In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (26 page)

THE VIRGIN’S NIPPLES

If you’re interested in seeing some older samples of erotic Italian pastry, there is a collection on display at Rome’s Museo delle Tradizioni Popolari. The recipe is based on June di Schino’s “The Waning of Sexually Allusive Monastic Confectionary in Southern Italy.”

THE ROOT OF LAZINESS

Modern nutritionists now say potatoes may indeed induce sloth because they help produce serotonin, which causes people to relax, a belief epitomized in the recent book of Kathleen DesMaisons,
Potatoes Not Prozac
. Cobbett was not the only Englishman to see the potato as the root from hell. Many considered the potato famine divine justice for Irish sloth, and believed the best possible outcome would be partial extinction of the Irish and total extermination of the potato. Others suggested outlawing small farms to prevent the growing of potatoes. La pricesse or la ratta potatoes can be found at
PricessePotato.com
Tel 631 537-9404; Fax 631 537-5436. Available October through late March.

THE LAST DROP

Reverend Billy Sunday’s eulogy is to be found in
Ardent Spirits
by John Kobler, as are many of the other particulars on the history of Prohibition. Sunday was a former professional baseball player whom an estimated one million Americans trekked out to see preach by the time he peaked in 1917. Most of the statistics on the economics of Prohibition come from the Cato Institute’s
Alcohol Prohibition Was a Failure
by Mark Thornton (also in his book
The Economics of Prohibition
), which details Richard Cowan’s “Iron Law of Prohibition,” i.e., that the more intense the law enforcement, the more potent the dope gets (“How the Narcs Created Crack,”
National Review,
12/5/86). Thornton notes that although the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed in 1933, its spirit lives on in the current “drug war,” which has (predictably) had the same results of increasing criminal power and putting harmless people in prison. Interestingly, some believe that narcotics got a foothold during Prohibition because their smaller size made them an attractive smuggling alternative. The pro-Prohibition statistics come from
The Encyclopedia
of Prohibition
and
Prohibition, the Way to National Prosperity
by Reverend T.M.C. The role of the women’s movement is detailed in
Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty,
1873–1900
by Ruth Bordin. For an alternate view, there’s always Ralph Waldo Harley’s
The Age of Unreason: Prohibition, and
Women and What They’re Doing
, which points out that “chain store flappers, private office concubines, dance hall shimmyshakers, bobbed-headed movie rats, hip-wriggling bridge hounds, adultery billboards . . . and female men” are “hell bent” on imposing their morality on the world. His circular analysis on the futility of giving women the right to vote is remarkable. “If all wives vote
with
their husbands,” he writes, “the ratio remains unchanged.” If all women vote
against
their spouses, again nothing changes. So why give them the vote? Not every bar-keep objected to the women’s crusade—some found the hymn-singing ladies such a draw that they hired actors to imitate them and put on two shows a day.

IN THE GREEN HOUR

Wormwood’s active compound
thujone
is also found in sage, probably accounting for the popularity of the “exhilarating” sage beer during the medieval period. Michael Albert-Puleo speculates in his essay on the mythology of the sage plant that the old saying “he who would live for aye, must eat Sage in May,” might refer to how sage’s
thujone
content peaks in spring. Absinthe has made a comeback in the last five years, via versions from Romania and Czechoslovakia. You can buy it in England, but by all accounts it lacks any serious wormwood punch. The stuff sold in the United States, called Absente, has even less psychoactive punch (the manufacturer claims that its
thujone
content increases when you add sugar, in the traditional manner of drinking). If you want to get the real thing, there are still moonshiners in Switzerland and France who follow the same recipes used a century ago. Just head up to the hills and ask around.

Greed

THE MAGIC CANNIBAL

Much of the information on various aspects of medieval law on cannibalism comes from Tannahill. There are, however, different interpretations of the sixth-century Salic and eighth-century Charlemagne laws in other works. The translation of Castillo’s man-feast is by A. Maudslay in “The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico 1517–1521.” Innocent’s concern about the Arthurian cult is detailed in
The Catholic Encyclopedia
, which also quotes eighth-century chronicler Helinandus on the grail, “called Gradalis or Gradale, means a dish [scutella], wide and somewhat deep, in which
precious viands
[meat] are wont to be served to the rich in degrees [gradatim], one morsel after another.” The word
precious
in its truest sense means magical. According to Helinandus, the
precious viands
referred to would have been lamb; Christ is commonly referred to as the Lamb of God. St. Philip Neri seemed to understand that the chalice was all about cannibalism—apparently he licked and sucked on the Eucharistic goblet so intensely he left tooth marks in its rim.

The Irish saint who apparently used a human sacrifice was Columba who, in founding his church at Iona, suggested to his followers, “it is permitted that one of you should go under the clay of this island to hallow it.” One of Columba’s disciples, Odran, replied, “If thou shouldst take me I am ready for that.” Columba accepts and “then Odran went to heaven.” That would have been in the sixth century, and various other public Druid rites apparently related to ritual cannibalism are well documented until the 1300s. As recently as the 1950s Catholic nuns were warning children to not bite the host with their teeth lest it bleed. Rindfleisch’s Nazi relation is mentioned in the “Communique of the Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission for Investigating the Crimes Committed by the Germans in the Majdanek Extermination Camp in Lublin,” translated by Philip Trauring. He appears to have specialized in vicious “medical” experimentation. The Bishop of Amalfi, trampled to death by his fellow prelates at the Fourth Lateran Council, was rewarded with a marble tomb in the Vatican for the inconvenience.

SMOKED GREEN MAKAKU

The horrified expression of the smoked monkeys on the boat was apparently caused by their facial muscles contracting during the smoking process. I refer to the country by its new name, Democratic Republic of Congo, but when I was there it was known as Zaire, although previously it had been known as the Belgian Congo, not to be confused with the much smaller Republic of Congo on Africa’s Atlantic seaboard.

THE LAUGHING MAN

Kuru
was first diagnosed by Nobel winner D. Carleton Gajdusek in the mid-1900s. Although there have been some recent reports of
kuru
in Papua New Guinea, both it and St. Vitus’s dance (also known as ergotism and St. Anthony’s Fire) are basically extinct diseases, and there is a lack of understanding as to precisely how they functioned. Mad Cow disease is now believed to be caused by renegade proteins called prions, which essentially eat the brain. How these prions work, however, is still controversial, as are the workings of drugs like LSD. Although LSD’s symptoms are normally temporary, it’s worth noting that long-term users of its sister, the hallucinogenic fly agaric mushroom, can develop these traits permanently. According to Waldemar Jochelson, a turn-of-the-century explorer who lived with a group of Siberian agaric enthusiasts, “long term users [of agaric] can be detected . . . even when they are in a normal condition, by an uncontrollable twitching of the face, and an uneven gait.” Most of the information on the prehistoric brain-eating cults comes from Weston La Barre. The sites he and others refer to belong to Solo Man of Java (150,000 B.C.) and Peking man (400,000 B.C.). Anthropologists like David Snellgrove have reported on a number of Tibetan ceremonies involving skull bowls containing mock human brains made of flour. Jane Goodall’s observations have been confirmed by other scientists and, although there have been contradictory reports, all agree that the head is the first thing eaten. The information about the missing brains of Aztec sacrificial victims comes from Sophie Coe’s
First American Cuisine
, which credits anthropologist Eduardo Contreras of the Mexican Institute of Anthropology (citing research from the 1960s). The reference to Texan barbecues is in
Eating in America
, by Waverly Root. My personal encounter with cannibalism in Zaire was in the early 1990s, but I was also later told that when the military wiped out a village they sometimes spread rumors of cannibal attacks to deter any investigations.

For those interested in learning about the religious eating of human brains firsthand, I understand from reliable sources that certain extreme sects of Hindu Sadhus still partake as part of their disciplines. It is apparently popular in the industrial hell-hole Paradeep near Orissa in eastern India, where some bodies are buried rather than cremated.

THOU SHALT NOT EAT THY MOTHER

The statistics on the health effects of bottle feeding come from a variety of studies in publications like
American Journal of
Nutrition
(Sept. 1999) and those of the World Health Organization. Many of the other facts come from Yalom’s book and
Milk, Money, and Madness
, by Naomi Baumslag. As to whether or not these companies currently use mailing lists, a friend of mine received a box full of free baby formula a year or so ago when she was accidentally put on some sort of mailing list for brides-to-be. Nestlé failed to respond to numerous requests for comments on the content of this piece.

AMERICAN PIGS

The relationship between the World Bank and the USDA’s apparently overlapping agendas is detailed in “AIDing and Abetting Mayhem,” by Jim Ridgeway and Billy Treger in the November 1994 issue of
Multinational Monitor
.

Blasphemy

THE JEWISH PIG

Most of the information on European customs comes from Fabre-Vassas. Details about the Judensau is in Schacher’s “The Judensau: A Medieval anti-Jewish Motif and its History.” When you analyze how some of these misunderstandings developed, it’s almost funny. For instance, Fabre-Vassas reports that some Jewish circumcisions entailed filling the mouth with wine and then sucking three times on the baby’s penis to disinfect the wound. The wine was then apparently spat into a bowl and sipped by all the men in the room. One can image superstitious Christians spying on their stand-offish neighbors through a crack in the wall and seeing the screaming children, the men with the red-stained lips—hardly surprising they gave it all the worst possible interpretation. The most unusual explanation for the Jewish need for Christian blood comes from Thomas of Cantimpre’s
Bonum Universale de Apibus
, which claims it was used to treat hemorrhoids. No instructions on application available. Exactly how kosher laws restricting social integration played into European anti-Semitism is a touchy subject, but Eduard Bernstein, a Jew who said he had become assimilated into German culture by giving up kosher laws in the 1920s, is quoted in Robertson’s work as having written in the 1920s
Der
Jude
that “Separationist meals . . . are a dividing wall that prevent the development and establishment of a true sense of social cohesion.” The information on the attitude of Germans toward the Jews they slaughtered comes primarily from Glass’s
Life Unworthy of Living
, in which he analyzes the motivations of a group of nonmilitary, middle-class, middle-aged men who murdered a thousand women and children in a Polish village in July 1942. He summarizes their feeling as akin “to witnessing for the first time the blood and gore of a sausage factory.”

FOR WHAT WE ARE ABOUT TO RECEIVE

According to Sherry Ortner, what kind of
torma
a god is offered depends on his or her diet. Carnivorous deities get red ones, veggie godlets get white. The technique of binding a spirit with the rules of hospitality is also used in Tibetan funeral services, in which a special seat is constructed for the deceased’s ghost, thus obliging it to stay until the priests have finished reading the Book of the Dead. For more information on the wafer controversy see Mahlon Smith’s work.

O, DOG

Most descriptions of the Polynesian poi dog come from Margaret Titcomb’s work. The species has been lost in the cross breeding with animals introduced by Europeans but there is a project to re-create the species in Hawaii, presumably for purely academic reasons. Poi dogs were not the only pooches force-fed for dinner—Moroccan dogs destined for dinner were fed dates. The account of the wolves following American Indian hunters comes from Thurston’s excellent
The Lost History of
the Canine Race
, in which she cites a nameless account written by Reverend J. G. Wood in 1870. For more information on the Egyptian dog city Hardai, check Thurston’s work, or
Food: The
Gift of Osiris
by William Darby and company. According to this, at one point there were respective sacred fish and dog cities that went to war because their citizens were eating each other’s deities. “In my day the fish worshipers caught a dog and ate it up as if it had been sacrificial meat because the people of Hardai were eating the fish known as the oxyrhynchus,” wrote Plutarch. “Both sides became involved in a war and inflicted great harm on each other.”

HOLY COW

Most of the material relating to horns and devils, cows and demons, comes from
The God of the Witches
, by Margaret Murray. The cow’s rep as stud divine is generally attributed to its agricultural role in pulling plows, but some anthropologists suggest that cattle were originally merely forced to walk over a field about to be planted so as to transmit some of their bovine mojo into the soil. The conduits for this energy were their horns, which is why farmers in some areas still attach special strings to the appendages and let them drag in the soil while plowing. Details on the Sepoy Rebellion come largely from
The
Great Mutiny of India 1857
, by Christopher Hibbert. This was a four-course war, by the way, because in one anecdote the Hindu soldiers mistook a box full of canned lobster for munitions and actually fired them at the British troops (in 1867’s
Shrimp and Lobster Lore
). If you want to try the honey cakes I sold at Anjuna, you’ll find the baker at the edge of the dirt road leading into the teeny village of Arambol in Goa. I forget his name, but he lives in a small shack just opposite the village cricket field.