In my article in the most recent issue of Eaten, on feasts, I talk about repurposing food waste in Early Modern English households. Repurposing waste was something done as a matter of course (and in many households and many places still is), utilizing simple techniques like making stock out of scraps.
But there were other more ingenious, creative repurposing efforts happening too: A personal favorite (for its creativity, not necessarily the product itself) is lids made out of hog bladders. Essentially, hog bladders are stretched across containers while still soft, and they dry to become taut like a drum.
I talk about these in the Eaten article, and talk at length in Our Fermented Lives about my own experiments fermenting food in period-appropriate containers using hog bladders. Tl;dr: The flavor was…memorable.
But while I wrote about the excess being put to use, I also jumped down a rabbit hole wherein the excess itself is the central purpose of the feast. We see that in grand meals across time, where the food becomes a centerpiece for showing off one’s wealth and status via access to expensive ingredients and ability to hire skilled workers to make things like ornate sugar sculptures or towers of meat stacked like nesting dolls.
Sometimes, the waste was the point, as noted by historian Anna Zeide: Who in one interview described the Gilded Age as “a very widespread celebration of overabundance.” Industrial robber barons hosted long tables of guests, with dozens of plates of food (and specialty silverware for each type of food, particularly in the US where social mobility was perceived to be higher and performing wealth was paramount). “For them, like that over consumption of food was a sign of wealth,” notes Zeide, “and of course, most Americans weren’t participating in it, but they were aspiring to it. And in some ways, not needing to use up every piece of food you had was a sign of having made it.”
Our modern sensibilities about food waste are interesting to me because we at once recognize the value of reducing waste not just for individual cost savings and food security, but for urgent and visible ecological reasons as well. And yet how much are we still influenced by food as status? In particular, in wasted elements that can’t be eaten, or are just added to the table for the sake of it.
This called to mind a recent evening where I was watching Downton Abbey in the background while cleaning, and was struck by a scene where two characters are decanting wine for the table, with a different wine for each course. One wonders at how the entire family isn’t falling down drunk by the end of dinner, but another reassures him that “they hardly drink any of it at all.”
These are fine wines, carefully selected by the head butler, decanted at the perfect interval before dinner to breathe properly, and poured with care and precision, to mostly languish in a glass before presumably being tossed down the drain (the show’s writers leave this last element a mystery).
Perhaps few of us engage in this exact kind of decadent waste, but as people in wealthy countries who, to varying extents, can afford a variety of foods, can we say that decadent waste is completely absent from our lives?
It also makes me wonder at the subjectivity of what “decadence” means: The way I live now feels pretty simple and streamlined to me, but would be positively decadent to me 20 years ago. And both might be decadent to someone living in circumstances without, say, indoor plumbing.
In terms of food waste, how can we use excess as a benchmark? I don’t have answers, but I wonder if thinking of “the excess is the point” versus waste as a by-product (and one we try to repurpose to varying extents), is a useful avenue for inquiry in our own lives and world. Not that we should never have big meals or show off our skills, but that those are placed within the context of our larger lives and worlds.
The Great Depression and World Wars by necessity, moderated some of these practices in the 20th century. But the aspiration to giant feasts remains, evidenced by everything from holiday feasts to dozen course menus: A desire to showcase our wealth and to prepare more than we need simply because we can, or because we want to experience luxury. Or want to share that experience with others.
While our relationship to food has shifted and distanced us from our meals’ sources, and shifted the context in which we experience certain low waste foods (like pie) or removed some practices (like using bladders as lids) altogether, perhaps we’ll come up with our own, new, low waste practices, that historians will look at centuries from now, placing us in our lived context through the ways we stored and repurposed the bits and bobs of our daily meals.
