In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (27 page)

Anger

THE CIVILIZED SAUCE

The information on the Janissary army is mentioned in Clifford Wright’s massive
A Mediterranean Feast
.

THE SADISTIC CHEF

Some of the details about sadistic cuisine are mentioned in Philippa Pullar’s
Consuming Passions
, which attributes them to a lecture given by Keith Thomas to the London Guild of Food Writers in 1990. The goose recipe comes from a book titled
Natural Magick
, by John Baptista Porta and published in London in 1658. It appears to be a reprint of a similar recipe mentioned in many other publications. The birth of modern cruelty-free butchery was first made official in Switzerland in 1892. According to some, it was actually tied into the wave of anti-Semitism during that era. Certainly the German ban on cruelty to animals appears to have been a swipe at Judaic culinary/butchery traditions. At one point a bill was introduced into the New York Senate requiring that meat be labeled as “humane” or “kosher,” according to Seymour Freedman’s
The Book of Kashruth
. The bill failed.

DEEP-FRIED MURDER

The only measurement of the decibel noise experienced by an eater of crunchy foods that I was able to discover comes from food engineers Zata Vickers and Carol Christensen in the late 1970s. They got over the problem of measuring the sound experienced by the chewer by having him or her wear headphones playing noise, the decibel level of which would be adjusted according to the food the person was eating. If they could no longer hear the sound of themselves chewing, that was assumed to be the approximate sound volume experienced by the ear. Foods such as chips and carrots measured between 110 and 120, according to Vickers. Spokeswomen for Frito-Lay declined to comment on the relationship between food sound volume/crunch and aggression.

ONLY IF IT HAS A FACE

Much of the general information on the relationship between meat and violence comes from
The Heretic’s Feast
, by Colin Spencer, as well as other publications. The Hmong people of Laos have a particularly charming version of the universal tale of how a broken dietary covenant landed humanity in purgatory. According to them, the crops of the field used to pick themselves out of the soil and line up outside the farmer’s hut so he could choose which ones he wanted for dinner. One day the farmer was too hungover to get out of bed and asked them all to come back the next day. The same thing happened every day for a week, and finally the veggies said, Well, maybe from now on we should just stay in the ground, and when you’re ready to choose you can come and pick us. And so work was invented. The Jivaro are a tribe of about twenty thousand who live in the tropical area near the Maranon River in eastern Peru and Ecuador.

HITLER’S LAST MEAL

Jane Barkas’s
The Vegetable Passion
goes into more detail on this subject than any sane person could ever want to know, including Hitler’s passion for Jewish pastries (apparently the only thing that could lure him into a Jewish establishment), and how his chef secretly added bone marrow to his food. Hitler’s plan to turn Germany into a raw food cult is mentioned by Bertram M. Gordon in “Fascism, the Neo Right” in the 1987 Oxford symposium on Food & Cookery. Walter Fleiss, the veggie restauranteur who made the Gestapo’s most-wanted list, reopened his Vega Restaurant in London’s Leicester Square, where it became an institution. He even convinced the Salon Culinaire Food Competition to include a veggie category in their prestigious contests.

VICIOUS LITTLE RED MAN

It appears that pre-chili Asian cuisine used a fruit called
fagara
, or prickly ash, which is comparable to horseradish and wasabi. These, however, have only an initial burn that quickly fades, as compared to chili’s long-lasting agony. One of the more unusual uses of chili powder is in birthing—the powder is flung into the mother’s face, precipitating contractions. Most of the information on the 1997 California incident comes from newspaper clips, Amnesty International reports, and “Spring,” one of the victims who is currently suing the officers involved. All officers involved were found not guilty of any criminal offense.

STINKING INFIDELS

The two Mar’ib men’s sins are detailed in Jacques Ryckman’s
Les Confessions publiques Sabeennes
. Ryckman refers to the men who apparently committed sodomy as being guilty of “special sex.” The two men accused of bad breath actually hailed from outside Mar’ib, and only made pilgrimage when their local priests were unable to cure their disease. This entailed not only a dangerous journey but also arranging a “truce of God” between the eternally warring tribes of Yemen. It was only when they arrived in Mar’ib that they learned exactly why the Moon was so miffed with them. The question as to why garlic became so closely associated with demons might relate to the fact that its stench results from sulfide compounds, sulfur being the eau de cologne of Old Horny. The tribes in Yemen, by the way, are still squabbling away.

FEASTING TO THE DEATH

The information on the Tudor banquets comes from C. Anne Wilson’s work
Banquetting Stuffe
. Details and quotes from various potlatch ceremonies can be found in Helen Codere’s
Fighting with Property
. The Kwakiutl were so fond of the potlatch ceremonies that they refused loans from the Canadian government to replace houses incinerated during the festivities because they thought the white officials would try to limit the size of the house to prevent further parties. One amusing account of food as weaponry is told in an anonymous work from the 1700s called
Origen de los Mexicanos
which claims the Aztecs were so proud of their cuisine that they would cook dishes before besieged cities so that “the smoke will enter their city and the smell will make the women miscarry, the children waste away, and the old men weaken and die of longing and desire to eat that which is unobtainable.” This passage, mentioned in Coe, probably refers to burning chili peppers. Elizabeth David’s account of the Medici marriage feast can be found in her piece on ice molds, “Savour of Ice and of Roses,” in
Petit Propos Culinaire
.

The potlatches were perhaps the most extreme version of the eating-as-aggression phenomenon, but it also played a part in the creation of the so-called California Cuisine of the late twentieth century. According to Jesse Drew’s “Call Any Vegetable” essay in
San Francisco: History, Politics and Culture
, a group of politically motivated food activists inadvertently led to the California aesthetic. The key group was the San Francisco Food Conspiracy, which formed in the 1960s to overthrow the corporate American power structure. “There are conspiracies all over the city,” wrote San Francisco’s
Good Times
in 1972 of the group, “[intent on] breaking down the master-servant trip of grocery stores.” The conspiracy was constructed using classic Marxist guidelines for guerrilla warfare in dozens of independent cells—Uprisings Bakery, Red Star Cheese, the People’s Warehouse—that produced subversive foodstuffs for worker-owned co-ops that distributed them to the masses. The Conspiracy hoped these would replace America’s soul-less supermarkets and their Wonder-Bread-and-mayonnaise sandwiches with “real food.” This would inevitably put Americans more in tune with The People and inevitably lead to world peace, not to mention universal happiness.

The conspiracy was only one of a number of “food happenings” during the 1960s. The huge free meals thrown by the radical Diggers’ group were staged so that nine-to-five working stiffs could see them, and were as much political theater as was the “pie encampment” of Charles the Bold. Another contemporaneous group, the New World Liberation Front, even bombed Safeway supermarkets apparently to force them to stock better produce. It was curiously effective, if in an unanticipated way. The Conspiracy’s co-ops dispensed organic, fresh food, free of preservatives, with an emphasis on ethnic dishes. It was food few white people had tasted, not surprising in an era that believed that processed, packaged foods were superior to the stuff that came straight out of the dirt. Brown rice, tofu, ripe tomatoes, real cheese—every bite was a sensory rejection of everything for which 1950s America stood. These politically inspired mantras of fresh/simple/seasonal in turn became the culinary guidelines for people like Alice Waters, the great guru of California cuisine, who opened her world famous Chez Panisse restaurant during the conspiracy’s heyday. The Panisse alumni list reads like the who’s who of American cuisine—Wolfgang Puck, Joyce Goldstein, Mark Miller, Jeremiah Towers—all of whom are still chanting the culinary mantras of the original guerrillas. All they lack are the beards and red stars.

That it took this bizarre mélange of Chairman Mao and Jacques Pepin to get Americans to appreciate good food is not all that surprising since, like the Germans and the English, Americans generally feel politics to be more worthy of conversation than pleasure. Radicals appalled at this co-opting of the revolution by today’s balsamic-swilling gourmands can console themselves with the fact that the original Conspiracy stayed true to its roots; in classic leftist rebellion style, the San Francisco Food Conspiracy movement ended with a gun battle between competing factions.

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