States, Religions, Commerce and Food

What we eat every day, and what we eat on special occasions, may well be part of a food culture handed down since ancient times. It carries the geography and climate of a place, and very likely strong social and religious elements as well. In other words, it is not only the food but the social rules and taboos around it that bear on our health.

Why should eating be regulated at all? At bottom, simply in order to keep living. Food is indispensable to human beings, and it has to be handled properly to suit them. The plants and animals it comes from must be sorted for the species and the parts that are of use. Some minimum set of food rules must have existed in every group, not only in the Neolithic when farming societies came to the fore, but in the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer societies too.

As farming societies grew more sophisticated and life took on rhythm and pattern, the rules of living grew more sophisticated with them. From roughly two thousand years before the common era, highly systematised bodies of practical wisdom — something like medical systems — begin to appear in various places: Ayurveda, formed from the fusion of indigenous South Asian culture with civilisations arriving from outside; the Huangdi Neijing, drawing together the Yellow River and Yangtze civilisations with the indigenous cultures of ancient southern China. And after the so-called Axial Age, when the world religions of Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism arose, we see the etiquette of Confucianism and the health regimens of Daoism come into view.

Take Buddhism as an example. In the fifth to fourth centuries BCE, amid the turmoil of Indian society, the Buddha set out a number of principles. One was the alms round. Rather than producing food oneself, food was to be received — a way of thinking built into the system of begging for alms.

Another was the three kinds of clean meat. Early Buddhism wanted to make meat-eating, bound up as it is with the taking of life, a matter of principle to be avoided; but given the variety of people’s circumstances, making it an absolute prohibition was not realistic. The rule that emerged — meat is acceptable if you were not involved in the killing — was intended to keep the principle while accommodating actual life. Behind it stands a firm policy against taking life.

Hinduism in India was formed on the foundation of the ancient Vedic tradition, in a relationship of mutual influence with Buddhism and others. It too has its own distinctive food practices. There are dietary norms by caste: Brahmins tended towards vegetarianism and set store by purity, while lower castes ate a more varied diet including animal foods. After Hindu society took shape, the cow came to be regarded as sacred and eating beef was forbidden. Strict restrictions are said to have applied to eating together as well.

Islamic food practice deserves mention too. What is distinctive there is how strongly the existence of the one God governs the rules. Halal and haram — what may be eaten and what is forbidden — are set out clearly on the basis of the Qur’an and the hadith. Pork, blood, carrion and alcohol are prohibited.

There is also the method of slaughter, dhabiha: the animal must be killed with the name of God spoken over it, and this process is what renders it pure. And there is the connection to the rhythm of daily life — as Ramadan shows most clearly, dietary discipline including fasting is bound up with the life of faith itself.

The difference between food practice before and after the rise of religion can be put like this. Earlier, dietary methods were worked out to suit the individual. Afterwards, religious and social purity took priority, and the rules were set according to rank and ritual rather than a person’s constitution.

The state’s control of food, and what it changed

Buddhism is thought to have been brought into Japan, an island country in the far east, during the Asuka period. Japan learned from Tang China a highly designed system of government — the ritsuryō state — and set about introducing it to the young Yamato polity. Buddhism, with the Great Buddha as its symbol, was put to work in this.

Emperor Tenmu’s prohibition on eating meat was temporary and limited to cattle, horses, dogs, monkeys and chickens. But from around this time, a prohibition on meat-eating appears in Japan as a rule.

As the folklorist Nobuo Harada has said, no account of the history of food in Japan can avoid the drama played out between meat and rice. Once, every kind of food and every kind of environment, meat included, went into the making of foodways. After the state was established and Buddhism introduced, particular foods and settings — above all rice, and a vegetarian diet — were required of the population under national policy.

Meat sauces made from the flesh of animals and fish, for instance, gave way to grain-based sauces requiring the special oversight of the state apparatus. And in order to produce rice efficiently, local ecosystems everywhere were adapted to paddy cultivation and took on a uniform appearance. So the “land of abundant rice,” with the emperor at its summit, came into being.

Eating together: the system that ties land, people and society

Groups need rules, and highly organised groups need rules of a higher order. Across monsoon Asia, from antiquity to the present, food has been at the core of these group rules and has strengthened the cohesion of the group. The catalyst for that cohesion, the act that produces it, is eating together.

In the animistic societies that preceded the state, there was a custom of offering appropriate foods to various deities at particular moments in life — sacred rice wine offered to the god of the mountain, say, or birds or cattle sacrificed to the god of the fields for a good harvest. First a precious food was offered to a higher being, some god; then the people concerned would eat that food. This symbolic process, in which the god appears to be giving the food back to human beings as a parting gift, gave rise to the cultural procedure known as shinsen, the sacred offering. The purpose of shinsen is thought to be a sense of oneness with the deity, and it survives today in the form of ritual offering cuisine.

Time passed, and divine beings were gradually replaced by human ancestors. People began to make offerings with the ancestors of their own line in mind. In being invisible this is no different from the animistic period, but the point is that at this stage the divine has become something closer at hand.

From the modern period it comes closer still. Now the people who can actually be seen — family, and others one is close to — occupy the position the divine once held. When eating together is spoken of generally, it is this stage that comes to mind: the evening meal with the family gathered, the kaiseki banquet where friends assemble, the party. And, in a slightly special position, the kaiseki meal designed to the highest degree ever attained for the entertaining of a guest.

Leaving aside that last case, what the settings of eating together have in common, wherever people are joined, is that the food is laid out in one space all at once and is open to everyone present. This is called a spatially deployed table culture, and it differs plainly in atmosphere from a table built around a course meal, which is arranged in time. What marks it is a feeling of oneness. The worldly form of eating together might be thought of as a table culture, a vessel, for forming comrades who have eaten from the same pot. Taken as a whole, one can say that the table culture of monsoon Asia has the raising of that sense of oneness as its aim.

Cities, commerce, and what was lost

As cities grew vast and sophisticated, capitalist thinking worked its way into the lives of their inhabitants. In Europe, commercial capital — trade and finance — developed, and market transactions free of guilds and feudal restriction began to spread. In Japan, society was agrarian and measured in rice until the middle of the Edo period; but as cities grew, merchants, market economies and financial systems developed, and the foundation that leads to modern capitalism was laid in the late Edo period.

In the busy turning space of the city, a culture of eating out arises naturally. Establishments pursued deliciousness, and city people wanted it. Cooking became refined, and anything that got in the way of flavour was stripped out. A brilliant food culture opened up — but there were costs.

The symbolic case is the “Edo affliction.” This was a disease of urban food culture: eating large quantities of white rice and drinking a great deal of sake led to a deficiency of vitamin B1 and so to beriberi. The lesson of the Edo affliction is that extreme imbalance and refinement damage health.

Brown rice carries a variety of nutrients drawn from the land — starch, dietary fibre, vitamins and minerals. Strip nearly all of that away and eat only pure white starch in quantity, and the result is beriberi. It stands as a symbol of what happens when the elements of the land are severed. The Edo affliction is only one example; urban food culture seems to have a brilliant face and, as a kind of recoil from it, a decadent one. The tendency continues to this day.

Traditional societies dismantled, corporations in the ascendant

The culture of eating out is, in substance, a business. There is almost no connection between land and person in it. As cities spread, business expands and the tie between people and the land grows thin. Nature and traditional society are dismantled, and corporations rise in their place. In our own time, corporations exert a large influence over what most people eat. That health should be a pressing issue of the present suggests some defect in a food culture built on money and business.

An individual who wishes to live in good health has to take control of what they eat with their own hands: the ingredients, the cooking method, the seasoning. They also have to arrange the setting of their eating deliberately, to suit themselves — the climate, the water, the landscape that agrees with them.

What research in genetics and epigenetics has shown is that human constitution differs from person to person. Which diet suits you is not the same as which diet suits anyone else. It is wise now to treat not only business-driven food culture but even the wisdom of traditional and ancient foodways as reference material and no more. Each person has to weigh their own constitution and their present environment, and select for themselves what they eat and where.

When a person has worked to understand their own body, arranged their surroundings and become able to eat in a way that suits them, that is the beginning of a new world. Through eating they connect with the land and with their environment, and also with the self within. This inner self, sometimes called the true self, becomes the divinity of the individual from here on. In an age when individuals were submerged in the rough communal vessel of a shared food culture, finding one’s own divinity would have been difficult. But now, after food was made into culture by human beings, then differentiated and honed until it arrived at the present, this path has at last begun to be offered to every one of us.

The history of foodways runs from the dietary discipline of animistic societies as its base, through the establishment and sorting of food practice by religion, to the accelerating expansion and disappearance of foodways under business. What comes next is up to you.

Here at Tea Gong Academy we place particular weight on tea within all of this — because tea, as history bears out, is food for the body, the mind and the soul. But tea too suits some people and not others. There are times when it should be drunk and hours when it is better avoided, and there are things to attend to when brewing it. Learn about tea properly here, and take up the alchemy this coming age will need: Tea Gong.