Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants:
How little we know about these bodies, these bodies that do the eating! Our ignorance is fed by our assumption that peasant bodies were the same as our bodies. They were not. The difference can be summarized thus: we have bodies, which we carry about in our minds, whereas they were their bodies. The head had not yet won victory over the medieval notion of the bowels as the centre of the body. Food, in the eating, went straight to this centre. In France in the late nineteenth century, the head still did not have much to do with reason. In Gascony, there was no patios word for brain, and ‘ideas’ weighed not on the mind, but on the stomach.