The Burton Diet: Notes on The Anatomy of Melancholy

Some day, perhaps, I will tell the full story of my life-long conflict with the alimentative aspect of my corporeal existence. For now I will only briefly mention one example of how difficult it is to lead a life, as one must, as an eater.

I came up under an anti-fat regime, when foods, or packaged food products, were rated according to their degree of 'fat-freeness', and it was taken for granted that to eat fat was immediately to become fat. This regime made natural sense to me; du bist was du ißt, and all that.

Imagine my surprise then, when, a decade or so ago, the entire value system was suddenly inverted as a sort of Protestant Reformation of the diet occurred, where suddenly it was not the fats but the carbohydrates that were on the index alimentorum prohibitorum. This was difficult to grasp since, as I had always understood, carbohydrates just are the default variety of foodstuff: you get a bit of fat here, and a bit of protein there, but for the most part to eat is just to eat carbs. For these to suddenly be prohibited, and in favor, at that, of at least a certain subvariety of lipid, was all really too much for this old diet-obsessed eater to comprehend. It was more than a Reformation. It was a revaluation of all values.

The anti-carb fever seems to have waned in the most recent years, and now other dietary components are being denounced as the real evil (gluten? Who the hell ever cared about gluten before?); and having lived long enough --having not yet been killed off by the things I eat-- to see dietary rules come and go, I feel emboldened in my reading of the historical record on such matters to conclude that, in general, there must always be some element of diet or other that is prohibited, and it does not matter so much which one it is. The anti-carb revolution was a vivid illustration of a sort of social instability, of a historical period in which competing theories of the proper diet could in a matter of years or even months squeeze out their competitors.

We are, I mean to say, no more advanced than Galenic humoral medicine, or than Ayurveda, in our ascription of values to various foodstuffs.

This came to me most vividly in my recent, and very belated, reading of Robert Burton's wonderful Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621. In the section on diet, what strikes the contemporary reader is the evident arbitrariness of all the praising and damning, as well as the evident relishing of the lists of good or bad foods themselves. If the harmful foods cannot be enjoyed in excess, at least they can be written about in excess. Thus, for example:

All black wines, over-hot, compound, strong, thick drinks, as muscadine, malmsey, rumney, brown bastard, metheglin, and the like, of which they have thirty several kinds in Muscovy, all such made drinks are hurtful in this case, to such as are hot, or of a sanguine, choleric complexion, young, or inclined to head-melancholy (I 2, 223).

In general, Burton is most concerned about the artifice involved in the combination of ingredients. In a stunning passage, he effectively denounces all 'kitchen science' (scientia popinae) as so much alchemical transgression:

To the noxious simples we may reduce an infinite number of compound, artificial made dishes, of which our cooks afford us a great variety, as tailors do fashions in our apparel. Such are puddings stuffed with blood, or otherwise composed; baked meats, soused indurate meats, fired and broiled, buttered meats, condite, powdered, and over-dried; all cakes, simnels, buns, cracknels made with butter, spice, etc., fritters, pancakes, pies, sausages, and those several sauces, sharp, or over-sweet, of which scientia popinae, as Seneca calls it, hath served those Apician tricks and perfumed dishes (I 2, 225).

Burton cites Avicenna and Fernel to confirm his view that the fundamental cause of all illness is overindulgence:

To feed on many dishes... 'tis the fountain of all diseases, which arise out of the repugnancy of gross humours. Thence... come crudities, wind, oppilations, cacochymia, plethora, cachexia, bradypepsia, sudden death, etc., and what not (I 2, 225-6).

But what is that pure core of recommendable foods, that list of simple and moderate dishes, that Burton thinks one can steadily eat while keeping the bodily humors in balance? We don't really seem to get an answer to this question, just as, today, no one can specify a particular food that is safely and unambiguously 'good for you'. Everything you eat is perceived as potentially harmful, and that is not because of any real, measurably physiological effect, but only because we will never be entirely at ease with the alimentary nature of our existence, with, to put it bluntly, the fact that in order to keep on going as creatures we must constantly devour other creatures. That is a charged activity, and one that is bound to give rise to endless disputations as to the right way of going about it.

So much for the history of diet. Now a word on the history of literature. As I've already suggested, it seems to me that Burton relishes listing those things he should not be eating. This is supposed to be non-fiction, but it seems to me that the list, and in particular the list of perverse, curious, unacceptable things, would come to be an essential element of the novel as well. We see it clearly in Sterne, and we see it, to my mind par excellence, in the 'cetology' chapter of Moby Dick, where Melville lists all the curious natural-historical knowledge he has managed to accumulate about whales. Is this a list of recipes? No, not technically, but zoology and cookery have never been all that far apart, and I think Melville sensed as much when he spelled out the properties of whales and the names of all their sundry subtypes, just as Burton spells out, and relishes spelling out, all the names of all the things you aren't supposed to eat.

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Comments

[Ian]

There is something about lists. The Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad, the Boaz begat Obed stuff from the Bible... unfortunately, such lists, so common to literature for so long, seem to have faded away, their only place now in the willfully obscure. Is it a sign of just how outre they've become that I don't have the patience to write a list of lists for this response? Probably not, but still.

[dr simeons hcg diet]

The text for this web edition of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy appears to be derived from the edition of 1832 published by Longman.