HEALTH: The British public's apparently voracious appetite for grandly sweeping narrative history (Simon Schama, Niall Ferguson) has recently reached for a more modest side-order of miniaturist microhistory.
The slimmest of subjects (cod, the potato) can afford, the genre suggests, a more immediate access to both the details of real, lived history and a wider complex of cultural significance. If the former has its origin in a fundamentally Victorian faith in the story of national progress, the latter is actually peculiarly French, schooled on the sort of historical microscopy that produced Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou. The rich admixture of diet and national identity is ripe for such analysis.
In the 1950s, Roland Barthes wrote that eating steak in France was an act at once natural and moral: it closed an alimentary circuit whose poles were blood, soil and national pride. The connections were not new, but, as Ben Rogers points out, the French were formerly willing to cede the metaphysics of meat-eating to the English. The historian Michelet wrote: "wool and flesh are the primitive foundations of England and the English race", even surmising that Shakespeare must originally have been a butcher.
In the 18th century, a concoction of chauvinism and culinary obstinacy had led writers like Addison and Steele to valorize the manly virtues of beef-eating at the expense of hopelessly effete French cuisine.
The metaphorical standoff was both lofty and bathetic: if England meant roast beef, gravy, broth and Tradition, France was characterized by feeble fricassées, sauces and soups: in short, by mere Fashion. Essentially a distinction between Nature and Culture, the whole controversy is like a culinary version of Edmund Burke's opposition between the Sublime and the Beautiful: sturdy (and vast) fare versus stylish affectation.
Rogers's slim volume is fascinating in its examples, if a little meagre in terms of complex historical insight. He might have something to say, though, about Maxime Schwartz's telling aside, in his account of the long history leading up to the BSE and CJD crises, regarding "the normally staid British". But Schwartz's book is only partly the story of the increasing panic that gripped the UK in the face of what he calls "The Disease". In fact, the disease is several diseases: How the Cows Turned Mad traces the crisis back to the 18th century, to its origin in the scrapie that had apparently only recently begun to afflict sheep.
It was in the mid-20th century that The Disease began to mutate into something more horrific, when an outbreak of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease among the cannibalistic Fore people of Papua New Guinea seemed to suggest a link with scrapie. The drama of Schwartz's book, beyond the real horror of The Disease's ultimate manifestation in new variant CJD, is in the slow coming together of several historical strands of scientific research, given the momentum of a detective story by his personification of the book's malign protagonist: a rogue protein given to feints and counterattacks, like something slippery and sinister from a David Cronenberg film.
Read together, these books suggest a whole new field of historical enquiry: the manner in which, particularly (and understandably) in the UK, the agricultural disasters of recent years have given rise to a wholesale cultural rejection of the scientific optimism and commercial adventurism that characterized the food industry in the middle of the last century. The British countryside may still be dotted with the remnants of placards exhorting the populace to eat British beef, but that sort of nationalist confidence is now strictly sidelined, an eccentric anachronism at a cultural moment which curiously revisits ideas of what is "natural", in the burgeoning faith in an organic conjunction of the global and the local. The real story here is about how Britain lost its stomach for bullish assertions of national pride, culinary or otherwise.
Beef and Liberty: Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation
By Ben Rogers
Chatto and Windus, 207 pp, £17.99
How the Cows Turned Mad
By Maxime Schwartz, translated by
Edward Schneider
University of California Press, 238 pp, £17.95
• Brian Dillon is a lecturer and freelance writer
