Denmark doesn’t often make the news. Of late, however, it has, and not necessarily for the right reasons. In an astonishing homage to institutionalised mugging, refugees will now have their valuables and cash confiscated at the gates. In Denmark today, you have to pay for the pleasure of human rights.
Then there is the pork. The city council of a place called Randers has decreed that it is mandatory for schools and other municipal institutions to serve pork on a daily basis. To paraphrase one hotelier of Torquay, if you don’t like pork, you’re a bit stuck.
To write about the second may seem like a serious case of muddled priorities. The State confiscations, as well as a number of other sinister moves, spearheaded by the Danish People’s Party and welcomed by too many Danes, are infinitely more troubling than the daily monotony of roast pork and parsley.
Except they are obviously closely symbiotic and fry in each other’s fat. Besides, the pork matter bears an uncanny resemblance to our own Patrijotti tal-Perżut picnic (literally and metaphorically, that word) at Msida two weeks ago. In France, too, the burning issue of whether or not school meals should include pork is on the national agenda. The point is that in Denmark, Malta, France and elsewhere, pork has become a pig of a debate.
I wish I could say I’m surprised. I did fieldwork in Mumbai a dozen-odd years ago, at a time when Hindutva (‘Hindu-ness’) far-right politics was rampant and relations between Hindus and Muslims in the city particularly fraught. One of the malignant consequences was a tendency for neighbourhoods to become more segregated as people felt the need to stick to their own.
I remember talking to a very open-minded and sensible Hindu woman who had lived in a middle-class Muslim neighbourhood for many years. She told me she got on very well with her neighbours, and also that she was looking to move away from them. “There’s one thing I really can’t stand,” she said, “and that’s the smell of roasting beef coming from their kitchens.”
There are many reasons why food can trace cultural fault lines with such visceral potence. First, it is consumed, which means that it becomes part of the body substance. When a certain type of Hindu says they consider mushrooms ‘dirty’, what they mean is that eating mushrooms would pollute their actual physical body. Simply put, we are what we eat.
The upshot is that food isn’t just symbolic. Rather, it goes to the very heart of the matter of who we are and who we wish to be
Second, food is experienced by the senses (emphasis on the plural) in a way that is anything but cerebral. We consider tactile feel to be the key quality of many foods – consider, for example, al dente pasta, or things that ‘melt in the mouth’. Likewise, smell contributes enormously to our experience of food, as do sight (half the charm of spaghetti al nero di seppia is the colour), and sometimes sound (casseroles sizzle and popcorn is onomatopoeic).
Third, the different ways in which food is prepared and consumed evoke strong cultural associations that often latch on to historical hierarchies. I have in mind standards of hygiene in the kitchen, or the way a particular food occupies its ‘rightful place’ in the kitchen and in the fridge. I had great difficulty learning to eat with my hands in India, and I’m still not sure I could ever bring myself to eat out of a communal dish.
Fourth, even the simplest of foods involves complicated networks of exchange and preparation. A glass of milk, for example, is the end result of the work of hundreds of people. Which means that any food is a relation between people, and therefore profoundly social.
Fifth, food marks all manner of social events. The one thing in common between business lunches, weddings and Catholic liturgy is that they all involve the eating of a particular food in a particular way. You could also probably tell which season it was and which feast was coming up, just by looking at the shelves in a confectionery.
The upshot is that food isn’t just symbolic. Rather, it goes to the very heart of the matter of who we are and who we wish to be. Which is why, for example, some historians of the Mediterranean have written about deep-rooted differences between pork-eaters and pork-avoiders. It is also why a clever someone saw fit to deposit two pigs’ heads outside a Muslim school in Lancashire last month.
In this case, pork finds itself caught up in a tangle that includes things like Islamophobia and nationalism. In fact, it serves as a fantastic middle ground between the two. On the one hand, making a show out of eating pork excludes Muslims and asserts European values pig-headedly understood. It also lends itself to nationalist assertions in the form of roast pork with parsley, ħobż bil-perżut, pork pies, salami and such authentic finery.
The argument doesn’t stop there. Nowadays, talk of superior races and sewer rats is limited to men who wear jackboots and use walking sticks, and who are invited by Fr Mark Montebello to lecture impressionable young people on philosophy.
Normal, respectable people will have none of that. Instead, they produce the culture card to much the same effect. There are no hearts on that card, only things like sharia, burka, halal slaughter, and of course, pork.
There is nothing banal about the Danish farmyard scuffle, or the Patrijotti tal-Perżut. Or rather there is, in the same way that blind allegiance to a national flag, or the belief that the European mind is the pinnacle of human achievement, are banal.
They are all ways of pushing swathes of unwanted people to the margins where they can enjoy their pork and poverty, even after their possessions have been stolen.
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