In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (20 page)

You and Your Beautiful Hide

He was the most elongated man I’d ever met, seven feet tall, with ears that hung down to his shoulders. Would have made a terrier pup jealous. The Masai of northern Kenya are famous for elongating their earlobes to enhance their natural good looks, and his must have made him look pretty sweet. His outfit, however, left a little to be desired. He’d given up those traditional bloodred Masai robes and spears for a grimy guard’s uniform and a shotgun, which he pointed at everyone who dared to enter the courtyard of our little hotel in the town of Isiolo. But he was definitely a Masai and loved nothing better than to talk about his family’s cattle.

“We only have a few,” he told me sadly while we shared a cigarette. “Ah, but they are just so beautiful. If you saw them . . .”

Everybody loves a good steak, but the beefy passions of the Masai people of northeast Africa are so intense, so soul-consuming, that anthropologists have suggested they suffer from a collective neurosis called “the cattle complex.” They pray to the beasts. They polish their horns. They drink their blood. They even name their children after cows. And every night, dressed in traditional crimson robes, spears in hand, the giant warrior-herders sing their beloved moo-moos to sleep.

God gave you to us long ago
You are in our hearts
Your smell is sweet to us.

But is this true love? Anthropologists Keith Hart and Louise Sperling found crucial differences between the Masai and Hindu cattle fetishes. For one thing, the Masai eat their loved ones. Reluctantly, true, and they get the animals drunk before their throats are slit, but eat them they do, and apparently with gusto. The wills of high-ranking tribesman usually contain instructions on which members of his herd should be eaten at his wake and which skins he wishes to be buried in. In fact, it’s actually a point of pride to live upon nothing but cow products, mainly milk and blood mixed together, or a kind of cheese made by curdling milk with cow urine. The only combination not allowed is milk and meat together, and the Masai will always take a special herb to make them vomit out any milk they have drunk before they eat beef. To eat anything “not cow,” or even mix vegetables with cow products, is allowed, but it’s terribly déclassé. The ultimate disgrace is to be banned to one of the tribes that actually grow and eat vegetables.

Equally odd is that although the Masai language has more than ten adjectives exclusively devoted to describing a cow’s charms, they appear to be indifferent to the quality of any given animal. It’s only the
size
of a man’s herd that matters, and the chief’s advisers are chosen not based on blood relation or geography, as is typical, but by the number of animals they own. I should say the number of animals they
stole
; the Masai are notorious cattle raiders (they don’t view it as theft), and at one point owned 1 million head among forty thousand people. The anthropologists’ conclusion was that a cow is no more sacred to the Masai than a lucrative NASDAQ share is to a Wall Street stockbroker. “Pastoral nomads (like the Masai) are some of the thickest-skinned capitalists on earth,” they wrote in their paper
Cattle as Capital
, “and view the cattle as self-reproducing commodities . . . representing future consumption.” Their reluctance to sell or eat their animals is simply the capitalist’s eternal hope for higher returns on the morrow.

The security guard I met that night would probably not have agreed. It was just one of those chance encounters that happens when one travels about mindlessly for months at a time. I was trying to meet a friend up toward the Ethiopian border and had gotten stuck in Isiolo because bandits had made trucks shy about heading north. I certainly had no interest in cows. But it’s hard to avoid the topic when talking to Masai. My friend that starry desert night told me how the god Engapi used to send all the world’s cattle to the Masai on a string between Heaven and Earth. When the Masai carelessly allowed the string to break, Engapi sentenced them to a life of “gathering” up all the cattle that were (of course) rightfully theirs. He told me that in his father’s day his tribe had owned hundreds of cattle. He even reminisced about the great cattle wars when the men would form raiding bands with names like “Red Bull,” because naming the group after a bull made them more attractive to the cattle. One of their favorite tricks was to shoot arrows up in the air; when the dirt-loving farmers covered their heads with their shields, he said, they were shot in the stomach. Ha! Ha! Ha! He laughed, throwing his shotgun over his shoulder. Such foolish people!

The Sadistic Chef

Infants are ripped from the womb and thrown into boiling oil. There’re dead bodies, flames, and the stench of burning flesh. Men in bloodstained smocks—their eyes bloodshot from wine and heat—scream abuse at the underlings. Grate, pound, whip, beat, sear, burn, blacken, chop, crack, mince;
Throw it on the grill,
the head chef growls,
and don’t dare take it off until it’s COM
PLETELY done, do you understand?

“A true gourmand,” wrote nineteenth-century gastronome Brillat-Savarin, “is as insensible to suffering as is a conqueror.” My preceding description of a restaurant kitchen may be considered an exaggeration, but Savarin’s comment was all too typical of his age. His contemporaries recommended that cooks tenderize their meat by whipping the animals to death. Pigs had red-hot irons thrust into their living bodies to make the meat “sweet and tender,” and eels were thrown alive into the fire for extra flavor. True gourmets had pregnant sows kicked to death in order to mingle their milk with the embryos, which were then removed and served forth. One recipe recommended that geese be plucked, basted with butter, and then roasted alive. “But make not haste,” instructs the seventeenth-century cookbook, which suggests placing dishes of water at the bird’s side to ensure it does not die of thirst before properly cooked. The bird is done, the author writes, when “you see him run mad up and down, and to stumble . . . wherefore take him and set him on the table to our guests who will cry out as you pull off his parts; and you shall almost eat him up before he is dead!”

These practices, common up until the eighteenth century, were ostensibly done to produce a more succulent dish. The ancient Romans, however, were unapologetic about serving violence as an aperitif to revive the jaded palate. Some hosts executed criminals or staged gladiator duels on the dining table. But most merely let their guests watch the first course slowly die
à table
, according to Seneca.

Mullets enclosed in glass jars are brought and their colour observed as they die. As they struggle for air death changes their colour into many hues. Others are killed by being pickled alive in garum (vinegar). . . . “There is nothing,” you say, “more beautiful than a dying mullet. Let me hold in my hands the glass jar where the fish may leap and quiver in the struggle for life. See how the red becomes inflamed, more brilliant than any vermilion! Look at the veins which pulse along its sides! Look! You would think its belly were actual blood! What a bright kind of blue gleamed right under its brow! Now, between life and death, it is stretching out and going pale into a gradation of colour of infinitely subtle shades.”

The old Romans found this appetizing, the theory goes, because they were more in touch with the essentially violent nature of the human species. Be that as it may, governments today have made these kinds of culinary highjinks illegal, and restauranteurs now go to enormous lengths to prove that their steaks died with a smile. Japan’s famously effeminate Wagyu cattle, whose flesh sells for $150 a pound, enjoy free beer and massages before having their throats slit. Livestock raisers like California’s Niman Ranch have made a fortune by claiming that their animals are not only killed in a painless manner, but spend their lives in a kind of free-range Club Med. And just as our ancestors’ science believed that their sadistic cuisine was both healthy and delicious—some butchers who failed to torture their wares faced criminal prosecution—today’s professors have conclusively proven that nice tastes nicer. Their secret elixir is glycogen, a carbohydrate found in animal tissue that provides energy for immediate action. If an animal dies after a horrific struggle, or even in extreme shock, its glycogen is depleted. This leads to tougher, more pungent meat, because when the animal dies its glycogen breaks down the flesh to make it more tender and flavorful. A cow that has died while stressed out, it seems, tastes like death. One that dies well rested is merely delicious.

Deep-Fried Murder

The notion that anger should be completely disassociated from eating has gone far beyond a question of sauce or butchering technique. The smallest clue that our food came from a living thing has become virtually taboo, as amply illustrated by a visit to any modern supermarket. Cattle are carefully ground up into a polite puree. Chickens come cubed and breaded. One rarely sees a head or hoof, and many children would no doubt be horrified to realize that their morning bacon once belonged to a cuddly little piggy-poo. Not everyone is pleased with this evisceration. Where, whine our intelligentsia, is the sweat of the farmer’s brow, the anguish of the hunted beast? They should look in the snack-food aisle, where delights like potato chips have been specifically engineered to heighten the vicarious violence beloved by America’s football warriors. Approximately half of the $19 billion worth of snack foods sold in the United States every year falls into the category of “crunch” snacks. This sector increases about 50 percent every decade, but the fastest-growing subsector within the crunch family are the so-called “extreme foods,” which put a premium on extreme auditory effects associated with anger: the splintering of skulls, the screams, the shattering bones, the sound track of mankind on the rampage.

Take a bag of Krunchers, which advertises it sells “no wimpy chips.” First comes packaging designed to create a battle between bag and man, in which the latter drags his prey to ground and then, straining and swearing, disembowels it with his bare hands. The chips inside are almost useless as food. Just fat and salt. It’s their shrieks of terror that we crave. In his book
The Secret House
, science writer David Bodanis does a marvelous job of explaining how every aspect of the product is designed by food engineers to manipulate our instinctual aggression. The chips themselves are made too large to close your mouth around, so their high-frequency roar will curve around your face and reach your ears without any loss of volume. They’re also packed with miniscule, air-filled “cells” that cause “shrapnels of flying starch and fat” to ricochet within the mouth and produce more of that lovely roar. Bodanis notes the essential violence of the experience when he writes that further chaos is ensured by the “broken fragments boomeranging at high speed inside the now vacated cells, like the lethal metal slivers broken loose inside an enemy tank by the latest shoulder-fired optically tracked missiles. . . .”

Corporations refer to this as “exciting” and grow cagey when asked about the relationship. No doubt Frito-Lay’s use of heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman as their spokesman was mere coincidence. It all really amounts to using a simulacrum of violence to whet our appetite, hence high-tech snacks like 3-D Doritos, which supposedly double the potential volume by creating an air pocket between two walls of high-tensile corn “glass.” A tingling chili flavor is added to give us the teeniest adrenaline rush by simulating a mild burning sensation. Food futurists have speculated that chips like these will eventually contain chemical stimulants much like the increasingly controversial hypercaffeinated sodas and “herb” drinks flooding the markets.

It’s a trend that causes people like
Salon
’s David Futrelle to question the long-term effect on our already jaded sensory threshold. “Taste in many cases is secondary; we’re talking food as entertainment,” he wrote, comparing some of the crunch snacks to violent video games. Both create not only similar thrills, but also similar action/response conditioning; just replace the tinny explosions and shrieks the video characters make as they are zapped with the chips’ high-frequency roar as they are chewed. While most people accept that violent visual entertainment can inspire real anger, the impact of their culinary cousins is considerably murkier. A person eating a mouthful of potato chips is experiencing an approximately one-hundred-decibel sound level. According to a NASA study, 65 decibels of sporadic noise can cause a 40 percent rise in hypertension and mental illness, especially among children; other studies have found increased anxiety at levels as low as 51 decibels. Laboratory experiments involving college students found that the louder the noise the more aggressive people become. At 95 decibels of sporadic bursts of sound—roughly the volume of most crunchy snack foods—the students showed significant increased aggression. More important, their aggressive behavior continued after the noise ceased.

“One aspect of this [appeal of crunchy foods] is definitely a primitive sense of the act of destruction,” said Alan Hirsch, Neurological Director of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago. “When you destroy you get a certain sense of power, and that’s why many people find the sensation of ‘breaking’ these foods so satisfying—they were expressing their subliminal anger.”

If, as brain specialists say, eating and aggression emanate from the same part of the brain, which appetite does the crunch of the potato chip stimulate? We know junk-food junkies usually reach for their treats in moments of anxiety, but nobody knows if they’re experiencing something that enhances their anger or something that soothes it. Hirsch believes high-crunch snacks probably act as a catharsis because the consumer has control over the sound, a belief that appears to be borne out by other sound/anger experiments. Violent visual entertainment, however, also has a cathartic element. Certainly, the connection between junk food and uncontrolled anger has been validated by the numerous juvenile detention facilities that have halved inmate violence by simply eliminating junk snacks from their inmates’ diets. While experiments like these were focused on the effect of excessive sugar and salt typically contained in snack foods, the blood tests performed for hypoglycemia and lower blood sugar did not adequately explain the drop in violence, according to a paper by Stephen Schoenthaler in the
International Journal of Biosocial Research
. At any rate, there seems to be little doubt that crunch has a psychological impact. According to Hirsch, one study involving 3,193 people indicated that habitués develop a distinct “crunch craving” third in intensity only to cravings for chocolate and salt.

No one is implying that snack food manufacturers want to stimulate violent behavior. They just want to make their snacks fun to eat. The problem, if there is one, may lie in the average American’s growing inability to distinguish between the two concepts. Even our favorite beverages are a form of pleasant torture. Nobody drinks flat soda, because the drink’s key, if not sole pleasure lies in the subclinical trigeminal pain caused by those bubbles of carbon dioxide exploding on the tongue. Without them they are as exciting as, well, a flat Coke. But then, every culture has its own way of invoking subliminal violence to stimulate appetite. The next time you go to a traditional French restaurant, take a moment to meditate on your
kir royale
; how the tongue shudders with titillating pinpricks as the bubbles explode; the way the champagne, stained bloodred with
cassis
liqueur, writhes sanguine in the candlelight. Time to eat.