Th i s c h a p t e r i s devoted to consumables that mark occasions joyful and sad, sacred and secular, routine and transformative. All evoke expec-tations for items that are specified by both mode of preparation and presentation, and all have physiologic as well as meaning-centered im-plications. Rather than single events, ceremonies typically are streams of occasion that offer opportunities to include diverse foods and beverages.
In the discussion that follows, the primary focus is on the foods them-selves; ritual and celebratory customs provide context. The caffeinated beverages coffee, cacao, and tea are also used in religious and other ceremonial contexts (see chapter 2).
Some foods of occasion—such as eggs, meat, blood, grain, honey, fruit, and alcoholic beverages—have near-universal significance. Eggs and meat specifically have been the subject of extensive study that over-laps folklore, religion, and ritual. Geese and other birds that lay golden eggs are common throughout European and African folklore. The Hausa fufunda story, for example (which may have been borrowed and trans-formed from an Arabic tale), starts with a king who sent Ataru, a poor man, to learn where the sun originates. He set off on a horse and after one month reached kasan babba da jaka (kasan, ‘‘the place of ’’; babba,
‘‘large ones with’’; jaka, ‘‘pouch’’), the land of the storks, who recognized him and gave him directions through a place where a river of silver flowed. Finally, he reached a large tamarind tree, where he saw the fufunda, Sarkin Tsuntsu—the king of birds—who, after creating the world, sat on his one egg, which will not hatch until the last day of the living. Reputable people will come under its shadow, while the morally repugnant will only see the shadow and be scorched by the sun (Tre-mearne 1970).
In centuries past, divination customs (including ovamancy, ooscopy,
and oomantia) employed eggs, often at times of transition such as the new year, at Halloween (when spirits walked), and when seasons shifted.
Meaning emerged from patterns created by breaking eggs into water, watching how white and yolk flow across hard surfaces, and many other iterations. Chicken and duck eggs are central images in Chinese folk religions. Simoons (1991) described two forms of egg divination in ancient and modern customs. In one instance, the egg is drawn upon, blackened, or painted and subsequently boiled or roasted. Meaning is interpreted from patterns in how the shell cracks or in the appearance of the yolk and white after the shell is removed and the egg cut. In other practices, the egg is thrown; predictions depend on whether the shell shatters and where the egg lands.
Eggs figure prominently in origin narratives worldwide and are key metaphors in traditional customs of renewal. For example, early Greeks described the universe as a formless, chaotic egg. In Macedonia and Serbia, colored Easter eggs are buried in vineyards to encourage good harvests, while in Slovakia, eggs are mixed with seed wheat and an egg is rolled across the newly seeded field to encourage growth (Newall 1971) (see explanations of seder and Naw Ruz eggs, below).
In China, eggs are part of the ceremonial bath for brides and are later shared among the wedding guests. For many occasions, eggs are dyed red, which symbolizes happiness, good fortune, and protection against spirits;
at engagement and wedding occasions, they are gifts or part of the wed-ding feast. Two red eggs are moved across a bride’s bodice and into her lap to encourage fertility. White or red eggs are given to a newborn and the baby’s mother and are placed in the water of the newborn’s first bath.
Hard-cooked eggs also are gifts for these and other life-cycle transitions.
White eggs carry the wish that the child will reach an advanced age and have white hair. Chinese preserved eggs are extraordinary in appearance, taste, smell, and texture. Most are conserved by salting: eggs are soaked in brine for twenty to forty days (or are brined for one week), then are coated with an earth-salt-chaff mixture to prevent them from sticking together, placed in a large earthenware jar, and rearranged every three days for fif-teen days; the jar is sealed for another thirty days. Although these eggs are called ‘‘thousand-year-old,’’ ‘‘Ming dynasty,’’ or ‘‘one hundred-year-old,’’ the duration of preservation is typically measured in months (Si-moons 1991).
For most of the world’s people, meat is a highly valued food but is not consumed in the same amounts as plant foods, in part because hunting and producing meat are more expensive in time, labor, and land and, in the case of hunting, not as reliable in results (see chapter 1). These cir-cumstances justify reserving meat, or the best cuts, for the elite and for marking special occasions. Meat is also the only single class of food that is commonly proscribed by certain cultures and religions. Those taboos might reflect the emotional and closer physical relationships that people have with animals, compared to plants. Pork is proscribed by Seventh Day Adventist, Jewish, Ethiopian Orthodox, Hindu, and Muslim peoples, although this prohibition is irregularly enforced among some groups.
Temporary food avoidances intersect fasting customs, the most impor-tant of which in medieval Christianity was Lent, during which period (between Ash Wednesday and Holy Saturday) meat and other animal products were disallowed. Fridays, Ember Days, and other occasions also were marked by meat proscriptions (den Hartog 2003).
While eggs, meat, and other universals are rich in imagery, they also affect us physiologically by providing concentrated nutrients—protein, fat, vitamins—which in some cases contribute to, or are the foundation of, their meanings. (The physiologic implications of honey consumption are described later in this chapter.) In some ways, alcoholic beverages are an exception among these nutrient-rich universals: their detrimental effects have been amply documented. But in traditional contexts, these bev-erages are produced in relatively small volumes at the household level and have low ethanol and relatively high nutrient values. For example, traditional beers produced by contemporary populations contain only 1–2 percent ethanol, unsprouted grains, and natural sugars. Since the popu-larization of the ‘‘French paradox’’ in the early 1990s, alcoholic beverages (wines, at least) have become associated with heart health. The phyto-alexin resveratrol, which is abundantly present in grape skin and seeds (produced in response to fungal infection), has a broad spectrum of pleio-tropic physiologic effects, including anticancer activity, slowed senes-cence, and kidney-, brain-, and heart-protective actions. It improves post-ischemic indices of myocardial function; this is in part explained by its antioxidant properties, although it has no effect on pre-ischemic heart function (Mokni et al. 2006; Goh et al. 2007). Whereas I understand some lay incentive to claim ‘‘healthful’’ properties for alcoholic beverages, the
continued focus of bioscientific research on resveratrol in wine strikes me as a twisted logic, since this phytochemical also occurs in nonfermented grapes, other berries (e.g., blue-, sparkle-, and cranberries; Vaccinium spp., Ericaceae), groundnuts, and other foods.