You mean what you eat
This week the Christian period of Lent begins, and we are reminded of the important mythical significance of foods.
There’s plenty of obvious symbolism to enjoy here. The Mexican lenten pudding Capirotada contains bread, representing Christ’s body, syrup (his blood), cinnamon (the wood of the cross) and cloves (the nails.) Pretzels derive their name from the latin bracellae (little arms). Early Roman Christians crossed their arms over their chests to denote prayer, and the little breads they made during lent – of flour, water and salt – were shaped to remind them that this was the period for prayer and abstinence. In the US Mid-West, where Polish traditions live on, Shrove Tuesday tomorrow will see the consumption of hundreds of thousands of pączki – jam-filled doughnuts whose name comes from the word for bud. They’re round, swollen and like the forthcoming spring, about to burst into life.
«© A.Savin, WikiCommons»
But if Lent brings us lots of tasty examples of folkloric food symbolism, there’s a deeper system of meaning in all food. Or so Roland Barthes suggested in Mythologies and other works, as he dissected the significance of foods around the world, including steak and chips. The prestige of steak, he asserted, lay in its semi-rawness. “In it, blood is visible, natural, dense, at once compact and sectile. One can well imagine the ambrosia of the Ancients as this kind of heavy substance which dwindles under one’s teeth in such a way as to make one keenly aware at the same time of its original strength and of its aptitude to flow into the very blood of man.”
One wonders what he would have made of last night’s family dinner – Ikea meatballs, frozen peas and oven chips from local London supermarkets?
The meatballs are the perfect size to facilitate distribution to each family member according to her need. Neither so large as to need cutting up; nor so small as to be unsatisfying. A living manifestation of Swedish egalitarianism perhaps. That’s not how the peas work however – too small. But these beauties are fresh as the morning when the pod went pop. Healthy and natural (despite being frozen), fecund and runcibly green, yet they barely take 3 minutes to cook; a longstanding, emblematic ally in the reconciliation of maternal duty and limited time. So benign are they in this sense that the packet of frozen peas has also taken on a further mythical weight – as the ideal compress for a bump on the head or a swollen knee. Maternally caring as food and artefact alike. Frozen sweetcorn, broad beans or broccoli florets won’t cut it; it’s got to be peas.
As for the chips – Barthes had them down as the alimentary sign of francité. Yet these ones went in the oven. A very British act of lèse-cuisine or an iconoclastic repudiation of the petit-bourgeois food sanctimony Barthes decried? Hard to say; but they were scrumptious, daubed in deep red ketchup, and we won’t be giving them up for Lent.