@spendius,
It is a well known fact that talking about food, or even mentioning it, was a gross impropriety in the educated and refined circles of the 18th and 19th centuries. Does Jane Austen mention food? Maybe as the waving corn, or the orchard or the meadows which all have aesthetic properties.
Philippa Pullar, in her delightful and informative book Consuming Passions, (a history of food) which I have read with attention, and recommend, remarks on that social convention and explains it using the same sort of argument I offered above. That even alluding to food necessarily brings to the forefront of the "cause and effect" consciousness, so approved of by the intelligent scientific mind, the thought of the excrements resulting and the operations involved in parting with them and all those low and tawdry references which many a satirist has exploited with a success which can only derive from the audience's fascinations.
After all, chomping one's way through the nutrient bed is a behaviour common to the biology of many other orders of being and which our manners and etiquette are at pains to dissociate us from.
Some Englishmen of taste have been known to scrupulously avoid anyone witnessing them eating.
I am quite sure that Ms Pullar, who wrote a biography of Frank Harris, would approve of my attempts to redress the general vulgarity of this thread.
