My gastronomic experiences in Holland led me to expect a no less fabulous profusion in Colonial Java. But I was disappointed, or perhaps relieved, to find that the hotels catered not for giants but for men and women only about twice life size. The only truly Rabelaisian feature of Javanese diet is the Rice Table. The Rice Table must be seen, and eaten, to be believed. Without the co-operation of the gullet, faith cannot swallow it. I do not even expect those who have never eaten a Rice Table to believe my description. Marco Polo, when he returned from the court of the Great Khan, full of true stories and correct statistics, was by his compatriots derisively nicknamed “Marco Milione.” For the sake of the truth about Rice Tables, I am prepared with old Mark Million to be thought a liar; here then it is—the truth, literal but unbelievable.
It is lunch time. You enter the dining-room of the hotel. A little old yellow waiter, looking less like a man than a kindly orang-utan, shaved and with a batik handkerchief tied round its head, shows you to your place, asks what you will eat. You push aside the menu of the commonplace European lunch.
“Ane Rice Tafel for mich,” you say, combining German and Lowland Scotch into what you believe, quite erroneously, to be the language of Holland. The kindly little monkey-man trots off, smiling; it seems to please him when his clients decide on the Rice Table. You wait. In a little while the monkey-man’s embassy to the kitchen has its effect. A waiter appears at your elbow with an enormous cauldron of rice; you heap your plate with it. He moves away. Immediately another waiter takes his place, offering fish soup. You damp your rice; the soup man goes. A dish of chops at once replaces the tureen. Looking round, you see that the chop carrier is standing at the head of a long procession of Javanese waiters, extending in unbroken line from your table right across the dining-room to the kitchen door. Each time you help yourself, the procession advances a step and a new dish is presented.
I took the trouble one day to count the number of dishes offered me. Twenty-six actually appeared before me; but it was a busy day for the waiters and I do not think I got all the dishes I was entitled to. They included after the chops, two other kinds of meat, two kinds of bird, a species of sausage; fish, both fresh and dried; roast bananas; several kinds of vegetables, plain and curried; two varieties of salads; fried nuts; numerous pickles; jam; a queer kind of unleavened bread, and various other things which I cannot at the moment remember. All these articles are thoroughly stirred in with the rice on your plate—a trough would be a more suitable receptacle—the napkin is tucked firmly into place beneath the chin and leaning forward you shovel the immense and steaming mound of food down your throat.
But the Rice Table is really the only inordinate feature of Dutch East Indian diet. The breakfast table may be furnished with such ill-timed delicacies as Edam cheese, gingerbread and liver sausage; but the porridge, the cooked meats, the eggs and fishes, the toast, the scones and marmalade of the Anglo-Saxon breakfast are lacking. Afternoon tea is strictly tea; one drinks, but one does not eat. Dinner is perfectly normal and late supper is unknown. Hotels within the British Empire may be innocent of the Rice Table; but the total amount of nourishment which they offer in the course of each day, and which is consumed by their clients, is decidedly greater than that which forms the daily foundation of Greater Holland. With the possible exception of the Americans, the English are, I am afraid, the world’s heaviest eaters. They call us in Italy “il popolo dei cinque pasti”—the Five Meal People.
Frenchmen and Italians eat normally a little more than half the amount of food consumed by prosperous Englishmen. Arabs and Indians about a third or a quarter. Seeing that mental and bodily efficiency can be attained and kept up on these smaller quantities, it follows that at least half our eating is a matter, not of hunger or need, but of pure gluttony, of simple and uncontrolled hoggishness.
Gluttony is numbered among the Seven Deadly Sins; but for some reason—perhaps because it is now so universally practised in respectable society—the sin is seldom denounced. Lasciviousness is deplored by every one; anger with its attendant violences, by a majority, at any rate in the Western and democratic countries. But gluttony, the besetting vice of our age—for never in the world’s history have so many men and women eaten so immoderately as they do now—gluttony goes almost unreproved. In the Middle Ages on the other hand, when food was scarce and over-eating singular and conspicuous, gluttony was freely denounced. Peace, prosperity, the colonisation of new lands, refrigerators, easy transport and modern agriculture have made food plentiful, at any rate in the West. Gluttony being universal is scarcely noticed, and all the fury of the moralists is spent on other sins, especially lasciviousness.
Now the gravity of a sin is gauged by several standards, which we employ, when we make our judgments, either separately or together. We may judge a sin, in the first place, by the degree of its harmfulness to the society in which the sinner lives. Thus, the sin of anger, when it leads to crimes of violence, is harmful to the society in which the angry man lives, and therefore grave. Avarice is chiefly detested because it leads to theft, and dishonest practices, which do mischief to the avaricious man’s neighbours. And so on. The application to each particular sin is easily made.
But sin is not exclusively a social matter; its gravity is also measured by the harm, mental or physical (and the physical is always finally also a mental mischief) it does to the sinner himself. The first and axiomatic duty of a man is, I suppose, to make the best use he can of such talents as he possesses, to develop his latent powers and keep himself at the highest pitch of efficiency. His first duty, in a word, is to be himself. The majority of human beings live in conditions which make it impossible for them to be themselves. A slum is, so to speak, an Original Sin common to all its inhabitants and for which they are not individually responsible. But a substantial minority of men and women cannot plead the Original Sin of bad conditions to excuse their failure to be fully themselves. These are personally accountable. For to bury talents, to frustrate development of one’s own powers, to compromise the efficiency of mind or body are sins. It is for this reason, rather than because they do harm to others beside the sinner, that the various forms of sloth, lust, intemperance and self-complacent pride are sinful.
Historical circumstances may cause the gravity of sins to change at different epochs. Thus, in a war-like society, whose very existence depends on the courage and ferocity of the individuals composing it, the sin of anger will not be a grave one; nor will the crimes of violence which accompany it be considered worthy of severe censure. Our Saxon fathers could kill a man for a few shillings; the punishment fitted the crime and was proportionate, at that period, to the sin. Later in the history of Western Europe there was a definite moment at which lasciviousness became a much graver sin than it had hitherto been. Before the introduction of venereal diseases, a moderate lechery might do a certain, but not very serious mischief to society; but it did very little harm, either spiritually or physically, to the lecher. Innocent of disease, a temperately lascivious Greek was almost innocent of sin.
The Christians, as innocent at first of disease, artificially invested the instinct with an aura of personal and social sinfulness. Later when the Crusaders returned with their deplorable souvenirs of Oriental travel, pleasure really and indeed became a crime. A single lapse, not a course of excesses, could reduce a man to repulsive disfigurement, madness, paralysis and death. Nor did he suffer alone; he murdered his wife as well as himself and condemned his children to blindness, deafness and deformity. Mercury and arsenic have done much to diminish the personal sinfulness of a moderate lechery. Its social sinfulness is succumbing to divorce and contraception, is dwindling with the gradual decay of Christian intolerance. The progress of medicine and common sense may end by making us as innocent as were the ancient Greeks.
It was, as I have already pointed out, a combination of historical circumstances—a combination of industrial prosperity with colonisation and imperialism, of scientific agriculture with steam transport—that made our modern gluttony possible. It escapes censure, in our English-speaking countries, at any rate, because it is universal in respectable circles, because its evil effects upon society are not immediately manifest, like those of avarice or anger, and because it does not so
