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Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants
Article in American Journal of Ophthalmology · December 1993
DOI: 10.2307/2167079
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Bertram M. Gordon
Mills College
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Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and
Intoxicants; in American Historical Review, 98: 5 (December 1993), 1570.
Bertram M. Gordon
Mills College
In Tastes of Paradise, first published in German in 1980, Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues
that the emergence of the modern era in Europe was marked by a succession of the introduction
of new spices, stimulants and intoxicants, or Genussmittel, "articles of enjoyment" (p. xiii):
sequentially pepper, coffee, chocolate, tobacco, liquor, and opium. Each, he suggests, fit into a
changing economic and social structure and met the needs of an emerging social class: coffee for
a sober bourgeoisie, liquor for a proletariat seeking to escape horrible working conditions, opium
encouraged by the British to make the Chinese docile and to help pay for the tea trade. Profusely
illustrated, the book is rich in informative detail, for example, that beer was a source of nutrition
in foods such as beer soup as late as the end of the eighteenth century in Germany (p. 23). A map
shows the incidence of coffee houses in a section of mid-eighteenth century London (p. 56).
Schivelbusch's account, however, would be strengthened by more systematic attention to
physiology and the history of medical theory. Discussing the spread of pepper as a luxury item,
for example, he does not explain why the taste of pepper might have appealed. Medical theory
was also more complex than indicated by the author. He argues, for example (p. 110), that the
brain was the part of the human body of most concern to the eighteenth century bourgeoisie and
that it alone was developed, cultivated, and cared for in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Eighteenth century materialist arguments, however, also gave rise to medical theories such as
those of Pierre-Jean Georges Cabanis who held the stomach as basic to human behavior.
Tastes of Paradise is an example of the popular German historical series genre and is
described on the dustjacket as the last of a three volume set by the author on "the origins of
modern industrialized consciousness." The book has neither footnotes nor an index. Dubious
statements include claims that salt has been a part of human civilization "since time immemorial"
(p. 4), that "Arabic culture is dominated by abstraction more than any other culture in human
history" (p. 17), and an anachronistic reference to the "Third World" during the period of British
sale of opium to the Chinese (p. 223). Unsupported claims such as "…in the nineteenth century
industrialization brought such an intensification of social misery into workers' lives that the
motive of escapism became far stronger than it had been in earlier times" (p. 149) hint of
historical naïveté.
There are also contradictions as in the claim that alcohol stimulates proletarian values of
collectivity and solidarity (p. 166) but that industrialization introduced the phenomenon of the
escapist solitary drunk as well. Cigarets gained popularity, according to Schivelbusch, because
they could be smoked quickly and therefore corresponded to industrial society in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, but he also notes (p. 117) that with the Crimean War cigaret use
spread to the West from Russia, hardly an industrialized country at the time. In a brief postscript
in 1992, Schivelbusch, inspired perhaps by Perrier sales, suggests that water had come to be
"celebrated as the height of gustatory delight" (p. 228), implying that substances need not be
chemically intoxicating to arouse excitement or Genuss, which may also be induced by
meditation, a Coke on a hot day, or the latest ice cream flavor. The rise of crack cocaine, not
mentioned in the 1992 postscript, also dates the book.
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