Hunger and bread in Malta
Descriptions of Malta dating from the 16th and 17th centuries, starting with the report of the officials sent to scout out the islands as a potential base for the Knights of St John in 1524, concurred that Malta was a land of hunger - sterile, devoid of trees and dependent on Sicily for its food. The sterility of the land was a hazard which worried all grandmasters right up to the end of the 18th century, when the knights fled as Napoleon arrived. Malta was a sterilissima isola. Grandmaster Perellos, in the early 18th century, refused permission for a Carmelite friary in Vittoriosa, claiming that the island could not sustain any more people.
Travellers’ reports from the 1530s onwards refer to bread as the staple diet of the Maltese. This has its echoes in our own time, when the price of bread remains one of the very few to be regulated by the state. Jean Quintin d’Autun wrote of Malta: “The island is not very productive of corn. Malta is very fortunate for this one reason namely, that Sicily, very fertile in all kinds of grain, lies nearby and is for the inhabitants as good as a granary where otherwise they would die of hunger. And the people,......conscious of their country’s sterility, live a very frugal life.”
Yet Quintin d’Autun refers to Malta’s “plantations of orchards” with olives, vines and fig-trees, “besides every other kind of fruit”. He also mentions the “excellent” honey which “bees produce from thyme, violets and other flowers”. Malta also produces cumin, he wrote, which is “spread over the bread’s crust, giving it a very delicious taste”. Quintin d’Autun described the use of what must be a type of artichoke: “[T]he inhabitants make use of certain kinds of thistles instead of wood, which together with dried cows’ dung, is used for the baker’s oven... The people also feed on other thistles; not those which we, along with the Italians, now eat with much relish... these are much more sour.”
The secretary of the Papal envoy, Monsignor Visconti, writing in 1582, reported that “the greater part of the people eat pane misturato” - bread made of a mixture of barley and wheat – “vegetables and latticini” (cheeses).
Maltese sayings are replete with references to bread, testifying to its crucial status in Maltese life. A well-off person is ħobżu maħbuż, which is translated literally as “his bread is baked”. A man who loses his job and his income is said to have “lost his loaf” (tilef ħobżu). Finding out about somebody necessitates the question, “What kind of bread does he eat?” (x’ħobż jiekol dak?), because the poor ate one kind of bread and the rich ate another. A person’s desperate need of something was described as “he needs it like bread” (jeħtieġu bħall-ħobż li jiekol). The chance to earn a bit of money is still called “ħaġa li fiha biċċa ħobż” (there’s bread in it). A profitless job is described by the opposite – there’s no bread in it.
Recurrent crop failure and the insufficiency or complete lack of staple food products gave rise to widespread malnutrition, a high death rate, and impaired resistance to disease. The Maltese lived under the constant threat of starvation, and the historical experience of hunger obviously had biological and cultural implications. A poor person is still referred to today as “bil-ġuħ” or “imġewwaħ” – hungry, or starving.