Whatever you eat this Christmas, you won't match Clodius Albinus, who downed 500 figs at a sitting. And if you're affluent you won't even try

Food was the basis of the first class system. Superior nourishment is the most primitive form of privilege. Socially differentiating cuisines, however, occurred relatively late and, until recently, were found only in some parts of the world. Originally, quantity mattered more than quality.

The gigantic appetite has normally commanded prestige in almost every society, partly as a sign of prowess and partly, perhaps, as an indulgence accessible only to wealth. Gluttony may be a sin, but it has never been classed as a crime. On the contrary, it can be socially functional. Big appetites stimulate production and generate surplus - leftovers on which lesser eaters can feed. So long as the food supply is unthreatened, eating a lot is an act of heroism and justice, similar in effect to other acts of this kind, such as fighting off enemies and propitiating the gods. It is usual to find the same sort of people engaged in all three tasks.

Legendary feats of digestion were chronicled in antiquity, like heroes' tallies of battle victims, wanderers' odysseys or tyrants' laws. Every day, Maximinus the Thracian drank an amphora of wine and ate 40 or 50 pounds of meat. Clodius Albinus was celebrated because he could eat 500 figs, a basket of peaches, ten melons, 20 pounds of grapes, 100 garden warblers and 400 oysters at a sitting. Charlemagne could not manage dietary temperance and refused his physicians' advice to mitigate his digestive problems by eating boiled instead of roasted food: this was the gustatory equivalent of Roland's refusal to summon reinforcements in battle - recklessness hallowed by risk. To comply would have been an act of self-derogation.

Such triumphs of heroic eating were not considered selfish. The rich man's table is part of the machinery of wealth distribution. His demand attracts supply. His waste feeds the poor. Food- sharing is a fundamental form of gift exchange, cement of societies; the chains of food distribution are social shackles. They create relationships of dependence, suppress revolutions and keep client classes in their place.

The story is told of how Consuelo Vanderbilt, when she became chatelaine of Blenheim Palace, reformed the method by which leftovers were distributed among the poor neighbours of the estate: the broken meats were still slopped into jerrycans and wheeled out to the beneficiaries, but Consuelo was fastidious enough to insist that the courses be separated - meat from fish, sweets from savouries, and so on. Consuelo's generosity belongs to a long tradition of noblesse oblige, scattered with crumbs from the rich man's table, haunted by the ghosts of guests from the highways and byways.

The tradition goes back at least to the redistributive palace storehouses of early agrarian civilisations. The labyrinth of Knossos contained no minotaurs, but it was filled with oil jars and bins of grain. Ancient Egypt was a food engine, and the pharaonic economy was dedicated to a cult of the abundance of the everyday: not individual abundance, for most people lived on bread and beer in amounts only modestly above subsistence level, but a surplus garnered and guarded against hard times, at the disposal of the state and the priests. The temple built to commemorate Rameses II had storehouses big enough to feed 20,000 people for a year. The taxation yields proudly painted on the walls of a vizier's tomb are an illustrated menu for hoarders on a monumental scale: sacks of barley, piles of loaves, hundreds of livestock.

Ancient Egypt was unusual in having, like the contemporary west, an aesthetic of thinness. The gods and rulers were lissom, columnar. There, like here, you could never be too rich or too thin. In most cultures, the master of abundance is fat - that is how he commands confidence among people who depend on him for food. Greatness goes with greatness of girth.

Reverence for excess remains widespread in the world outside the west. Modern Trobriand islanders relish the prospect of a feast so big that "we shall eat until we vomit". A South African saying is: "We shall eat until we cannot stand." The aesthetics of obesity are widely prized. Among the Banyankole of East Africa, a girl prepares for marriage at about eight years old by staying indoors and drinking milk for a year until corpulence reduces her walk to a waddle. It is striking how the sheer quantity of food served - and sometimes eaten - persists in some societies as an indication of status.

Jack Goody, Britain's greatest living anthropologist, has devoted much inconclusive pondering to the problem of why West Africa has never developed a courtly cuisine, but continues to rely on big meals as measures of chiefly status. Tribute traditions in this region have enabled chiefs to maintain large households: Chief Gandaa of Birifor, for instance, whose funeral Goody attended, had 33 wives and more than 200 children but, like other chiefs in the region, "he lived just like everyone else, only with more of everything".

No separate style of cooking or serving is apparent, though chiefs normally have to eat out of the public gaze. Among the traditional Yoruba, it was a customary obligation for a king to eat his predecessor's heart and other special ritual foods were prescribed, and in Gonja, in northern Ghana, feasts of yam or cassava with fish or meat relish are laid on under the chief's auspices at rites of passage. But these practices hardly seem to have the makings, or to constitute the potential menu, of a courtly cuisine.

Even in the modern west, until the 20th century, habits of atavistic overeating recurred in high-status individuals, even though society had abundant other ways of honouring rank. Pride in big meals and bodily corpulence survived the medieval demonisation of gluttony in the Middle Ages and the neo-stoical cult of moderation which was part of the "civilising process" of the Renaissance and early modern times. Waists were barely slimmed by the 19th-century cult of the Romantic waif. It is perhaps not surprising that revulsion towards fat took so long to become normal in our culture. It is a striking reversal of a long-standing evolutionary trend. From a biologist's point of view, the human body can be seen as a startlingly efficient repository for fat, which we secrete in relatively large amounts and deposit more widely around our bodies than any other land mammal. A healthy, normal-sized western woman today has a body that is, on average, 30 per cent adipose tissue: not even polar bears and penguins can rival that level of attainment. Esteem for fatness was part of the earliest aesthetic we know of: the prejudice in favour of big-hipped, bosomy beauties in Stone Age carvings.

Now, however, the era of esteemed adiposity is over in the west. Obesity is a disqualification for status. The last really fat US president was William Howard Taft, who was so enormous that he could not tie his own shoelaces. Nowadays, that level of obesity would weigh down any political career. Bill Clinton, who was not particularly fat, suffered almost as much obloquy for his slack waistline as for his loose morals. Dieting is now as much de rigueur for politicians as for female entertainers. Big corporations sack the fat and discriminate in favour of the thin in appointments and promotions. The fat are in danger of self-reclassification as a persecuted minority: that, indeed, is the message of the quaintly named "National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance". Obesity has to justify itself as a form of disability, demanding "equal rights" for fat people: fat-friendly turnstiles, extra-long car seat belts.

Meanwhile, the affluence formerly spent on engorgement is wasted, in our society, on the thinning gym. Hostility to fat drives the anxious to anorexia. The thin image is advocated by a thousand publicity campaigns on grounds of beauty, morals and health. The historic profile of body fat has undergone a revolution. Historically, poverty has been thin and fatness has been an index of social standing. In today's most developed societies, the rich are thin and obesity is a mark of the underclass.

The change has been relatively sudden. In a little over 100 years, we've discarded the standards of Rubens and Renoir, and substituted those of Barbie and Twiggy. Most artists of the past would now be classed as fat-fetishist weirdos. No one knows how it happened. Classic explanations blame capitalism and industrialisation: the diet and fashion industries created a market for thinness - an ideal product from the suppliers' viewpoint, as a demand that could be infinitely prolonged and never satisfied.

There is probably something in this - but fat would surely be more easily saleable. Some feminists blame men for trying to recraft women's body-shapes. But anti-fat propaganda is not gender-specific; female fashion editors and designers connive in its campaigns; and feminism has contributed to the hallowing of women's own bodily "control", of which dieting is an aspect. Medical wisdom is often credited with effecting the revolution: but the modern demonisation of fat far exceeds anything that could be justified by genuine health concerns. There are fat-related diseases, but most fat people do not have them.

Really, we are experiencing a cultural revolution with obvious economic roots. As food has grown cheaper, fatness has become easy to attain. Tempted by an affordable indulgence, the poor overeat; middle-class moralists condemn them for it, as formerly they condemned the corresponding excesses of earlier generations of poor people: tipples at the gin and flutters at the races. The great lesson of the current global obesity "pandemic" is that urbanisation actually makes it hard for some poor people to stay thin, as rural diets, low in sugar and starch, are replaced by high-energy fixes, preservative-steeped shop-stored comestibles and sneakily fattening "convenience" foods. "Food deserts" in modern cities are actually oases of dietary junk.

Normally in history, when the cost of culture changes, its social profile changes, too. The rich have to be different. They flee from the practices of the poor. The rich lose their taste for easily accessible pleasures. Because aesthetic trends unfold at the command of elites, the rise of the thin aesthetic has matched the decline of the price of food. When thinness became a luxury instead of a common condition, fat was bound to lose face. Something similar has happened with the cult of muscles: when bodily strength was useful, the upper classes affected physical delicacy; now that muscles are useless, they have become an expensive fashion accessory, which - in most of the sedentary occupations favoured by the "knowledge economy" - you need time and money to cultivate. So it is with food: as the poor eat more, the rich eat less.

The era of cheap food may not last: indeed, I hope it does not; it is ecologically disastrous, because of the polluting effects of intensive agriculture. Traditional farming would put up our food bills but rescue our environment. At the moment, however, the wealth gap is dividing diets in terms of quality as well as quantity. There is plenty of fodder to fatten on, but well-produced food is in danger of becoming another prerogative of the thinner classes. Our best hope, in the present connection, is for more embourgeoisement of the kind that has already revolutionised taste in Britain in recent times and driven so many supermarket staples upmarket: as the thin aesthetic spreads through society, and the fatter classes ape the slimness of the celebs they admire, demand for cheap food will slacken; more people will want less, of higher quality, and - if capitalism works - the market will respond.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, author of Food: a history (Macmillan), is a professorial fellow in history and geography at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, and a member of the modern history faculty at Oxford University. This essay appears in Foodstuff: feast and famine, published on 19 December by Demos (£10). To order, call 020 8986 5488

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