Food - Bee Wilson on the stomach derangements of the great Victorian utilitarian
Pain and pleasure, pleasure and pain. These are the components of all eating. The pain of hunger gives way, if one is fortunate, to the sweet pleasure of consumption. The pleasure of eating gives way, if one is unfortunate, to the pain of indigestion. And so it continues, until the pleasures and pains cancel each other out and one may calculate whether our meal was, on balance, beneficial.
Pleasure and pain are also the stuff of classical utilitarianism, whose broad aim was to maximise the one and minimise the other. You might therefore expect the great 19th-century utilitarians to have been fine theorists of the dinner table, experts in extracting the maximum human happiness from the process of feeding. Not so. They seem to have been more concerned with cerebral happiness than with the delights of dairy, wheatfield and vine, and none more so than John Stuart Mill (1806-73).
Mill thought that some pleasures were objectively more important than others. Reading Herodotus, learning botany and helping his fellow man (all hobbies of Mill's) were qualitatively superior to gorging on sweets in an animal fashion. Having sampled the higher pleasures - true happiness - you could never go back to being a mindless glutton. Mill himself began to learn Greek at the age of three and, by the age of ten, was an "efficient reasoning machine".
From reading Mill's works of political philosophy, or even his Autobiography, it is hard to imagine that anything so fleshly as food ever passed his thin Victorian lips. In portraits of the time, his spare, noble face is trained on higher things - on liberty, for example, and the subjection of women. Yet a different picture emerges from his correspondence with the love of his life, Harriet Taylor, the married woman he adored for 20 years, until the death of her husband allowed them to wed. In his letters to Harriet, Mill writes with a niggling and worried depth of detail about the things he eats and the effects they produce on him. "My digestion has unluckily got wrong again," he writes on one occasion, "or rather wronger, for it had never got anything like right. I eat nothing but the wholesomest things, but I fancy I have been eating too much of them."
In 1854, Mill travelled all over Europe, in a state of "chronic indigestion" and "stomach derangement". Wherever he stopped, he took great note of the local cuisine. Breakfast was the meal which troubled him most. Because of his tendency to spit blood in the morning, he had to be careful. His usual ration was eggs and bread, but in Sicily, the yellowish cake-like bread disagreed with him. It was made with the same hard wheat as macaroni, and Mill found it "heavy and uncomfortable with a slight tendency to sickness".
He fared better in Greece, where he changed his breakfast order to cutlets and pilaff. At midday, the Greek guide makes Mill some fizzy lemonade, which he finds "delicious": "the gas penetrates one's whole body, & the effect is like a slight intoxication by champagne and lasts several hours". By dinnertime, he has come back down to earth and dines wisely on soup, chicken and stewed prunes.
Just occasionally, Mill expresses real gourmet enjoyment - of a splendid turkey in Corfu, or of a classy establishment in Montpellier, where he is offered 30 or 40 perfectly cooked dishes "with polite attention" from the waiters. But his pleasures are never easy. Wherever he goes, he asks the price of meat, partly because, as a good Englishman, he enjoys roast beef, but more importantly because he wants to gauge the relative cost of living and state of civilisation in each country. Mill's utilitarian morals, far from enhancing his happiness when dining, seemed to complicate and reduce it.
Knowledge of Mill's anguished eating in no way lessens the value of his thought. But it might cast yet further doubt on the kind of utilitarianism which proposes that happiness consists in leaving the lower pleasures behind. Reading Herodotus and helping your fellow man may indeed be superior pleasures to filling your stomach. Yet the stomach must be filled somehow, and we may as well do it with as little pain and as much pleasure as we can.
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