The Political Economy of Subsistence

“Let Them Eat Baklava” was the title of a recent article in The Economist about how rising food prices help explain unrest and revolution in much of the Middle East during the so-called Arab Spring of the early 2010s. The venerable London magazine saw no need to explain the jocular title; the story on which it draws—a sovereign suggests luxury desserts as a substitute for basic food—long ago became the stuff of legend. Indeed, it might be the world's best-known anecdote about the politics of food: reacting to news that the people of Paris could not afford bread on the eve of the French Revolution, Queen Marie Antoinette exclaimed, “Let them eat cake!” The cartoonish evil of the scenario might help explain its enduring appeal in spite of scholars long ago having debunked it, noting, for example, that already Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, written when Marie Antoinette was still a young girl, had mentioned “a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: ‘Let them eat brioche.’” As a historical trope, a cruel ruler taunting her famished subjects lies somewhere beyond the realm of simple memes or urban legends, being timeless and prevalent enough that countless variations of it, dating at least as far back as the Eastern Jin Empire in fourth-century China, have received the classification number AaTh 1446 in the influential Aarne-Thompson typology of folktales. Although apocryphal, or rather because apocryphal, it speaks to the sprawling and often undigested array of thoughts and emotions—from incredulity through consternation to righteous rage—that food can evoke across time and space. Disentangled from the particular circumstances of Marie Antoinette and the dawning of a particular Revolution, this infamous trope speaks to far deeper transhistorical processes. The incomprehension between rulers and subjects to which it testifies, the sometimes opaque wall between popular and elite politics, strikes at the very core of human coexistence. Material inequality is a polyvalent and often poorly understood force in any society, conducive simultaneously to emulation and jealousy, to social progress and disintegration, but food is somehow different. Food is so conspicuous because it is, by nature, existential.