Eating on the Left

Puritanism is optional

image: teepublic.com

If you have ever wondered what Karl Marx used to eat – and I have only recently done so – there are few clues. We do know that he was fond of pickles and that he helped his friend, Friedrich Engels, to celebrate his 70^th birthday with claret “sixteen bottles of Champagne” and “12 dozen oysters”. With others, of course.

“This was not an isolated act of indulgence,” writes historian Tristram Hunt of Engels. “During the 1870s his Primrose Hill home had become a popular venue for socialist excess. ‘On Sundays, Engels would throw open his house,’ recalled the communist August Bebel. ‘On those puritanical days when no merry men can bear life in London, Engels’s house was open to all, and no one left before 2 or 3 in the morning.’ Pilsner, claret, and vast bowls of Maitrank — a May wine flavoured with woodruff — were consumed while Engels sang German folk-songs or drunkenly recited ‘The Vicar of Bray’.”

Of course, while Engels was a socialist and, indeed, a Marxist, he was also a major beneficiary of the capitalist system as a mill owner. He believed, like Nye Bevan, that nothing is too good for the working classes. As Hunt remarks “Engels believed in cascading the pleasures of life — food, sex, drink, culture, travel — down to all classes. Socialism was not a never-ending committee meeting, but a life of satiated enjoyment.”

Marx was happy to benefit from his friend’s largesse but as Bertrand Russell observed, Marxism is not so much about making the working class happy as making the bourgeoisie unhappy. Engels was not alone amongst early socialists in seeking to share the pleasures of the well-off with the workers but, in time, a certain puritanism set in. If you were on the side of the workers – whether they liked it or not – there was no place for indulgence. The pleasures of the table were – still are, perhaps – seen as unimportant, even decadent.

Anyone who visited the Soviet Union will have noticed that the food was generally terrible and in short supply. I remember in 1983 seeing people queueing outside the GUM department store on Red Square in Moscow because there was a rumour of tinned fish being available.

There seems little doubt that the early communists had no interest whatsoever in food. And the later ones too. Che Guevara happily ate putrid meat when he was on manoeuvres with other revolutionaries in the Cuban jungle. He had been brought up in an affluent home in Argentina but he had no interest in what he ate (or, it is widely believed, in personal hygiene).

Lenin was fond, like many Russians, of a kind of buckwheat porridge which sounds pretty bland, and he occasionally had some ham or fried eggs.

Trotsky seems to have taken some pleasure in eating although he was probably not very adventurous. When he lived in New York he ate three meals a day in the same restaurant, The Triangle Dairy in the Bronx. His strict policy of not tipping did not endear him to the waiters. When in prison, he received a food parcel and later wrote of the “white bread, tea, sugar, ham, canned foods, apples, oranges – yes, big bright-coloured oranges! Even to-day, after thirty-one years, I list all these marvellous things with emotion, and I even pull myself up for having forgotten the jar of jam.”

After the Revolution it seems that Stalin and his wife were happy to eat in the Kremlin canteen which, according to some, was the worst in Moscow. The competition was stiff.

Stalin could not abide the smell of cooking. When the French communist Henri Barbusse visited him after Mrs Stalin had committed suicide, he wrote: ““The bedrooms are as simply furnished as those of a respectable second-class hotel. The dining room is oval in shape; the meal has been sent in from a neighbouring restaurant. In a capitalist country a junior office clerk would turn up his nose at the bedrooms and complain about the fare.”

There speaks a true Frenchman. Ordering a meal from a restaurant certainly got around the odours of cooking issue.

Stalin incidentally, for all his relative frugality, decided that the workers should have “Champagne”, the Soviet sparkling wine known as “champanski”. It was not Champagne, of course, in any sense, although Chardonnay was used, along with Aligoté, and the production system was stolen from the French scientist, Eugène Charmat: first and second fermentations took place in tanks rather than in the bottle, thus saving a great deal of labour and, indeed, time. I drank some in Moscow in the early 1980s and found it palatable but not remotely like Champagne. I recall that it cost about 50 cent a bottle if you changed your dollars on the black market.

Anecdotally, it appears that vegetarianism is more common on the left than the right. British Labour Party former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has long avoided meat – ever since he worked on a pig farm at the age of 20 - and has been toying with veganism. It strikes me that he cuts a rather joyless figure so this self-deprivation makes a kind of sense. He does have a decadent habit, however, of enthusiastic jam making. He eats porridge for breakfast every morning and does not drink alcohol but is a keen consumer of what he calls “energy bars”.

His friend and mentor, Tony Benn, became a vegetarian in middle-age, following the example of his son, Hilary. He claimed never to have enjoyed meat – something that anyone who has ploughed through his diaries will find credible. Food is only ever mentioned in passing. Decidedly puritan but not nearly as joyless as Corbyn, his main indulgence was strong tea, drunk from a pint mug.

Another ascetic figure in the Labour Party who eschewed meat was Sir Stafford Cripps, Chancellor of the Exchquer in Clement Attlee’s post-War government. He was bleakly austere in his personal habits and even gave up his one vice: pipe smoking.

Harold Wilson, the Labour Prime Minister, was famous for his pipe smoking but it seems that this was mainly for show, an attempt to appear thoughtful and avuncular. It also allowed him time to think when answering questions. However, in private he smoked Havana cigars – an expensive import from a socialist paradise – and enjoyed Cognac rather than the beer made famous in the “beer and sandwiches” negotiations with the trades unions. Indeed, like many other PMs, Wilson would fortify himself with up to four Cognacs before taking Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons, a duty he hated. (Margaret Thatcher also had a stiffener before PMQs, but of Scotch whisky. Herbert Asquith, the Liberal PM, would fortify himself to excess and was known as Squiffy Asquith).

Keir Starmer – and, yes, I know he’s more centrist than leftist – is yet another vegetarian although he loves meat. However, he won’t eat it on principle and both his wife and daughter (but not his son) also eschew the flesh of animals. He told the i newspaper that his last meal would comprise a seaweed salad to start followed by tandoori salmon with pilao rice, finishing with a baked lemon cheesecake. So, a pecatarian rather than a vegetarian. And he would drink Pinot Grigio in deference to his wife’s taste. He admits to eating a lot of tuna sandwiches.

Anthony Crosland (1918-1977), the influential Labour MP, was the child of Plymouth Brethren and came to detest puritanism, especially of the socialist kind. In his 1956 book The Future of Socialism he argued for “liberty and gaiety in private life, more open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating houses, more riverside cafes, more pleasure gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places... and so on ad infinitum”.

Crosland had briefly had a gay relationship with fellow Labour politician, Roy Jenkins at Oxford, during what appears to have been an experimental phase in their late adolescence. Both men were later decidedly heterosexual in their preferences. Jenkins, who would leave Labour for the SDP, later the Liberal Democrats, was the son of a trades union organiser and the grandson of a Welsh miner but he shared Crosland’s enthusiasm for the finer things in life.

At the farewell dinner in 1977 before he went to be President of the European Commission, Château Lafite and Quinta do Noval vintage port featured amongst the wines, both from the legendary 1945 vintage (which was the year he had been first elected as a member of parliament). He was known to set aside 90 minutes each day for a particularly good lunch with someone he found interesting.

Which shows, I suppose, that just as those on the right don’t have to consume hamburgers and Diet Coke, those on the left – and, of course Jenkins moved to the centre – don’t have to embrace puritanism. There is nothing puritanical about Lafite ’45.