What do the the French Revolution, the Irish famines of the 19th century, the Boston Tea Party and Gulliver’s Travels all have in common? I suspect you have grasped my point already. They all have food at the centre of their stories. The ancient Lilliputian dispute between big-enders and little-enders (over which end to open a boiled egg), led to, “six rebellions…wherein one Emperor lost his life and another his crown.”
Swift was parodying and satirising the British state of George l. Marie Antoinette told her people that if they had no bread they should eat cake. Down came a tumbling the ancien regime. In Ireland, the enormity of the deaths from hunger and the mass emigration in the wake of the famines fueled the resentment that saw Ireland eventually rise up against Britain and create the sovereign Irish state we know today. In 1773 in Boston harbour the idea of a tax on tea being levied without the consent of those paying the tax sparked the American revolution.
Food matters. It matters for reasons so fundamental that I won’t patronise readers by articulating them. Jonathan Swift knew his history and his politics. He knew that food shortages and the cultural importance societies attach to given foods can have profound political consequences.
Rebellion in Russia and India
Food riots helped propagate the Russian revolution. In British India, locally engaged Hindu and Muslim soldiers serving the Crown rebelled in 1857 when they heard that the cartridges for the new Enfield rifle were coated with cow and pig fat, thus offending both religions. Things might not have got out of hand were it not necessary for soldiers to tear open the cartridges with their teeth (hence “bite the bullet”), thus forcing Hindus to eat the fat of cows, which they hold sacred and never to be eaten. Muslims were being asked to put pig fat in their mouths. It is a central canon of Muslim faith that pigs are unclean and unfit for human consumption. Many thousands died before the British restored order, though the event surely marked the beginning of the long, slow, disengagement of Britain from India. As has been so often the case with political turmoil, the matter of food unlocked seething anger at some of the many insensitive behaviours of the colonial power.
And now we have Brexit. Now we have Dr Liam Fox leaping and scurrying about in bovine bowing and scrapping at the feet of Donald Trump. A free trade deal with the USA makes Brexit Tories salivate at its very prospect. It’s more than trade and jobs and Britain’s place in the world for them. For them it represents a fixed link – a permanent bridge – between the very rich and very powerful economic and social conservatives of the American Right and creating a British world of red in tooth and claw capitalism, mindless xenophobia and the rolling back of employment rights and the great triumphs won to build a socially liberal Britain. A free trade deal with the USA is for the hard Right Tories the economic equivalent of the foreign policy and defence super glue of Trident.
Pandora’s Box
It is noticeable that Venezuela is prominent in the British media at the moment. To be honest, the chaos of a typical Latin American banana republic seldom causes such interest, but given the links between the Venezuelan Government and Jeremy Corbyn, its failure is a convenient stick to beat him with.
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