In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (21 page)

Only if It Has a Face

A peach drifts down like an errant autumn leaf. You pick it up with a sleepy smile and take a bite. No need to peel, for you know it will be honey-sweet, soft, luscious, and divine. Perhaps you share it with a friend, and, sitting in the tree’s fragrant shadow, the two of you make love before slipping into the perfect sleep. You wake up in the dead of night. Something wet is crawling across your feet. You look down and see a huge sabertooth tiger licking your toes. But no worries, mate. You are in the Muslims’
al-jannah
, the Greeks’ Arcadia, the Druids’ Avalon, the Judaic Eden, or one of a dozen primordial paradises that many religions remember as the place where we once lived free of death or fear or hunger or—most important of all—red meat.

The connection between the vegetarian diet and paradise is thought by some to date back to the Miocene period 8 million years ago, when it is conjectured that large parts of the Earth may have been free of significant predators, and hominoids, like everyone else, were strict vegetarians. The collective memory of this time, according to writers like Colin Spencer, supplied the imagery for this 2,500-year-old poem of paradise credited to Pythagoras.

There are the crops,
Apples that bend the branches with their weight
Grapes swelling on the vines: there are fresh herbs
And those the tempered flame makes mellow
Milk is ungrudged and honey from the thyme
Earth lavishes her wealth, gives sustenance
Benign, spreads, feasts unstained by blood and death

This prehistoric love fest is thought to have evaporated when the weather went ratty and we were forced to become hunters. According to some dieticians, the increased protein provided by the switch to a carnivorous diet caused an unprecedented growth spurt of the part of the brain called the cerebrum responsible for higher reasoning. This quasi-scientific “fall from vegetarianism,” however, reeks of the Bible. In both story-lines, humanity breaks a food covenant—one with God (don’t eat the apple), and the other with the animals (don’t eat us)— precipitating a profound change in consciousness. Actually, the Bible repeatedly connects our fall from grace with a growing appetite for red meat. God kept us on a strict vegan diet until we got tossed out of Eden. In the second-class paradise where we found ourselves, meat was allowed but under the constraints outlined in the Book of Leviticus: no blood sausage, no fatty steaks, no pork chops, no cheeseburgers. Only after our behavior had grown so revolting that He drowned most of the human race in the flood were the survivors allowed full expression of their bloodthirsty ways. “Just as I gave you green plants, I now give you everything,” God tells Noah in despair. “Everything that lives and moves will be food to you.” Some rabbis claim Jewish dietary laws are really just a ruse to limit Hebrew meat consumption and keep them closer to a vegetarianism suitable for the Chosen People.

All these theological trappings make perfect sense when you realize that vegetarianism is actually a religion. People “become” vegetarians, they have epiphanies. Vegetarians think they’re better than the rest of us, and, surprisingly enough, we tend to agree. Surveys of students reveal that even devoted carnivores view vegetarians as more moral and spiritual. It is arguably the fastest-growing belief system on the face of the planet. The West’s current interest, however, is, predictably, clothed in pseudo-science of diet and biochemistry. “It’s meat, ma’am,” says Mr. Bumble in the novel
Oliver Twist
. “If you had kept the boy on gruel, ma’am, this would never have happened.” Mr. Bumble’s explanation of Oliver’s violent temper tantrum summarizes the belief of Dickens’s time—when the term
vegetarianism
was first coined—that a meat diet led to unnatural bursts of violence, particularly in children. Other writers even credited English world dominance to the aggression created by their penchant for roast beef. At one point, Gandhi realized that his largely vegetarian Indian people could violently overthrow British rule only if they amplified their aggressive tendencies by becoming carnivores. “It began to grow on me that meat eating was good,” he wrote, “and that if my whole country took to meat eating the English could finally be overcome!” He goes to a quiet spot and cooks up some goat, only to find it too tough to chew.

Goat, of course, is notorious for its propensity to toughen when overcooked. The meat-violence proposition underlying Gandhi’s foray into barbecue, however, is interesting. One could no doubt make a statistical argument that cultures where vegetarianism is the norm, like India, have lower rates of violent crime than meat-gorging cultures like the United States, despite much higher levels of poverty and other crime. It’s also fair to say that the act of eating meat plays on our species’ memories of hunting and killing, which could potentially lead to a different kind of violence in certain individuals. Some vegetarians argue that butchering animals for meat engenders general violence by subliminally sanctioning killing, an argument quite similar to the one made by opponents of the death penalty, who claim that our government’s endorsement of murder teaches our children that it is an acceptable way to solve problems. In 1847, lawyers for two London boys who’d killed their younger brother claimed that they had seen their own father slaughter a pig and were just repeating his behavior in play, the same defense offered in 2001 for an underage boy who’d pummeled a young girl to death, supposedly while imitating a wrestling match he had seen on TV.

The problem with all this is that there is no real evidence linking T-bone steaks to psycho killers. I believe vegetarianism’s appeal lies not in this supposed ability to decrease aggression, but in its undeniable ability to amplify our capacity to love. Take the almost extinct Jivaro people of eastern Peru. The Jivaro eat meat but have a profound taboo against eating jungle deer. They point to the deer’s nocturnal habits, its shyness, its quietness, the way it melts in and out of the jungle to appear, ghost-like, at the village edge. Then they point to the animal’s fondness for grazing in gardens left abandoned when the people who tilled them died. The deer, the Jivaro conclude, are the ghosts of their dead neighbors returning to tend their gardens. We could never eat them, they say; they are our friends. This was the original reasoning of people like Pythagoras and Buddha, who introduced vegetarianism twenty-five hundred years ago. Like the Jivaro, they believed in a kind of reincarnation and that animals had “human” souls. It’s this underlying concept that gives this religious diet its moral imperative, because by including all animals in “our tribe,” it allows us psychologically to embrace and love more of God’s world. Like throwing a stone into a pond and watching the ripples grow larger and larger and larger until the entire pond—from self to family to tribe to country to race, on to other species and all birds and beasts— falls within its magic circle.

Hitler’s Last Meal

Adolf Hitler was the nicest man a pig could meet. Or a cow or a lamb, for that matter. The mass murderer was such a devout vegetarian that he would weep during movies that showed animals being harmed, covering his eyes and begging the others “to tell him when it was all over.” Meat-eaters, he often said, were hypocritical “corpse eaters” and ultimately unsuitable as candidates for the master race. One early Nazi propaganda device was to sell boxes of cigarettes that contained a picture of the nature-loving Führer pensively peeling an apple. In fact, the German vegetarian community was so instrumental in his rise to power that he once considered making a meat-free diet part of the party platform, only stopping when he realized it would damage the food-supply system and hurt his war effort. When he finally came to power in 1933, leaders of the movement hailed him as their savior.

This bizarre character quirk has been explained in a number of ways. Hitler said it was the writings of opera composer Richard Wagner that made him a believer. “Did you know that Wagner has attributed much of the decay of our civilization to meat-eating?” he told Nazi chronicler Hermann Rauschning. “I don’t touch meat, largely because of what Wagner says on the subject and says, I think, absolutely rightly.” Traditional historians, however, suggest the diet was to alleviate Hitler’s jumpy stomach. Psycho-historians point to his well-known oral fixations, like sucking his thumb during cabinet meetings, as well as to the guilt complex he developed after murdering his niece. It all certainly casts a shadow on the idea that vegetarians are innately peaceful, and to this day his fellow believers (dietary ones) still insist he was not a
real
vegetarian at all—didn’t his vitamin capsules contain animal gelatin? they ask. His pastries lard?

Equally odd is the way Hitler treated his fellow carrot eaters once he got into power. According to historian Jane Barkas, Hitler first tried to turn the vegetarian/nature group Wander-vogel into the super-Aryan Union of Teutonic Knights. Next he pressured the vegetarian colony Eden to teach Nazi race theories. When this failed, he banned the entire vegetarian movement. Their main magazine,
Vegetarian Warte,
was suppressed, and major meeting sites were turned into concentration camps. Known vegetarians were arrested, cookbooks were confiscated, and the owner of Cologne’s popular Vega Restaurant, Walter Fleiss, appeared on the Gestapo’s most-wanted list, apparently just for being a Jewish vegetarian. While the repression was part and parcel of Nazi paranoia about any “group,” the traditional association between vegetarians and the peace movement, and the implication that the Führer was a closeted peacenik, were particularly galling to the war-hungry regime. And despite his backsliding during the war, Hitler remained as committed to vegetarian principles of morality as he was to cleaning the world of “subhuman” species. “He believes more than ever that meat-eating is harmful to humanity,” wrote the author of
Hitler’s Secret Conversations 1941–44
(supposedly propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels). “Of course, he knows that during the war we cannot completely upset our food system. After the war, however, he intends to tackle this problem also.” The vegetarian Final Solution was never realized. The world’s most-hated murderer and animal lover took his own life to the tune of Russian bombs tinkling down overhead. His beloved veggie cook, Fraulein Manzialy, was one of the few followers to commit suicide with him.

Little Nigoda

If Lewis Carroll were the head of a religious cult, I thought, he would have built a temple like this. The main building to my left was covered inside and out with thousands of bits of broken mirror, while a few
lungi
-clad priests sat meditating under a gaudy chandelier. The steeples looked as if they’d been squeezed out of a pastry tube. The building next to it was pure French baroque, albeit painted hot pink. Statues of the unlikeliest characters were scattered everywhere. Simpering English girls swirled parasols, boys in breeches cavorted with basset hounds. The largest was a six-foot-tall statue of an English soldier twirling his mustache with one hand and pointing furiously at the meditating priests with his other—
get up you bloody
wogs
, his expression clearly said,
and get back to work!

I looked at the man at my side, a priest actually, head of the entire complex, the Jain temple in Calcutta. He was a big-bellied fellow in a white
lungi
and skin-tight T-shirt. Jainism is the quintessential vegetarian religion, closely related to Buddhism, and I’d come to find out if it was true that followers wore gags to ensure they did not accidentally swallow a fly.

“So Jains eat no animals of any kind,” I asked. “Not even fish?”

“No fish,” said the priest. “Never.”

“Only vegetables—like beans or potatoes.” A confused look crept across the priest’s face. I tried to remember the Hindi word for potato.
“Alu,”
I said. “Jain eat only
alu
and . . .”

“No!” he bellowed, raising his hands in horror. “No
alu
!” You’d have thought I’d suggested he liked to eat little girls. “Jain no eat
alu
!”

It turned out Jainism not only forbids the eating of animals but also considers most root vegetables taboo. Mere vegetarians, in their eyes, are little better than cannibals. The restrictions vary among the world’s 4 million Jainists, but it boils down to eating almost nothing but leafy greens. Potatoes are particularly naughty because they are a kind of root and therefore are akin to seeds. Figs are also a no-no because they contain so many seeds, as no doubt are kiwi, corn, and almost every other food that makes the vegetarians’ life occasionally bearable. The guiding principle behind these regulations is a belief in
nigodas
, or simple souls, which are beginning their long journey through endless reincarnations. They are thought to inhabit almost every fruit or vegetable, as well as substances like honey, hence the saying “He who eats honey commits a sin equal to murdering seven villages!”

Despite what seems like a fanatical veneration of life, the Jains’ motivation is curiously anti-life, at least life on Earth. Every
nigoda
a Jain sucks down inhabits his or her body, and, because
nigodas
are young souls facing many earthly lives, their presence in the body increases the host’s earthly attachments. This makes attaining
moksa
, or Nirvana, much more difficult, forcing the Jain to return to Earth for yet another life. This thought is apparently so unappealing that Jains condone suicide if followers starve themselves to death and so empty themselves of
nigodas
—the real sin of suicide would be if they took the life of some not-ready-for-
moksa
-soul(s) that happened to be in their lower intestine. True believers follow these principles to insane degrees. The ground on which they walk is preswept to ensure nobody gets squashed underfoot. Sudden movement in the dark and on grass is forbidden for the same reason. Even defecation is limited to stony places so one can see what’s underneath, lest a
nigoda
inadvertently meet a truly unsavory end. The three-thousand-year-old cult is slowly disappearing, but you can still see their dust collectors in the streets of India. Look for an old man pulling a cart decorated with the Jain symbol of purity, the swastika. His job is to collect dust swept up by Jain housewives and store it in a sealed room for twenty years so the life forms in the dirt can die a natural death.