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Yak Burgers and Black Tea: Consumption,Deprivation, and the Literature ofHimalayan Adventure TravelTom Strychacz aa Department of English , Mills College , Oakland, California, USAPublished online: 12 Aug 2010.

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Food and Foodways, 18:145–167, 2010Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0740-9710 print / 1542-3484 onlineDOI: 10.1080/07409710.2010.504105

Yak Burgers and Black Tea: Consumption,Deprivation, and the Literature of Himalayan

Adventure Travel

TOM STRYCHACZDepartment of English, Mills College, Oakland, California, USA

Prominent in the accounts of trekking, mountaineering, and explo-ration that make up the literature of Himalayan adventure travelare complex descriptions of food consumption: the shock of newfoods or no food or the wrong food, different practices of culti-vation and food preparation, climbers’ rations, menus designedto optimize performance, and changes in appetite. Focusing ontwo recent works, Jon Krakauer’s well-known Into Thin Air (1997)and Wade Brackenbury’s Yak Butter and Black Tea (1997), butalso looking more briefly at the historical record, this article makesthree important points. First, descriptions of food consumption inthese works signify within a broader discourse about a (Western)culture of consumption and consumerism. Second, these accountsare “orientalist”: the writings of Western adventurers register, inEdward Said’s terms, a “flexible positional superiority” to the food-ways of high Asia. Third, these accounts are organized within adiscourse of deprivation as they constantly draw attention to thelack of food available in high Asia and, in particular, to the body’sinability to ingest food at high altitudes. Krakauer’s and Bracken-bury’s books exemplify a common topos of Himalayan adventureliterature: they use scenes of deprivation to pose a challenge to West-ern discourses and practices of over-consumption. But the strategicmoves enabling this critique are “orientalist” insofar as they con-tinue to manifest a functional difference between the Western ad-venturer’s experience of deprivation and the subsistence economiesand foodways of the Himalayan regions.

Address correspondence to Tom Strychacz, Department of English, Mills College,Oakland, CA 94613. E-mail: toms@mills.edu

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“Some people,” notes Hilary Howard in a recent New York Times article,“want a little more out of their vacation than a fruity drink served pool-side” (2008: 2). Howard is writing here about adventure tourism: the “littlemore” her vacationers want is to canoe a crocodile-infested river in Zambia,and their object is to spurn what Dean MacCannell was the first to anato-mize as the alienating effects of mass consumer tourism.1 Her comment alsousefully frames recent debates about culinary tourism, which Lucy M. Longdefines as the “intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an-other” (Culinary Tourism 2004: 21). Culinary tourists or “food adventurers”(Heldke 2003: xiv), like Zambian kayakers, seek authentic experience. Theyavoid the practice of sipping generic fruit drinks beside generic pools infavor of exploring authentic ethnic or national cuisines—an effort that mayenhance their understanding of the cultural Other and simultaneously stretchtheir sense of self, as Long claims, or, as Lisa Heldke has recently argued,threaten a return to an acquisitive cultural colonialism in which the goal isto consume the lived experiences of another culture along with its tradi-tional or uniquely exotic food.2 Among the goals of adventure tourists andculinary tourists in the marketplace of tourism there clearly exists a broadoverlap, which is both rhetorical—Heldke maintains that “food adventuringis frequently described as a quest, and the food adventurer as an explorer”(2003: xxiii)—and economic. When adventure company Abercrombie & Kentpromises to have clients “[p]articipate in a food-offering ceremony with Bud-dhist monks in Bangkok,” for example, it taps into a market that both groupsof tourists would recognize and that can be analyzed (following Pierre Bour-dieu) in terms of the cultural capital generated by singular and exclusiveexperiences, whether the focus is adventurous eating or adventuring “out ofthe box” or, as here, both together.3

The overlapping categories of culinary and adventure tourism provideone context for understanding the symbolic meanings associated with foodin the (English language) adventure literature of the Himalayas, a body ofwork that generates frequent reflections on risk-taking, adventurous eating,and eating while adventuring, and that also contemplates various resistancesto “fruity drink” alienated consumption. This literature burgeoned in thetwentieth century. Some American and British individuals did traverse thehigh ranges of the Himalayas before the twentieth century; George Bogle’saccount of his expedition from India to Bhutan and then Tibet in the lateeighteenth century is a notable and well-researched example.4 But the cata-lyst for the bulk of these narratives was Britain’s bid to expand its colonialreach across the Himalayas by invading Tibet in 1904, an expedition that laidthe political groundwork for numerous British attempts to climb Mount Ever-est in the next three decades and simultaneously produced several mono-graphs that would generate the topoi governing much writing about theHimalayas in the twentieth century.5 Francis Younghusband, leader of theBritish expeditionary force to Tibet and later of the first British assaults on

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Everest, plays a pivotal role here. His The Epic of Mount Everest ([1926] 1942)establishes one major genre of Himalayan adventure: the mountaineeringchronicle focused on an individual’s or team’s efforts to climb a particularpeak. And his visionary experience of the “sacred city” (India and Tibet326) of Lhasa at the end of the 1904 invasion, described in India and Tibet(1910), leads directly to what Laurie McMillin calls the “myth of epiphany” (x)in another topos of this literature: quests for spiritual regeneration organizedaround exploring, or adventuring in, places little known to the West.

As these brief remarks imply, these writings cannot be wholly assimi-lated to the discourses of adventure and culinary tourism, and not simplybecause it might strike one as anachronistic to call Francis Younghusbandan “adventure tourist.” In fact, these writers tend to disavow that they aretourists at all. They pursue extreme risk. They possess goals—climbing apeak, reconstructing the self—that seem to override the implication thatthey are alienated consumers of the cultural Other’s foodways and folkwaysor disengaged surveillers of “primitive” peoples.6 And by constantly puttingtheir lives in peril, they lay claim to a practice compelled not by consumerismbut, as Sherry Ortner recognizes, by the “romantic and other countermodernyearnings that were central to much of early mountaineering” (1999: 47). Inthis respect, Himalayan adventurers do not repeat the experiences of adven-ture and culinary tourists so much as reveal the countermodern impulsesthat impel revolts against mass-marketed experience and rote consumptionacross an array of interlinked cultural fields.

As one of their key signifying strategies, Himalayan adventure narra-tives represent a yearning for an alternative to market-based consumptionthrough a discourse on food. This places them in an uneasy alliance withthe current conversation on culinary tourism. Like today’s culinary tourists,Himalayan adventurers have always made authenticity the touchstone oftheir experience, and these narratives are packed with observations aboutthe unique foodways and landscapes of subsistence agriculture to be foundin the communities along the trek to the higher mountains. But I will arguehere that this literature typically and most successfully generates a claim onauthentic value through a discourse of deprivation. Writers of high-altitudeadventure constantly confront a lack of, or an inability to consume, foodand drink. This is in part because the subsistence farming characteristic ofthe Himalayan region has little extra for visitors, and in part because of thelogistical problems of supplying food at altitudes above permanent humansettlement. As pressing are the physiological problems of surviving at highaltitude. Jon Krakauer, arriving at Everest Base Camp situated around 18,000feet, suddenly finds that “[m]y appetite vanished and my digestive system,which required abundant oxygen to metabolize food, failed to make use ofmuch of what I forced myself to eat; instead, my body began consumingitself for sustenance. My arms and legs gradually began to wither to stick-like proportions” (1997: 88). The moment is archetypical in these writings:

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Krakauer arrives at a site that consumes him, where attempts to manage avanishing appetite amid the physical sufferings experienced by the hunger-ing and thirsting body meet an intensified desire to survive, to conquer thepeak, to find self-fulfillment. Surprisingly, narratives of high-altitude adven-ture in this respect perform a similar cultural work to culinary tourism: theyplace the value and meaning of appetite under surveillance and under pres-sure; they make food the signifier of difference between authentic and fakeexperiences; and, by situating the careful consumption of food at the heartof the metaphorical significance of their enterprise, they offer sometimesexplicit challenges to a culture of over-consumption.

These countermodern challenges to mass-market-based economies canand should be considered skeptically. Holly Everett notes in writing of culi-nary tourism in Labrador that tourists “consistently make choices in keepingwith their class location” and that the “continual reassertion of class identitythrough food reproduces socioeconomic hierarchies of power and control”(2009: 28). Himalayan adventurers deploy similar assumptions with regardto the countries they occupy on the way to their goals. The strategic movesenabling their critique of over-consumption are, in Edward Said’s term, “ori-entalist”; they are part of an archive of imaginative constructions of highAsia which depend on a “flexible positional superiority, which puts theWesterner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient withoutever losing him the relative upper hand” (Said 1991: 7).7 In particular, thesenarratives map out and rely on a functional difference between the Westernadventurer’s experience of deprivation and the subsistence economies andfoodways of the Himalayan regions. Yet the trope of deprivation is a mobileand complex one. This article traces an array of its significations in a numberof twentieth-century writings but focuses more closely on two fairly recentworks, Jon Krakauer’s well-known Into Thin Air (1997) and Wade Brack-enbury’s Yak Butter and Black Tea (1997), both of which engage issues offood and deprivation with a level of self-conscious reflection often missingfrom narratives of Himalayan adventure. Krakauer’s account of his ascent ofEverest and of the 1996 Everest disaster, when eight people died in one dayduring a storm, reproduces the classic plot of the Himalayan mountaineeringnarrative, which begins with the trek to the mountain, relates adventuresand obstacles overcome on the way (usually) to the top, and concludes withthe trek out and aftermath. Brackenbury’s quest to become supposedly thefirst Westerner to visit the “secret” Valley of the Drung in Tibet exempli-fies the other category of Himalayan adventure I identified earlier: the storyjuxtaposes his efforts to overcome difficult terrain and the roadblocks quiteliterally put up by the Chinese in their occupation of Tibet with his growingsense of emotional and spiritual self-discovery. Both works contain overtcritiques of specific forms of Western over-consumption—and in both thetrope of deprivation recalls the socioeconomic conditions of capitalism towhich the writers cannot help but return.

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I

Early in Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer shapes a little parable of Western-style consumption when he describes a Sherpani taking orders from someAmerican trekkers at the Khumbu Lodge in Namche Bazaar, the social andcommercial hub of Sherpa life:

“We hungry,” a ruddy-cheeked man announced to her in overly loudpidgin, miming the act of eating. “Want eat po-ta-toes. Yak bur-ger. Co-ca-Co-la. You have?”“Would you like to see the menu?” the sherpani replied in clear, sparklingEnglish that carried a hint of a Canadian accent. “Our selection is actuallyquite large. And I believe there is still some freshly baked apple pieavailable, if that interests you, for dessert.”The American trekker, unable to comprehend that this brown-skinnedwoman of the hills was addressing him in perfectly enunciated King’sEnglish, continued to employ his comical pidgin argot: “Men-u. Good,good. Yes, yes, we like see men-u.” (1997: 54–55)

The significance of this scene goes beyond its play with the figure ofthe ugly American abroad and the neat comic reversals that have the Sher-pani speaking the King’s English and offering apple pie while the Americanstupidly speaks the pidgin that has typically been reserved for the “native”in a long history of imperialist encounters. Indeed, it is the Sherpani whoreads the situation correctly, anticipating when she says “[o]ur selection isactually quite large” that the American will both underestimate the lodge’scooking and desire a variety of foods. It is she who first offers the menu,a concept that might be said to distinguish U.S.-style consumption from asubsistence economy. Menus imply superabundance—a stockpile of foodwell beyond the capacity of any individual human to consume. They im-ply choice. Food offered menu-style is a cultural practice in which each actof selection evokes a multiplicity of other such potential acts: the choicesthat could have been made, and that could have been accommodated, beforethe decisive one. And both superabundance and choice demand capital. Thepresence of a menu at the Khumbu Lodge therefore speaks to an embraceof economic transformation structured around the new capital supplied bythe tourist-trekker, which then emerges in a host of complementary eco-nomic and cultural shifts: the Sherpani’s multilingual education, her flexiblebusiness savvy, the Lodge’s hybrid cuisines.

What is on the menu reveals that transformation to be multifaceted. TheKhumbu Lodge seems to be no place for the culinary tourist. The trekkerhungers for American-style service (the menu) and food with Americanorigins (Coca-Cola) in Nepal, Nepalese food expressed in American terms(yak burgers), and Nepalese food Americans understand (potatoes)—and the

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Lodge appears to accommodate his desires. In this sense, the shaping of thepostcolonial global economy into a “borderless world of flows . . . and theimminent unbundling of territorial sovereignty” (Nagar, Lawson, McDowell,and Hanson 2002: 260) could be understood here as a ruse. It merely restatesthe economic hegemony of the United States amid a variety of hybrid forms:apple pie (in Nepal) and, especially, the yak burger. In this scenario, thetrekker is no explorer and Nepal, amid the McDonaldization of its cuisine,no longer authentically Nepal.

Krakauer’s emphasis is entirely different. In the global borderlands ofNamche Bazaar, it is the American trekker who is out of place, transfixed bya reified notion of cultural otherness that no longer obtains. The yak burgerplays an important role here in Krakauer’s parable: rather than making theKhumbu Lodge into a Nepal McDonalds, it signifies a choice, a deliberate ori-entation toward Western-style consumption among a people who (Krakauerclaims) “seem to have no desire to be severed from the modern world orthe untidy flow of human progress” (1997: 58). The yak burger arguablyrepresents an adventure in imaginatively re-cooking cultures as the Sherpaniemploys homegrown ingredients in a novel culinary language and as thealmighty burger finds its hegemony at once reinstated and fundamentallyrealigned. The challenge to hierarchies of power implicit in such strategiesof culinary fusion has found much favor among contemporary scholars offoodways. Daniela Rogobete, for example, celebrates the “extreme culinarydiversity and openness” (2007: 31) of Indian cuisine as a metonym for aprogressive postcolonial society: “The mixture of gastronomic styles andinfluences indicates the Indian propensity towards diversity and pluralityand its capacity of assimilating everything from religious beliefs and culturalpractices to food” (31).8 The lowly yak burger signifies a similar openness todiversity; and, as Rogobete’s argument implies, the same can be said of theSherpani’s hybrid linguistic and entrepreneurial skills. Perhaps most tellinglyof all in Krakauer’s provocative analysis, the Sherpani does not actually cor-roborate the American trekker’s assumption that yak burgers are, in fact,on her menu. Her offer of the menu to his request for yak burger impliesthat hybrid cuisines are, for her, but one choice among an indeterminatenumber of many more. And in so doing she redefines the very meaning ofmenu-style consumption, which in her quiet response to the trekker’s ag-gressive enunciation of an engorged appetite becomes a metonym not forover-consumption but for appetites deliberatively and modestly fulfilled.

At Namche Bazaar, Krakauer seems unambiguously committed to a vi-sion of (near) borderless consumption, figured most clearly in the way theSherpani subtly out-menus the menu-loving American trekker. But in IntoThin Air, this commitment is temporary and precarious. A few days later andstill higher, at Everest Base Camp, a narrative that runs counter to the sceneat the Khumbu Lodge begins to emerge at the moment Krakauer’s “stick-like” body begins to consume itself—a metonym of reverse consumption

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that appears throughout the literature of Himalayan adventure as a virtuallymandatory sign of the countermodern implications of life at high altitude.9

This trope does not signify the end of desire. In fact, it typically signifies lesserappetites and wants and desires being erased in favor of, or transferred into,one abstract desire: for the summit, for self-knowledge, for transcendence.The trope of the starving adventurer is crucial, for it distinguishes this sort ofadventure from the characteristic protocols of both adventure and culinarytourism, which define the exploration of the Other through a meticulous,one might say abstemious, consumption of only the most authentic foodsand most exclusive experiences in an effort to satisfy a demanding ethos ofconstant self-gratification. In fact, the trope seems to place this sort of adven-ture in an adversarial relationship with what Carole M. Counihan calls thecentral tension of consumer capitalism: the tension between the “pleasuresof consumption and the moral superiority deriving from abstention” (1999:115), where abstention must be interpreted as the class privilege of “well-fed, well-off people” (126) who look to construct the lean, fit body valuedin Western cultures. As we shall see, there are senses in which “[v]oluntaryrestraint and freedom of choice toward food” (Counihan 1999: 126) on thepart of the Western adventurer does differentiate them from the people wholive in the high Himalayas. But the physiological and logistical problems ofconsuming anything at high altitude place pressure on the ideologies as-sociated with over-consumption and its privileged counterpart, abstemiousor exclusive consumption. The next section of this article deals with a setof characteristic responses to deprivation in this body of work: a complexdiscourse on appetites that cannot be created or assuaged by variety.

II

The earliest accounts of Western expeditions to the Himalayan region seethe consumption of food as a complex problem to be negotiated and, withluck, managed. Under-consumption appears as a constant peril and thus the“importance of correct feeding,” as F. S. Smythe says in Kamet Conquered([1932] 1947), “can hardly be over-estimated” (68–69). Hugh Ruttledge drawsattention to the problem of “incipient scurvy” (44) because “[f]resh vegeta-bles can only be secured with great difficulty in Tibet, [and] fresh fruit isunknown.” For this reason, Eric Shipton, having consulted a nutrition expertbefore the 1935 expedition to Everest, imports “dried vegetables from Eng-land” ([1943] 1956: 196) to supplement local fare.10 The reason that “correctfeeding” obsessed early expeditions to the Himalayas and continues to be-devil climbers today is that appetite for food dwindles dramatically as thealtitude rises above 23,000 feet in what is now often called the Death Zone,where the body deteriorates even under conditions of rest. To the 1924 Ever-est expedition, food was “nauseating” (Ruttledge [1934] 1938: 43) above the

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North Col; “eating tends to make one vomit” agrees Shipton ([1943] 1956:134); “one of the difficulties of high climbing,” says E. F. Norton, is that “itis impossible to force oneself to take enough food even to begin to makegood the day’s wastage of tissue” ([1925] 2002: 116).

Over the twentieth century, three perspectives have come to dominatethe discourse on food consumption (or lack of it) on expeditions from theWest. The first proposes variety as a solution to chronic under-consumption.“Palates must be tickled with dainties” (Kamet 34), F. S. Smythe says, andinventories at one point the luxuries bestowed on them by their expeditionsponsors—“caviar, pate de foie gras, tinned gherkins, Christmas puddings,tinned mushrooms” (Kangchenjunga 1930: 69). The 1933 Everest expedition,Shipton writes, had “every conceivable variety—half a dozen kinds of break-fast food, bacon, ham, beef, mutton, chicken, lobster, crab, salmon, herrings,cod-roes, asparagus, caviar, foie gras, smoked salmon, sausages, many kindsof cheese, a dozen varieties of biscuit” (197), and more. But these early,elegant adumbrations of menu-style consumption fail: Smythe admits thattheir luxurious food led to “ill health and upset stomachs” (Kangchenjunga69), and Shipton finds that “one and all, we agreed that the food was whollyunsatisfying” ([1943] 1956: 197). The problem, as Shipton sees it, is that thefoods he lists are all tinned, and his solution is a different kind of variety, inwhich tinned food is supplemented with “fresh, salted, or dried food” (197).Yet all writers agree that at high altitudes no amount of variety can tempt theclimber. J. B. L. Noel, a member of the 1924 expedition, states that duringa period of four days and nights at 23,000 feet he “ate no meat at all, andenjoyed a diet of Swiss milk mixed with strawberry jam” (1927: 170). Otherclimbers at altitude eat virtually nothing for days.

This dwindling desire for food correlates with a near-desperate cravingfor liquid—the one natural desire that is sharpened unbearably at high alti-tudes, for the large quantities required by climbers are virtually unobtainablegiven the limited amounts of fuel that can be transported for melting snow.The consequences can be devastating. “[W]ithout liquid we would deterio-rate rapidly” (Savage Arena 1982: 63) realizes Joe Tasker, facing a multi-dayfuel-less descent of Dunagiri. “Everything was so slow moving when wehad no water” (quoted in Curran 1987: 193), says Willi Bauer of the highcamp on K2 in 1986, where during a storm four climbers died of oxygen andfluid deprivation. Hermann Buhl’s account of his epic solo ascent of NangaParbat is dominated by thirst, which he describes at one point as becom-ing a “torture of hell, driving me literally mad” ([1956] 1989: 31). At altitude,however, profound exhaustion makes procuring any liquid an immense chal-lenge. Narratives of high-altitude mountaineering are rife with descriptionsof endless forced sessions of melting snow and brewing up tea. “Melting asaucepan full of snow for water and bringing it to the boil took so long,”writes Shipton in neat testimony to the problem, “that people tended to de-lude themselves that they had eaten a hearty meal” ([1943] 1956: 129–130).

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Even drinks that are imbibed, writes Francis Younghusband, are “not verycomforting, for at these high altitudes water boils at so low a temperaturethat a really hot drink cannot be had. Nothing more than tepid tea or soupcan be concocted” (Epic [1926] 1942: 133). Like food, however, water merelyaugments the period of survival at high altitude. The ambiguous nature ofhigh-altitude consumption of foodstuffs is that desire must be managed—adesire for water must be repressed or strenuously accommodated, and adesire for crucial calories heightened—but only in a realm where life can beprolonged, not sustained.

The other two responses to chronic under-consumption are also re-sponses to the crisis of an appetite invulnerable to variety. First, varietyquickly comes to be rewritten in the guise of careful food management onwhat Sherry Ortner calls the “military model” (1999: 47). Accounts of Britishexpeditions from the 1930s onward are already beginning to detail the di-ets of climbers and porters, and the shipment of foodstuffs, with militaryprecision.11 The “nucleus of each day’s food,” Ruttledge explains, was a “ba-sic ration containing all necessary vitamins and calories,” variety coming inthe shape of “‘Christmas boxes,’ many of them containing special delicaciesobtained largely from Messrs. Fortnum and Mason” ([1934] 1938: 44). AfterWorld War II, the military overtones become explicit. (Brigadier) John Hunt’s1953 expedition to Everest chooses to pack food in “man-day units,” a “sys-tem which is now widely used by armed forces operating in small groupsin the field” (Hunt 1953: 263). The founding principle of consumption hereis not the menu but the ration: a principle of controlled variety carefullymeasured in terms of optimal calorie and vitamin counts and designed tomanage the peril of under-consumption. These early military-style venturesinto food management find their counterpart in latter-day exercises of whatone might call performance mountaineering, in which individuals accom-plish near superhuman feats of endurance. Benoit Chamoux, for instance,attributes his successful 23-hour climb of K2 to a “special diet” that “spreadsout the various foods, taking into account their ‘profitability’ as far as thebody and effort are concerned” (Curran 1987: 203).12

Food supply on these expeditions could therefore be read ultimatelyas an orientalist celebration of Western-style management of “Third World”conditions, and accounts of high-altitude mountaineering do tend to fo-cus on the methodical process whereby ever-smaller amounts of food andother gear are transported up the mountain to a succession of high camps,which necessitates the supervision of teams of Sherpas working to supplythe climbers’ needs. In this respect, these narratives tend to be covert cel-ebrations of Western brains (management skills) and “native” brawn (theload-hauling capacities of porters, Sherpas, and yaks). “Ascending Everest,”writes Krakauer, is a “long, tedious process, more like a mammoth construc-tion project than climbing as I’d previously known it,” before calling expe-dition leader Rob Hall a “quartermaster nonpareil” who “pored over reams

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of computer printouts detailing logistical minutiae: menus, spare parts, tools,medicines, communications hardware, load-hauling schedules, yak availabil-ity” (1997: 95).

Hall’s menus, however, carry a subtly different semiotic function fromthe Sherpani’s postcolonial marketplace at the Khumbu Lodge, for they areprepared at an altitude where variety per se has little effect on the appetite andWestern climbers could subsist just as well, or just as poorly, on a daily dietof rice and dahl.13 Krakauer’s description of Hall’s task at Base Camp drawsattention instead to his managing function. In that respect, Hall’s role looksback to a very long line of famous expedition organizers—Charles GranvilleBruce, John Hunt, Chris Bonington, to name a few—whose command overa vast infrastructure of organization carried neoimperialist overtones insofaras they represented differences between Western models of organizationand the lifestyles of the indigenous peoples.14 If that difference is no longerabsolute or impermeable, as Krakauer’s anecdote about the Sherpani and thearrogant trekker demonstrates, it is still maintained by principles Rob Hallexemplifies. The Sherpani shows promise at menu management; Rob Hall,“nonpareil,” outshines her.

Yet life at Base Camp and above seems to run counter to the lure of anyform of consumption: one simply cannot eat. This fact structures the third re-sponse to the disappearing appetite, which is to embrace it as the provenanceand exemplification of the countermodern significances of mountaineering.Since the advent of British Alpinism in the nineteenth century, writings abouthigh adventure have expressed a quite conscious critique of an alienatingbourgeois-capitalist lifestyle and, more pressingly as the twentieth centurywore on, of cultures of over-consumption.15 Climbing, Jeff Achey writes, is a“rebel yell and a vision quest” (2004: 10), and expeditions to the Himalayasare commonly cast in that mold. Wade Brackenbury writes near the endof his adventure of having to go back to California, back to the “mundaneworld of schedules and appointments, of honking horns, congested traffic,pollution, and faces lined with stress” (1997: 208). In “those high, ancientranges” of Tibet, however, “I could soar above and be free of the rules anddrudgery that lashed out at me like the sting of birdshot” (209). PerhapsDavid Breashears puts it best: “Climbing Everest is about the deprivations,the challenge, the sheer physical beauty, the movement and rhythm. And it’spartly about risk. You learn about yourself, about what happens when youabandon comfort and warmth and a daily routine, the tyranny of the urgent”(quoted in Coburn 1997: 36).

Abandoning the “tyranny of the urgent” means experiencing life (toquote some book titles) “on the edge,” in “thin air,” “without mercy,” ina region where appetite often fails or cannot be satisfied; where no oneis indulged; where the rhythm of life is stripped down to subsistence andmere survival; where one’s own decisions count for everything; where life-threatening risk attends any accomplishment; and where toughness and

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endurance bring success. Tales of Himalayan climbing, writes Greg Child,evoke a “picture of a person being strained through a metaphysical sieve,separating each component of the inner being, shedding all but the com-ponents essential to survival, then forcing those vital remnants to functionat the limit” (1998: 17). As if such extreme conditions strip away all imma-terial cultural differences—so that U.S. or British climbers can go on visionquests—writers of high adventure frequently transform their narratives intotestaments to the fortitude of the human spirit. Watching climber Ed Viestursclimb slowly upward on Everest, Breashears writes: “I became aware thatit embodied the ancient struggle between man and nature, a struggle thatilluminates and exemplifies our questing, adventurous nature” (HimalayanQuest 2003: 16).

In that confrontation with nature, nothing expresses the transcendenthuman spirit so completely as subduing bodily appetites. Climbing high, asBreashears says, is “about the deprivations”; and privation turns out to havepositive countermodern significances. Hardships endured are necessary fora new appreciation of simple things, for example. Returning from a freezingday on the Northeast Ridge of K2 to be greeted with “steaming mugs ofhot chocolate,” Rick Ridgeway notes: “One of the lessons one learns fromhard climbing is how satisfying something simple can be” (1980: 123). ForTom Hornbein, the “tasting of hardship” on Everest is one reason for the“simplicity that strips the veneer off civilization and makes that which ismeaningful easier to come by” ([196] 2002: 180). The meaningfulness ofsimplicity, as Hornbein and Ridgeway already imply, can amount to a critiqueof the “veneer” of consumer capitalism. William O. Douglas, trekking throughthe Indian Himalaya (now Jammu and Kashmir) in 1951, begins by quizzinga guide about the “monotony” (1952: 90) of a diet consisting almost entirelyof butter tea and tsampa. Yet after encountering one tough old womanwho out-walks him, Douglas ponders that “civilization had made us soft andflabby. We were fat and weak in our protective environment” (140). The trickto regaining an “adventuresome spirit” is to “[e]at according to the height ofyour meal bag” (140), as an old Tibetan proverb suggests.

To many climbers, deprivation signals not merely the quality of theadventure but the route to visionary experience. Wilfred Noyce, high onEverest in 1953, for instance, asks at one point: “What for supper? Therewas sausage-meat . . . now unpalatable. I decided to stew it up in the soup.When it was half-cooked, a not unusual event occurred. The Primus ran outof fuel” (1954: 167). But this prosaic moment leads to sudden transcendenceas Noyce looks at the spectacular scene and finds:

Something here beyond me, outside me, “far more deeply interfused”than my muddled brain could care to know, lent a magic to the air thatmade human effort meaningless. I was, for the moment, again near toNirvana.

Heartened . . . I went back to cook sausage-meat in soup. (168)

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Hermann Buhl experiences a similar moment on Nanga Parbat when, despitehis torturing thirst, he finds himself “on that spot, the target of my dreams,and I was the first human being since Creation’s day to get there” (1989: 27).Bivouacking in a crevasse above 23,000 feet on Annapurna, having gonedays without food or drink, Maurice Herzog “floated in a kind of peace-ful happiness” as “[e]verything material about me seemed to have droppedaway” ([1952] 1997: 222–223).

Such moments adumbrate some of the deeper symbolic meanings of(non-)consumption among the high summits. High-altitude mountaineeringbrings climbers face to face with elemental conditions virtually unobtainablein the West, whose inhabitants, buffered from authentic experience in theirluxurious over-consumption and endlessly unfulfilled yearnings for gratifica-tion, can feel, as T. J. Jackson Lears writes of the psychological experienceof consumer capitalism, profoundly unreal or “weightless” ([1981] 1994: 8).If deprivation must be managed to accomplish any climbing goals at all,its constant presence is also responsible for the countermodern meaningsof high-altitude mountaineering. High altitude brings Westerners to one ofthe few sites where hunger can be almost completely suppressed or trans-posed into an abstract appetite (for the summit, for conquest, for victory),and where the consumption of food therefore seems to shed the dense webof socioeconomic meanings that Krakauer exploits so skillfully in the sceneat Namche Bazaar. In harmony with the notion that climbing high allowsone to reclaim some original and authentic “human spirit” beyond the realmof cultural difference, entering the spatial and temporal boundaries of theDeath Zone ensures that food becomes reducible to its substance, to its pureutility—to so much weight to carry, so many calories, so much longer tosurvive.

Entry into the Death Zone, however, also begins to structure a counter-narrative, for it poses to the sojourner there a stark imperative: return toconsumption, or die. High-altitude deprivation restores the meaningfulnessof consumption, making it a vital and consequential act in the face of in-credible hardship. Joe Tasker, for instance, devotes two separate paragraphs(72, 74) to detailing the “snow mushes” he and Dick Renshaw devise on thedescent from Dunagiri, mixing a little melted snow with “bits of oats amongthe dirt in the bottom of our rucksacks” (74). Moreover, most tales of sur-vival among the high peaks end with ecstatic accounts of appetite regained.George Bell, returning with his companions to the valley near Askole (innorthern Pakistan) after ten harrowing days pinned down in a storm on theAbruzzi ridge of K2, writes that “we made hogs of ourselves” ([1954] 1994:153): “We stuffed ourselves with apricots, chickens, eggs, grapes, apples,pears, and cucumbers, for the fertile valley was yielding luxuries unknownto the grim regions beyond” (153); one lunch for Bell was composed of “tenhard-boiled eggs, two small chickens, and chuppatis” (153). Wilfrid Noyce

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speaks of his “strongest memory” of the trip out from Everest being theirdesire for food: “In order to satisfy our greed, it was necessary to plundervillages all along the way. . . . That night we had seven chickens, but most de-clared this not to be enough” (1954: 274). Peter Boardman, after ascendingChangabang, writes: “Unlimited food, unlimited brews—this was Heaven”(1978: 102). Writers in fact often represent the joys of being reintroduced toconsumption as a transcendent and magical experience: near death, downfrom the shoulder of K2, where four climbers died from lack of food andoxygen, Kurt Diemberger sees Camp 2 as a place of “pure magic” ([1989]1990: 270), where, inside the tent, Willi Bauer is “squatting . . . like a sorcererswathed in wreathing vapors, stirring a big pot” which has “thick, swollengrains floating around in it” (270). To Alexandra David-Neel, also, after sixstarving days crossing the Aigni La [pass], it appears that “beings rushed upfrom the depth of my body toward my mouth to feed upon the thick mixtureof tsampa, water, curd, and turnips” ([1927] 1982: 178).

Yet if the countermodern significations of high-altitude deprivation re-sist the hegemony of bourgeois ease and over-consumption, they also resistthe chronic under-consumption Westerners see as typical of the Himalayanregion. While George Bell devours his giant chicken and egg “lunch for thesahib,” he takes a moment to notice that the “dandy wallahs [Bell’s carriers]were perhaps a bit depressed by seeing me eat with such gusto” ([1954]1994: 153). With life and appetite restored, Bell reverts to overtly colonialistassumptions whereby his hunger trumps that of the people who are carryinghis injured body. This is wholly in keeping with the more-or-less consciouscultural superiority writers on early expeditions to the Himalayas evincetoward porters and Sherpas—the kind of attitude that has J. B. L. Noel com-menting: “If they are happy, fit, and well-fed, these simple-minded peoplewill work with the strength of giants” (1927: 294–295). Krakauer’s tale of theencounter at the Khumbu Lodge, which inverts Noel’s sahib/porter relation-ship and places the Sherpani in charge of local resources, and Krakauer’slater approbation of Hall’s assessment that “we would have absolutely nochance of getting to the summit of Everest without [the Sherpas’] help” (1997:68), are expressly designed to counter such very common assessments asthese.

That “flexible positional superiority” of which Said speaks nonethelessemerges subtly in dozens of more recent accounts of trekking and climbingin the Himalayas, which preserve countermodern values within a deeper,though occluded, embrace of Western-style patterns of consumption.The agriculture-based subsistence economies of Nepal and Tibet play animportant role here in allowing Western visitors to rewrite the meaningof the terrain.16 “I have the universe all to myself” (1978: 127), says PeterMatthiessen in The Snow Leopard, standing elatedly atop the Namdo Passin Nepal, waiting for his Sherpa porters to arrive. Matthiessen codes that

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particular land grab in terms of his quest for Zen enlightenment. But whathe articulates in terms of transcendence, others embrace in a more mundanebut subtler re-visioning of socioeconomic and geopolitical boundaries. TomHornbein, hiking through the heavily terraced foothills of Nepal, notes that:“For all the size, for all the intransigent power of the ice-encrusted wall tothe north, wilderness, as western man defines it, did not exist. . . . here manlived in continuous harmony with the land. . . . It was an enviable symbiosis”([196] 2002: 45). It is also a crucial symbiosis for Hornbein’s symbolicpurposes, for if the Nepalese sculpt the land and create farming commu-nities and live in harmony with their landscape here, the “ice-encrustedwall to the north” represents the limits of their cultural reach even thoughtechnically that land lies within Nepal.17 It is “beyond man’s control” (1997:36), as Broughton Coburn says, and Greg Child, after pondering balancesbetween man and nature, agrees: “Perhaps the reason we were drawn to themountains was precisely because they were not man’s place at all” (1998:83).

Krakauer’s Into Thin Air likewise reconfigures the significations of theNepalese landscape. As if to sunder his relationship to the kind of “enviablesymbiosis” Hornbein and others saw in Nepal, Krakauer’s descriptions ofNepal on the trek in to Everest are determinedly pragmatic. “[E]arly West-ern climbers,” according to Krakauer, regarded the country as an “earthlyparadise, a real-life Shangri-la” (1997: 57), and it is this romantic misap-prehension that the scene in the Khumbu Lodge, which underscores theNepaleses’ determination to live in the untidy “modern world,” is designedto puncture. But later, Krakauer sets the Sherpani’s entrepreneurial ambi-tions against a different, more sweeping assessment of Nepal: “It wasn’twilderness, and hadn’t been for hundreds of years,” for “[e]very scrap ofarable land had been terraced and planted with barley, bitter buckwheat,or potatoes” (52). Krakauer looks backward to the subsistence economystill visible in every acre of tilled ground and forward to the economic re-structurings tourism makes possible. But both perspectives undergird therhetorical force of “it wasn’t wilderness.” Like Hornbein’s “wilderness . . . didnot exist,” Krakauer equates the geopolitical entity of Nepal with habitableland while freeing the terrain of the higher regions from the herders andfarmers—whose country it, in fact, is—for a new set of meanings organizedaround the ostensibly non-economic activities in which climbers participateon the mountain. Under-consumption in the mountains, in short, takes on awholly different set of meanings than under-consumption in the foothills. Itis this act of de-nationalizing Nepal (and Tibet or Pakistan in other accounts)that allows writers such as Breashears to read an “ancient struggle betweenman and nature” in the landscape—and to allow writers to make symbolicclaims about the “human condition” in terms of Western climbers who, intheir massive efforts to achieve the summit, undergo an apotheosis as theadventuring human spirit.18

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III

Published in the same year as Into Thin Air, Wade Brackenbury’s Yak Butterand Black Tea also testifies to the complex symbolic narratives consumingfood in high Asia can foster. Yak Butter details the efforts of three West-erners, and ultimately Brackenbury alone, to reach the valley of the Drungpeople in Tibet, which they believe (mistakenly) has not been visited byWesterners—a journey made complex by the fact of the area having beenclosed to foreigners since the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Once more, actsof food consumption play a central role in expressing cultural values andnegotiating cultural differences. One symbolic resolution of the narrative, forinstance, is Brackenbury’s solo journey through difficult mountain passes tothe Drung valley, when he, like so many mountaineers making a summitpush before him, relies entirely on his own skills at survival and on thefood and shelter he carries with him. And it is at this point, characteristically,that implicit hints of a journey toward self-knowledge become obvious. Heleaves for the high pass with dreams of “being pursued by a great blackbird” (1997: 171), and finds the way to the Drung valley accompanied by avisionary reliving of scenes with his father.

Yet this visionary experience is a momentary relief from Brackenbury’spreoccupation with the brute materiality of subsistence. Several factors keepthe issue of acquiring food in the foreground. First, Brackenbury explains,the “constant exertion, coupled with the high altitude, meant that I wasburning a tremendous number of calories. . . . As a result, I was hungry allthe time and found a large part of my thinking devoted to food” (1997: 120).19

Second, though the travelers carry some dehydrated food for a planned finalpush through high mountain passes, they have to spend much of their timescrounging food from local villagers. Third, the party constantly confrontsthe problem of traveling within a subsistence economy: there is no surplusfood available for purchase. After they complain when promised suppliesfail to materialize, one villager tells them: “You just don’t understand. . . .

You’re used to being able to buy what you want, but here there isn’t muchextra of anything. When you get some eggs from a family in the morning,those are the eggs that the family was going to eat that day” (77). In lightof the terrific constraints on consumption in a true subsistence economy farfrom the usual trekking routes, the only possible trade, Brackenbury comesto realize, could be by barter.

In the end, however, the Westerners must depend, not on barter, but ona kind of anti-economy: that is, on the incredible generosity of the Tibetans.At virtually every stop, the travelers share the villagers’ meals, relying on themto such an extent that their occasional payments of money or Brackenbury’sskillful chiropractic adjustments seem increasingly at odds with the villagers’largesse—to whom the money in any case generally means little. In termsof the symbolic meanings of his journey, this redefinition of the possibilities

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of consuming food is surprisingly powerful. Importantly, it allows readers toactivate the significance of the Drung creation myth Brackenbury inserts aspreface to the book, and which begins:

A long time ago when the world was young, the land was covered withpeople. The forests were filled with the sounds of many kinds of animals,all good for food. The good soil produced more corn and vegetables andbarley than all the people could eat, so there was plenty of everythingfor all and no reason for unhappiness. (1997: xi)

In one sense, this legend of a land of plenty stands in stark contrast to theactual situation of the Tibetans, who, Brackenbury shows, barely enduretheir encounters with a precarious environment. Yet the Tibetans, accordingto Brackenbury, exemplify a non-commodified approach to consumption—they simply share whatever they have—which their visitors from lands ofconsumerist plenty find a compelling countermodern alternative.

Just prior to his solo journey through the high pass, for example, Brack-enbury spends the night with an old couple who, despite having no suppliesbeyond “a leather bag full of butter, and another with tsampa,” and no im-plements beyond “one cooking pot [and] one tea kettle,” take him “right infor tea and food. I shared my buckwheat bread, and they cooked me severalears of corn. Neither could speak any Chinese, but they jabbered away inTibetan, seeming to care not at all that I couldn’t respond. We laughed to-gether and ate” (1997: 169). The by-now-familiar gestures toward the value ofnon-commodified consumption—the Tibetans have literally two utensils andthree items of food in their “small shanty,” yet the meal is joyful—accompanyhints of a pre-lapsarian state. They communicate without language, and en-joy a magical communion (breaking bread, eating and laughing together),for which the Tibetans produce food seemingly out of nowhere. To this cer-emony Brackenbury contributes his own bread. (Actually, the bread given tohim by other Tibetans the day before.) Quiet as it is, the scene promotes anethos of communal sharing to place against the lonely strife of the one thatfollows, and underscores the continuing relevance of the Drung myth. TheTibetans preserve paradisal virtues in a terrain where there is barely enoughof anything for anybody, as opposed to the West, where there is plenty ofeverything for all and every reason for unhappiness. For Brackenbury, thelack of food for excess consumption is what makes Tibet the potential repos-itory of symbolic values set against an ethos of endless over-consumption.And it is precisely the kind of scene that Krakauer skewers in Into Thin Air:the Sherpani is more interested in entrepreneurship than in transcendence.

Yet in Yak Butter the travelers’ journeys do not so much resolve assharpen the questions the book poses about an appropriate relationshipto consumption in high Asia. Though the travelers eschew the commonexpedition-approach to trekking and mountaineering in which all supplies

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are carefully managed and then carried by porters, and though their statedgoal is to escape the destructive commodity capitalism of the West, their trektoward the Drung valley nonetheless subtly takes Western-style consumptionas their governing assumption. For example, the travelers never abandon the“menu” approach to consumption. The travelers desire variety. “People hadbeen bringing us food,” Brackenbury states at one point, “but it was thewrong kind. We had enough walnuts and cucumbers for two months, butgetting eggs, meat, potatoes, butter, and salt seemed to be about impossible”(1997: 69). And later, as they slip away from the Chinese authorities whohave been holding them, Brackenbury, like so many expedition plannersbefore him, takes the time to inventory their food supply: “We had six days’worth of freeze-dried dinners, thirty-six Power Bars, ten pounds of powderedmilk, around three and a half pounds of yak butter, six pounds of buckwheatnoodles, seven pounds of rice, six packs of instant ramen noodles, about apound of dried yak meat, five very small potatoes, a pound of tsampa, andnine pounds of canned meat” (119–120).

This demand for a “menu” of foods points toward the cultural differencethat appears more insistently as the book progresses, which is that the West-erners, in contrast to the Tibetans, define their lifestyle in terms of choice.The shape of the entire adventure and narrative hinges on certain choices thetravelers constantly discuss: whether to approach the Drung valley by wayof villages or through high mountain passes; whether to avoid the authoritiesor try to enlist their help; whether, in the face of opposition, they will presson to the valley at all. Two of the adventurers choose to return; Brackenburyproceeds to the valley. That decision to choose the valley is crucial for himbecause, as he eventually makes clear, exercising choices signifies a kind ofspiritual awakening to the endless possibilities of the human spirit. When hedecides to return to the States rather than wander alone in the mountains, forinstance, he feels “a great welling-up of joy, not because of the choice I hadmade to reject the fantasy—to go back and continue the life I had left—butbecause it was a choice” (1997: 209).

An earlier scene where Brackenbury buys corn flour from a villager fora ridiculously high price provides an important contrast. The villager needsmoney to buy medicine for his sick mother. The next day, Brackenbury re-turns and gives the man forty yuan for two sacks of flour, having to fightoff five young children who “stared on in apprehension as they watchedme try to trade what must have seemed to them a few scraps of paper forwhat was probably all the food in the house” (1997: 79). The ironies of thescene are multiple. The villager does have a choice; but it is a choice thatpits vital medicine against all the food in the house rather than choice whichis interpreted menu-style, where one selection should be as gratifying as an-other because accommodated within a context of abundance. Brackenbury,for his part, claims that he was forced to take the family’s food because “wedesperately needed more food” (78). Yet it is clear that at any time during

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the trip the Westerners could return to their own countries. Brackenbury’sdecision is “menu-based” in the sense that his efforts to prolong the adven-ture do not negate the possibility of returning to a consumer paradise—thefall-back position whose allure can always be traced in the travelers’ hungerfor more food.

This prospect of (relatively) well-off Westerners depending on some ofthe poorest inhabitants of the globe for their fantasies of a pre-consumeristShangri-La is an unpalatable one, and Brackenbury does reveal a graduallydawning shame for so disrupting the lives of the villagers. Having lied to onevillager whose family provides him with a “large dinner of buckwheat breadand pork with . . . lots of butter tea” (1997: 167) and a parting gift of a “giantround loaf of buckwheat bread” (169)—the loaf he shares with the old cou-ple the following night—Brackenbury writes: “I felt dirty as I walked away.I suddenly saw myself as I imagined they must see me—a selfish Westerner,coming suddenly into their quiet lives, then disappearing, leaving troublebehind and them to pick up the pieces” (168). It “seemed wrong,” Brack-enbury notes, “to lie to and endanger the villagers who freely shared foodand helped us in so many ways” (169). This scene is crucial to the symbolicmoves that follow. This recognition of selfishness, followed immediately bythe communal supper with the old couple to which he contributes food,frames the solo journey to the Drung valley—the self-reliance and the (self-)discoveries he now achieves given new weight because they are dissoci-ated from selfishness on the one hand, and enabled by non-commodifiedconsumption on the other.

Consuming food in Yak Butter always carries these kind of uneasyand shifting symbolic meanings. At its richest, the book avoids the rhetor-ical sleight of hand manifest in so many accounts of climbing in highAsia whereby a high-altitude suppression of appetite underpins counter-modern values. Brackenbury cannot afford the trope of meaningful non-consumption. He cannot afford the porters and the variety of food broughtfrom the West; that is to say, he cannot afford the apparatus of food manage-ment that enables high-altitude mountaineering to proceed as if it were notdependent on a wholly different socioeconomic regime than the ones typi-fying the Himalayan region. Brackenbury’s and his co-travelers’ dependenceon the Tibetan people places them in a perpetually changing relationshipto economic systems. They choose to step outside a capitalist economy andare forced in turn beyond the traditional farming/barter economic activitiesof the Tibetans. Yet they remain in relation to those economies and to thecultural assumptions that accompany them. Like so many other twentieth-century accounts of adventure in high Asia, privation in Brackenbury’s booksignifies a deep ambivalence toward Western consumerism. To choose pri-vation is to oppose an ethos of self-gratification. Yet that choice returns himto menu-based consumption in its privileging of the very act of choosing.Unsurprisingly, for it repeats a theme that ends virtually every narrative of

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high adventure in the Himalayas, one of his first actions on returning toa consumer economy in the tourist town of Dali is to enter the TibetanFreedom Restaurant, where he “order[s] four dinners” (1997: 221).

IV

Down for a few days’ rest from the west face of Changabang, Peter Board-man, a famous British climber, articulates more explicitly than Brackenburywhat I have called the menu-style underpinnings of adventures in the highHimalayas: “Joe [Tasker] and I were here seeking a survival situation. Wehad been struggling for survival not because of force of circumstance, butbecause of a deliberate choice we had made. Our adventure was a pam-pered luxury that we could afford to enjoy, it was pure self-indulgence”(1978: 107). Few moments in these narratives reach this level of insight. Farmore commonly—and this is also generally true of Boardman’s and Tasker’sbooks—writers engineer a symbolic narrative whereby deprivation comesto signify a complex countermodernism: an eroding appetite counters fearsof an existence committed to over-consumption, returns mountaineers to aprimal scene where eating and drinking matter only as a matter of survival,and makes “pure self-indulgence” comprehensible, once the climb or trek isover, as reparation for privations endured.

Boardman’s oxymoronic emphasis on the luxurious underpinnings ofstruggling for survival suggests that Himalayan adventure narratives can beplaced productively alongside the more overtly consumerist experiences ofculinary and adventure tourism. All are concerned with the restoration incultures of consumption of appetite: the “little more,” as Hilary Howard putsit understatedly, that adds spice to an existence spent sipping fruity drinksaround generic pools. Amid the “drudgery” (Brackenbury) and the “tyranny”of the “daily routine” (Breashears) of mass capitalist society, the culturalanxiety over appetites becoming McDonaldized and jaded within a regimeof compulsory over-consumption, where material comfort goes hand in handwith unsatisfied desire, is a powerful one.

Himalayan adventuring, like food adventuring, and like adventuretourism, aims to impart meaning, value, authenticity, and “weightiness” tothe appetite once more. That it structures value through a symbolic languageof deprivation is in this sense immaterial. Deprivation and the response toit ultimately produce a logic explaining why material consumption is evennecessary. And more: by making appetite into a compelling desire for some-thing, an abstract and transcendent force impelling the “human spirit” onwardand upward, these narratives expose the metonymic foundation upon whichthe trope of appetite (for food) comes to construct a broader discourse ondesire. It is on this basis that we might speak of an equivalence between theculinary tourist’s quest for authentic cuisine and the reverse consumption

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Krakauer and others describe as a function of living at high altitude. Bothmetaphorize desires thwarted or unfulfilled, and both counter with a questfor authentic experience expressed in a symbolic register of abstemious-ness: refraining from mass food production in the first case, refraining fromvirtually all food in the second.

The relations among Himalayan adventurer, adventure tourist, and culi-nary tourist are nowhere clearer than in the trope of the menu, indispensableto the culinary tourist and supposedly supererogatory to the high-altitudeadventurer. In fact, as Boardman recognizes most powerfully, Himalayanadventures imply a menu-based approach to experience on the part of theWestern participant; they are choices enabled by an economy and a cultureof superabundance. Having the luxury of choice is what makes a struggle forsurvival into self-indulgence, and near-starvation into a singular experienceakin to assisting Buddhist monks in a food ceremony. This becomes plainin the distinction these narratives draw between deprivation on the menu-model and the systemic under-consumption among the indigenous peoplesof the region, which is why often-astonishing accounts of hardships under-gone still need to be read as orientalist in their genesis and effect—and whythe Sherpani’s offer of a menu in Krakauer’s little parable of postcolonialcapitalist transformations still cannot quite displace the insistent, aggressivevoice of the ugly American tourist who demands “we like see men-u.”

NOTES

1. See The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976).2. For Long, culinary tourism “offers a way to share our basic humanity” (“Culinary Tourism,”

1998: 204); Heldke argues instead that without stringent precautions “food adventurers [can] play a directand important role in the colonizing project” (2003: 57).

3. See Bourdieu (1987).4. See Teltscher (2006) and Stewart (2009) for fascinating analyses of Bogle’s journey.5. Among the other books about the 1904 invasion were Laurence Austine Waddell’s Lhasa and

Its Mysteries, Perceval Landon’s The Opening of Tibet, and Edmund Candler’s The Unveiling of Lhasa, allpublished in 1905.

6. I have in mind here John Urry’s work (1990) on the hegemony of the gaze in mass-markettourism.

7. I follow the lead here of Sherry Ortner, Reuben Ellis, and Peter L. Bayers, the three scholarswho have worked most interestingly on the neoimperialist and orientalist underpinnings of Himalayanadventure literature.

8. Inga Bryden applies a similar argument still more broadly as a way of “[r]evitalising food”around the world: “Resourcefulness (the exaltation of the scrap or leftover), creativity, inventiveness, andmixing-it-all-up to taste are celebrated regardless of where a food has travelled from and where it is goingto” (24).

9. Jim Wickwire, the first American to summit K2, returns from that near-death experience“shrunken” and “sunken” (Ridgeway 1980: 300, 301). Joe Tasker also cites one of the filmmakers onthe 1980/1981 winter expedition to Everest, Graham Robinson, who “could hardly eat any of the food”and who “seemed to shrink visibly before our eyes”; it is, Tasker explains, a “feature of living at altitude”(Cruel Way 1981: 86).

10. During their epic hunting trip across the Himalayas, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. and Kermit Roo-sevelt find a different way of dealing with the problem of high altitudes, where an “onion can be boiled

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literally for hours and still remains hard as a rock” ([1926] 1929: 13): They bring along a newly patentedpressure cooker.

11. Many members of these early expeditions were recruited from the military; Bayers providesan extensive list (2003: 80).

12. I am therefore not fully persuaded by Ortner’s argument that recent “Alpine” ascents “clearlyarose . . . from a reaction to the technologism and militarism of the earlier expeditions, which appeared tohave thrown in their lot with modernity after all” (1999: 196). In fact, such “light and fast” endeavors de-pend on cutting-edge technologies (particularly in clothing) and detailed pre-planning if the ostentatiousrisk taking is to have any chance of success.

13. I choose the example from Joe Tasker’s Everest The Cruel Way: Early in the expedition theclimbers find the Sirdar (Dawa) and perhaps other Sherpas eating their canned food while “our mealswere a tedious affair of rice and dahl” (1981: 39).

14. Ellis, speaking of the first British expeditions bringing bottled oxygen to Everest, remarks thatthe British interpreted the technology as a “display of national and racial superiority, a symbolic constructconsistent with the many representations that Europeans have made to themselves of their imagined rightto empire” (2001: 150).

15. For an entertaining narrative of the antimodern underpinnings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Alpinism in Switzerland, see Fleming (2000: 11–12, 83–85).

16. My argument here parallels that of Peter Bayers, who argues that the British naming of Hi-malayan peaks “effectively usurped the mountains from the indigenous populations” (2003: 6), and thatof Reuben Ellis, who notes that in John Noel’s Through Tibet to Everest (1927) the “mountain, the siteof exploration, is radically set apart from the experientially defined region of toil and desolation,” for itpossesses a “geography that is symbolically British” (2001: 146).

17. A similar strategy emerges in National Geographic’s brief history of “The Sherpas” in Everest:Mountain Without Mercy (Coburn 1997), which is entitled “Herders, Farmers, Traders, and Lamas.”

18. In a similar vein, Greg Child, at the end of one grueling trek in to Base Camp on the Baltoroglacier, dismisses the expedition’s surly Balti porters and watches them sprint off down the glacier in agathering snowstorm, remarking “We are home, the Balti are not” (1998: 167). And Sue Cobb, apparentlywithout irony, celebrates her 1988 expedition’s goal to climb Everest without Sherpa support thus: “Takea large, self-sustained, all-American team across China and Tibet. . . . Open the Himalayas to youngAmerican climbers and senior citizens. Celebrate the cowboy spirit that opened the West! CelebrateWyoming! Celebrate America!” (1989: 8).

19. Brackenbury’s “high altitude” is still below the altitude at which mountaineers’ appetites gen-erally shut down completely.

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