Consider this simple meal: Corn on the cob with butter and salt; chicken with rice; lettuce tossed with olive oil and lemon; and ice cream. What could be more ordinary? More prosaic? More boring?
But its very ordinariness makes it fascinating to Dr. Margaret Visser, a classicist whose interest in the meanings of everyday foods has resulted in
``Much Depends on Dinner,`` a book about the myth and history of that one meal`s ingredients. The book, a best seller in Canada, was published in the United States this year by Grove Press ($19.95) and is now going into its second printing.
Visser`s work, which is dense with detail and analysis, also offers food trivia that could enrich any cocktail party. The reader is told, for instance, that a Greek named Pithyllos kept his tongue in a bag between meals to preserve its sensitivity, that thousand-year-old popcorn still can be popped and that eating ice cream makes the body warmer rather than cooler because of the work it must do to balance the temperatures.
Although Visser, who teaches ancient Greek at York University in Toronto, clearly delights in telling these stories, she does it for a reason: to help people find greater meaning in their lives by recounting the origins and myths of the simple objects that surround them.
``We tend to think in our culture that something that is ordinary is not important,`` she said in a telephone interview. But in fact, it is the reverse. ``It is only ordinary,`` she says, ``because it is important.`` The ordinary, she says, orders our lives; the word ``ordinary`` comes from the Latin word for order.
Because people have lost touch with the fascination of the ordinary they have lost a sense of meaning, a meaning they deeply need, Dr. Visser says.
``In the modern culture people are very, very bored.``
In traditional cultures, Visser says, ordinary things always are imbued with significance. Food sometimes was worshiped and always it was respected. The Mexican Indians, for instance, would breathe on ears of corn to accustom them to heat before throwing them in boiling water.
Visser says she would like to help people see modern life with the same kind of reverence and meaning. ``The next time they eat a lettuce salad, I would like them to think about why they are eating that leaf, of all the leaves they could eat, and to realize that they don`t make that choice in a vacuum.``
Visser`s rule of writing is simple: she fills her book with ideas that interest her, and leaves out whatever bores her. She did all of her research in Canada and in France, where she and her husband, Colin, the head of the drama department at the University of Toronto, also have a house. The book is eclectic and international, which may reflect Visser`s life. She was born in Zambia and has lived in the Middle East, France, the United States and Canada. Sources for the book include trade journals like Poultry Science and Food Engineering; reference works and encyclopedias on food, including the ``Foods and Food Production Encyclopedia``; specialized books like ``Corn:
Improvement, Seed Productions and Uses``; magazine articles like ``The Chemistry of Garlic and Onions,`` and occasionally even fiction.
Although that eclecticism provides great detail, her dependence on secondary sources-and a book this wide-ranging probably could not be produced without relying on them-means the reader cannot be assured that apocryphal food stories are not being recycled.
Some food experts note that the book does not represent original research in the field, but nevertheless makes a contribution. ``It`s a very admirable idea,`` says Nach Waxman, owner of Kitchen Arts and Letters, a New York store devoted to books on food and wine. ``I am a huge admirer of books that look at the underside of any phenomena.``
Because she began as an amateur in the realm of food, Visser says, she learned a great deal in her research. Some topics, like corn, were easier to research because much has been written about them. Lettuce, though, was another story. Nothing had been done, so she began with what she knew: ``I dimly remembered reading a book about Adonis, and it mentioned lettuce, so that was the first thing.`` Butter, too, was surprisingly unplumbed territory. She found that ancient myths sometimes are reflected in modern attitudes. Some people feel uncomfortable about salt in their food, supposedly because of health concerns about its effects. But salt always has been viewed by society as powerful and dangerous; some people still throw salt over their shoulders to ward off trouble.
Today, she says, most people are unaware of the myths that form their food choices and tend to devalue ritual. Even that, though, says something about the culture.
``Nothing more directly expresses our loathing of hierarchy,`` she writes, ``than the precut, precoated, ground and reconstituted portions, often computer calculated to be equal, which we get as fast food.``
Dr. Visser now is writing a book about table manners, which will look more closely at modern rituals of eating and how they are changing. The loss of certain rituals, she says, symbolizes profound shifts. Some families, for instance, infrequently eat dinner together. ``It`s a symptom,`` she says. ``It means to me a breakup of the family bond.``