforce.18 When Joseph Addison in 1710 explained the democracy of theEnglish clubs, he observed “Our modern celebrated Clubs are foundedupon Eating and Drinking, which are Points wherein most Men agree,and in which the Learned and Illiterate, the Dull and the Airy, the phi-losopher and Buffoon, can all of them agree.”19 We see in Addison’s analysisof the limited sphere of private society features that look back to Gracian(and indeed to the undifferentiated community of Epicurean fellowship)—the democracy, the common grounding in shared taste, the society of thesenses. Yet there are elements that look forward to Brillat-Savarin: theconflation of taste with appetite, the expansion of the community gov-erned by appetite to those who are not the high, wise, and handsome. YetAddison describes only a stratum of English private society. Brillat-Savarinsees the taste as the driving mechanism of the globe, transforming thedesires of low as well as high—making working men seek out turkeys andkings guzzle tea.

What is striking about the Physiology of Taste as an intellectual docu-ment is its lack of concern for the “meanness” of human appetite. Theentire tradition of theological, moral, and philosophical worrying overthe animality of human appetite is discountenanced.20 The demands ofhuman physiology are absolute. Since pleasure attends the serving ofnecessity, its compulsion over human action is doubly powerful. There isno embarrassment over serving one’s appetites. Indeed, those parts ofsociety that enable the flow of food and drink, that organize consump-tion, are worthy of praise, not denigration as mere commerce.

Meditation XXVIII reflects upon the institutions that came at the turnof the century to drive the world of metropolitan consumption, the res-taurants. Springing up in the wake of the revolutionary destruction of theancien régime and aristocratic hospitality, these Parisian establishmentsbecame “the paradise of gourmands.” In the restaurant the citizen could, ifhe or she had the money, “make a substantial, refined, or dainty meal,wash it down with the best French or foreign wines, aromatise it withMocha, or perfume it with the liquers of the Old and New World.” Thereason the restaurant became the engine of consumption was that it oper-ated as a competitive commercial enterprise.21 Great chefs could securefame, provided they could create taste novelties. “[A]s soon as experience

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showed that a single dish, well cooked, was sufficient to make the fortuneof the inventor, self-interest, acting as a powerful motive, kindled everyimagination, and set all the cooks to work.” Chefs looked abroad for theitems that would give dishes distinction.

New foods have been found; the old ones have been improved on; andboth have been combined in a thousand different manners. Foreign inven-tions have been imported; the entire universe has been laid under contri-bution, and it may be truly said that during some of our meals a completecourse of food-geography might be held.

In the ancient world Archestratus had to wander Alexander’s empire tosurvey the world’s gastronomy. Because interest and appetite had coa-lesced in the Parisian restaurants, all the edible world had been concen-trated to a table. At it sat the omnivorous citizen of the world.

Everyone already knows fragments of Brillat-Savarin’s wisdom, thoughperhaps not by name. Everyone has heard some version of his aphorism,“You tell me what you eat; I’ll tell you what you are.” This is one of twentythat prefix the Physiology of Taste. Perhaps after one has eaten the world, asBrillat-Savarin did, one can grasp why he preceded his most famous say-ing with another that could be the mantra of the modern age: “The des-tiny of nations depends on the manner wherein they take their food.”

David S. ShieldsThe Citadel

NOTES

1. Adam Potkay, The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Ithaca:Cornell Univ., 2000).

2. The Science of Pleasure: Cosmos and Psyche in the Bourgeois World View (London:Routledge, 1990).

3. Thierry Boissel, Brillat-Savarin, 1755-1826: un chevalier candide (Paris: Presses de laRenaissance, 1989) is the standard recent biography. See also Giles MacDonogh, Brillat-Savarin: The Judge and His Stomach (London: John Murray, 1992).

4. Essai historique et critique sur le duel: d’apres notre legislation et nos moeurs (Paris: ChezCaille et Ravier, 1819).

5. Trans. Charles Monselet (N.Y.: Liveright, 1926). All quotations will be taken fromthis translation; but because of the popularity of M. F. K. Fisher’s 1949 translation (SanFrancisco: North Point Press, 2nd edn., 1986), I have identified quotations by Meditationnumber and subheading.

6. The relation of skepticism to hedonism is sketched in John Watson’s classic Hedonis-tic Theories from Aristippus to Spencer (Glasgow: J. Maclehose; N.Y.: Macmillan, 1895).

7. The surviving portions of Archestratus’ poem have been collected and translatedinto English as The Life of Luxury, Europe’s Oldest Cookery Book, trans. John Wilkins & Shaun

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Hill (London: Prospect, 1994). Atheneus, The Diepnosophists, 15 vols., trans. Charles BurtonGulick (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1928–50).

8. Brillat-Savarin anticipates the economic analysis of the world system found inWolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants,trans. David Jacobsen (N.Y.: Pantheon, 1992).

9. “Boston,” in The Collected Verse of William Bradford, ed. Michael G. Runyan (St. Paul:John Colet, 1977).

10. A brief recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness: Made in the Audience ofthe General Assembly of the Massachusetts Colony at Boston in N.E. on the 11th of the third Month,1670, being the Day of Election there (Cambridge, Mass.: S.G. & M.J., 1671).

11. New Englands crisis. Or a brief Narrative, of New-Englands Lamentable Estate at Present,Compar’d with the Former (but few) years of Prosperity (Boston: John Foster, 1676).

12. Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music,Literature, and the Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to theInauguration of George Washington, 1763–1789 (N.Y.: T. Y. Crowell, 1976), pp. 509–10.

13. One peculiar testimony to American reception of Brillat-Savarin’s book in termsof its preoccupation with sumptuary regulation is a heavily edited translation of The Physi-ology as The Handbook of Dining: or, Corpulency and Leanness Scientifically Considered; comprisingthe Art of Dining on Correct Principles consistent with easy digestion, the avoidance of Corpulency,and the cure of Leanness, trans., L. F. Simpson (N.Y.: D. Appleton, 1865).

14. The Hasty-Pudding: a Poem, in Three Cantos; Written in Chambery in Savoy, Jan. 1793(N.Y.: Fellows & Adam, 1796).

15. Epicurus, Fragment 37, in Works. English & Greek. Epicurus, the Extant Remains,trans. Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), p. 110. The standard edn. breaks down thecanon of Epicurus’ sayings into several groups: the “Vatican Sayings” is one traditionalcollection, the “Fragments,” another collection.

16. This construction of pleasure is taken up by modern theorists of pleasure such asRem B. Edwards, Pleasures and Pains: A Theory of Qualitative Hedonism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ.,1979). For a historical account of the Cyreniac position, see Voula Tsona, The Epistemology ofthe Cyreniac School (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1998).

17. For the continuation and critique of this line of philosophical gastronomy, seeMichel Onfray, La Raison gourmande: philosophie du gout (Paris: B. Grasset, 1995).

18. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (N.Y.: Continuum, 1975), pp. 33–35.19. [About Clubs], Spectator, no. 9 (10 March 1710/11).20. For a historical survey of the pejorative attitude toward taste, see the first chap. of

Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., 1999).See also Elizabeth Telfer, Food for Thought (London: Routledge, 1996).

21. An observation that serves as a point of departure for Rebecca L. Sprang’s TheInvention of the Restaurant: Paris and the Invention of Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard Univ., 2000).

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the world i ate: the prophets of global consumption culture

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