How food and gambling share roots in human history

The French comedy The Sheep Has Five Legs (1954) has a scene where gamblers bet on which of the two sugar cubes a fly will sit on. As it buzzes endlessly around the closed room, the camera focuses on their sweaty faces, transfixed by its flight. It is a depiction of the primal power of gambling, perhaps all the more when combined with something equally basic as food.

One of the most ancient forms of gaming started after eating a sheep. Their roughly cuboid ankle bones were collected and thrown like primitive dice.

Almost anything can be used, including food items, or eating itself. Cleopatra famously bet with Mark Anthony over who could offer the most expensive meal. After Anthony’s lavish feast, the Egyptian queen dissolved a huge pearl in vinegar and drank it, outspending him and winning the bet.

More recently, in 2017, professional poker player Mike Noori bet he could eat $1,000 worth of McDonald’s food in 36 hours. But he failed to account for how cheap the food was. Despite ordering the most expensive items, like guacamole, he couldn’t even cross $100 worth before giving up. Many restaurants use a variety of this as a means of publicity — if you can eat a huge, fixed, amount of their food in a certain time, you get it free. Most people can’t, but they come to try and it’s good business.

Really dedicated gamblers eat as they play. John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, was said to do just that, which is why he had meat served to him between two slices of bread. Historians have questioned this, pointing to his intense work schedule, but the sandwich name has stuck. It’s true that many gamblers prefer cold, easy-to-eat food, though a hospitality insider says that Goa’s boat casinos are allowed to serve only cold food because of the risk of fire: “Think very average wedding banquet,” with particular focus on food from where most patrons come, like Hyderabad and Punjab. The insider stuck to curd-rice, a dish I would never have associated with casinos.

Food has been used to circumvent gambling restrictions. When slot machines, which throw up combinations of symbols, were invented, they couldn’t initially spew out prizes. When you got a winning combination, you could claim a drink or cigars. By the time mechanisms for spilling out coins were devised, the popularity of the machines was attracting opposition. To avoid being banned, machines were adapted to pay out chewing gum. This was usually fruit flavoured, so fruit symbols were used, a system that continues.

These gum gambling machines are still banned in many places, because, as a judge ruled, they “appealed to the player’s propensity to gamble, and that is vice��. The Indian government’s recent action to ban online gaming stems from the same spirit, though it raises questions why casinos and lotteries continue. It’s true that online gaming has fewer barriers to entry and hence might enable gambling addictions more. But if there is any lesson to be drawn from the long, mostly futile battle against alcohol addiction, it is that banning the substance rarely works, since alternatives are easily found. Only encouraging a balanced approach to the activity really works.

This debate is not new. In 19th century India, the British tried to outlaw gambling, with a particular focus on rain gambling, which was common among Marwaris, who were also major grain merchants. Rain gambling may have started with tracking cloud movements in their desert homelands of Rajasthan, where they were crucial for harvests. It evolved into a widespread activity based on rain gauges, which Ritu Birla in Stages of Capital, her history of the evolution of India’s financial markets, argues persuasively played a role in building systems of trust in markets and the practice of forward trading. British attempts to ban it were counterproductive, something that perhaps the government today should consider.