The caste system is not just fun and food fights, of course. Beneath the four main castes are the so-called Untouchables, or Dalits, a group of about 250 million people who are completely without caste, and so … well, untouchable. They get to clean the latrines, but that’s about it. If they take water from the communal well, they are sometimes killed. If they try to eat with caste members, the food is pushed off their plates until they leave in tears. This horrific repression (now illegal) is said to stem directly from the sense of separation caused by the dietary rules enshrined in the ancient laws of Hindu society. “The feelings of Untouchability in the caste system,” writes Sundar La Sar in Hindu Culture and Caste System, “had their roots in the compulsory separation of food-habits among the people.” The upside for the Untouchables is that they can eat anything they want without losing social status—beef, caviar, foie gras, even truffles. Compare that to the menu of poor, pitiful Brahmins, who not only must follow a strict vegetarian diet, but also must abstain from things like garlic and onions. No booze, of course. Some are not even allowed carrots or tomatoes because their origin in foreign lands means they have no caste and are therefore “untouchable.” Nor is the conversation at dinner likely to make amends for the cuisine. “One should take one’s food alone and not in the company of even one’s relatives,” suggests the three-thousand-year-old Laws of Manu, “since who can know the secret sins of a person in whose company one eats?” Some high-caste Brahmins dine in a room devoted exclusively to that purpose, or at least set up screens to keep impure influences at bay while eating. True blue bloods purify the dinner table with cow dung or, better yet, eat straight off the karma-enhancing excrement by “pouring water over a spot and plastering [leaves] with cow dung.”
The only other major group with a comparably strict dining etiquette are ultra-Orthodox Jews, some of whom will not use a plate that a nonbeliever has touched. The similarity of the two groups’ food obsessions, plus the fact that the Jews have been called “the Sons of Abraham” (read “A Brahmin”), have led to speculation that both sprang from some prehistoric super-priesthood. While this thought might have some historical basis, what the two really share is a profound awareness of the connection between food, purity, and morality. “The dietary rules [of the Jews] merely developed the metaphor for holiness,” wrote scholar Mary Douglas in her book Purity and Danger, by “keeping distinct the categories of creation.” In her view, kosher dietary law forbids the eating of animals like the salamander because the Lord created the world to be in three separate categories: earth, sky, and water. The amphibious salamander violates this organization by living both on earth and in water. Hence, it is a creature created by the Devil and unclean. The Hindu prohibition against castes sharing meals stems from the same concept. Just as God created separate categories of matter, He created separate groups of humans. It would be as immoral to breach the latter as it would the former. This is particularly true about breaking bread together, because eating is so intimately tied to tribal identity and religious worship. Moreover, this concept of “sacred separation,” or boundaries, is the underlying principle of almost all morality, according to Douglas. A lie is only wrong because it pretends to be true, i.e., it mingles two separate categories of nature: falsehood and truth. In Douglas’s point of view, the peculiar dietary laws of the Hebrews and the Brahmins were created to force believers into ritualized daily meditations on these great questions—truth, purity, holiness—and return dinner to its roots “as a meaningful part of the great liturgical act of worship, which culminates in the sacrifice [meal] in The Temple.”
The Last Supper
The New Testament is littered with tales of Jesus’ lousy table manners. He forgets to wash his hands before eating. He takes dinner with hookers. He does lunch with unbelievers. These were more than mere breaches of etiquette; like the Hindu caste code, these rules upheld the society of the time and were taken extremely seriously. Members of the Essenes, a cult that Christ probably studied with, starved to death rather than eat food touched by non-Essenes.
Christ’s déclassé dinner parties were tolerated as long as he held them out in the boonies. But dining out in the big city, Jerusalem, was another matter. In The Scrolls and Christian Origins: Studies in the Jewish Background of the New Testament, religious scholar Matthew Black notes a number of odd circumstances surrounding Christ’s Last Supper. First, it appears to have been kept a secret. Christ refused to tell even his apostles where it was to be held, instead making them meet with a stranger who led them to the dinner party’s location. Black believes this indicates that the meal was probably an illegal ceremony of some kind. He then reconstructs the calendar of Jesus’ time and concludes that, although the Last Supper occurred around Jewish Passover, it did not fall on the officially sanctioned holiday. Black then looks at the circumstances leading to the arrest of Jesus, particularly the behavior of the traitor Judas during the meal. The New Testament notes that “having received the sop he [Judas] immediately went out: and it was night.” A curiously bleak turn of phrase, especially when you realize that a sop is just a piece of bread used to soak up gravy. Couldn’t Judas just have wanted something to snack on? Hardly. “In carrying off the sop he took evidence with him to the priests and the Pharisees that an illegal feast had been celebrated,” Black concludes, “[and] that Jesus was challenging Pharisaic law in its stronghold, Jerusalem itself.” Judas took the gravy-soaked crust to prove that Christ was holding an illegal feast—a satanic passover— and that if the police acted immediately they could catch this charlatan Messiah red-handed. In this light, the copious amount of biblical ink spilled on the Last Supper appears quite reasonable. Christ’s reason for coming to Jerusalem seems to have been to provoke a confrontation with the authorities, but he gets arrested before anything happens. Perhaps the Last Supper was the planned confrontation. During dinner, he predicts the imminent arrival of the cops. If the soirée had been a deliberate affront, his prophesy is no more clairvoyant than a protester foreseeing jail time after staging a sit-in at the mayor’s office.
Christianity is unique among the major religions for its almost complete lack of food taboos. This was no accident. The New Testament specifically quotes Matthew as saying, “Know and understand; it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man, but that which comes out.” Christ’s choice of a dinner party to take a theological stand makes sense if you consider that his years of training with the food-obsessed Essene cult would have left him preternaturally aware of the connection between pride and dietary taboos. After all, how can people be truly equal if they can’t all eat the same food at the same table? His manipulation of the Passover feast for political gain, however, was to prove catastrophic; in the ensuing two millenniums, ignorant Christians mourning Christ’s death during Easter routinely massacred Jews because their simultaneous Passover feast—a joyous event commemorating their release from Egyptian bondage—was mistaken as celebration of Christ’s death on the cross.
Humble Pie
So here I am in some subterranean dive in Manhattan’s East Village. Everywhere you look, there are Japanese hipsters in hornrim glasses sucking on Sapporo beers and munching omelets covered in writhing bonito flakes that look like barf monsters from a bad sci-fi flick. I take a mouthful of my motsu yakitori . Motsu means cow intestines. I love ’em, which is just as well, since each yakitori—a kind of Japanese shish-kebab—is only three inches long, and I am determined to choke down an entire cow intestine. There’s approximately 150 feet of digestive tract per animal, which means I have another six hundred yakitori to go. The divine Nina J. is my companion in this adventure. She looks as if she’s going to throw up. She’s a dainty one, that Nina, who doesn’t eat meat, and is restricting herself to a shrimp.
“That,” I say defensively, pointing to the pink body on her spear, “is a bottom feeder. Do you know what it eats?” Happily, I remember her brother Jerry certifies kosher restaurants for his synagogue. “Jerry would rather be strangled than pu
t one of those in his mouth.”
Nina ignores me and continues eating. I change tactics. Sure, I say to her, few self-respecting Americans would be caught dead eating cow intestine or heart or liver—at least not publicly—but organ meats like these were once the sacrament of the world’s most powerful priesthood, the Etruscan haruspex. The Etruscans were the original inhabitants of Italy’s Tuscany region. They taught Imperial Rome not only how to read and write but how to foretell future events, and no Roman emperor worth his salt made a political decision without ordering an Etruscan haruspex to read the future in a sheep’s entrails. I describe the scene to Nina: the bleating animals, the incense, the priests pulling the organs out of the beast’s still-steaming body to examine it for prophetic markings. Then, if the lower intestine gave the go-ahead, the politicians would send an army out to conquer, say, Asia Minor and the haruspex priests would sit back to enjoy a snack very much like the one before me now. Charred heart and liver shish-kebab, salted and eaten with the grill’s ashes still sticking to it.
But that was all a long time ago. Ancient history.
Or so I thought.
The guinea pig took another sip of his beer and rolled his eyes in exasperation—was this never going to end?
“He works better when he’s drunk,” Señor Villanova explained. “You’ll see, señor.”
My personal journey into the mystic realm of variety meats began in the village of Husao high in the Peruvian Andes. Peru is probably the last place in the world to continue a Tuscan-like reverence for entrails. The only real difference is that the Etruscan priests used sheep. The Peruvian priests, curandernos, prefer guinea pigs.
Villanova poured another mouthful of beer into his pet’s maw. Not all curandernos get their guinea pigs drunk, but Villanova had been highly recommended. And that was good, because I was beginning to feel skeptical. For one thing, his pants didn’t fit. He also seemed tipsy, at least judging by the incomprehensible mix of Quecha (the native Inca language) and Spanish that he mumbled out of the corner of his crooked mouth. In fact, his whole face looked vaguely out of kilter. Nor did his office décor help—nothing but two rickety wooden stools and a table covered with dirty leaves. Every other witch doctor I’d visited had displayed a healthy supply of gods and talismans. Hell, I thought, if the walls had been painted white instead of raw cement I could have been in the office of a Western doctor, God forbid. The most impressive thing about Villanova was how he got his pet to drink the beer. He held the animal by the skin around its shoulders and, when it was time to administer a chug, pulled back on the skin to force its little mouth open. Then he dunked its head straight into the mug. The guinea pig had a helluva foam mustache, but in minutes they’d gone through half a large bottle of Cuzco cerveza, although I couldn’t say whether Señor Villanova or the pig had done most of the drinking.
He explained tomorrow’s procedure to me. First, he would enchant his pig and rub it over my naked body so it could absorb my illness. This normally kills the beast; then, amid prayers and chanting, Villanova would cut it in half to examine the inner organs for signs indicating the best way to heal me. Villanova compared it to taking an X ray without the dangers of radiation.
Very Etruscan, I thought. Straight out of Bella Tuscany. I asked Villanova if he’d ever heard of Tuscany. Frances Mayes? Risotto? He didn’t seem to understand, so I pulled out a picture of the Piacenza liver, a two-hundred-pound, three-dimensional bronze reproduction of a sheep’s liver made by the Romans around the second century B.C. to teach priests how to prophesize in the Tuscan way. It shows forty-four sections, each of which is sacred to a particular divinity. The idea was to look for prophetic polyps. A distended gallbladder, for instance, was considered propitious for war because martial gods like Hercle (Hercules) dominated the area. I presume that’s why we used to say, “she’s got a lotta gall” about someone with an unusually fiery temperament, but I could be mistaken.
I told Señor Villanova all about the Etruscans. I waved my Xerox of the Piacenza liver at him and asked if curandernos had similar learning aids. But my Spanish must not have been up to the task, because he just gave me a pitying look.
“Please stay calm, señor.” He patted me on the shoulder. “When you come back tomorrow you will see my wife. She specializes in these kinds of conditions.” Then he poured us both out a glass of the beer. “I suggest you drink this,” he said, gulping his down. “It will make you feel much better.”
The Romans came to depend on the Etruscan prophets in much the same way we depend on tabloid journalists. It was a haruspex named Spurinna who came up with the famous “Beware the Ides of March!” headline, and Caesar’s personal priests warned him to stay home the day Brutus struck because they had disemboweled an animal without a heart. The flavor of these rites is captured nicely by the Roman chronicler Silicus Italicus in a scene in which the great general Hannibal consults a haruspice (a female haruspex) prior to declaring war on Rome. The divination takes place in a blood-splattered cave full of hissing gases and wailing spirits. “Then a black victim was sacrificed to the goddess of triple shape; and the priestess, seeking an oracle, quickly opened the still-breathing body and questioned the spirit, as it fled from the inward parts that she had laid bare in haste.” Consulting the entrails she plops on the table, the priestess prophesies, “I see the Aetolian field covered far and wide with soldiers’ corpses, and lakes red with Trojan blood … the river Po runs blood.” She was describing the events of the Second Punic War, the most significant conflict in Roman history.
The abrupt disappearance of Etruscan culture around the fourth century B.C. has long baffled some historians, but some now think that when their priests divined their culture’s demise in a sheep’s liver, the race simply merged with the Romans rather than fight the inevitable. Tuscany’s love of chopped-liver, however, seems to have lived on in Europe. The ancient Irish Vision of Mac Conglinne tells in great detail how the king could be satisfied only with “son of fat, son of kidney, son of slender tripe,” and how the tribute to the royal ladies consisted of sweetbreads and pig hearts. Organ meats fetched significantly higher prices than chops in the markets of seventeenth-century Paris. The French called these delicacies parties nobles, and every hunter carried a ritual set of knives with which to remove them. He would then present them, on a forked stick, called la fourchie, to the most powerful person present and they would be grilled on the spot in a little ceremony meant to honor the nobleman’s bravery. We still say a brave man has “guts” or “pluck” (a kind of intestine). Cowards, of course, are “gutless” or “lily-livered.”
In fact, the entire world seems to be riddled with a perverse reverence for variety meats. The Scottish have made entrails wrapped in entrails (stomach), called haggis, a national dish, which they eat in a ceremony filled with pomp and bagpipes. The Tongans believed the liver was the finest part of the meal because it was where the animal’s courage resided, which is why they gave it to the chief. The heads of the African Masai eat nothing but milk, honey, and roasted livers, for similar reasons. The Turkish high holiday Kurban Bayrami, the Day of Sacrifice, culminates in the ritual eating of a bowl of tripe stew called iskembe corbasi. The ancient Greeks claimed Achilles’ courage came from a diet of lion intestines. The nomad tribes of Sudan make a delicious dish from giraffe innards that they claim allows them to communicate telepathically with their revered giraffe.
And then, of course, there was the Inca empire of Peru and their sacred guinea pigs.
Señora Villanova was waiting for me when I returned to the curanderno’s house the next day. She was about four feet tall, a hundred years old, and wearing a massive pleated skirt and foot-tall white top hat. Braids to her waist. Now here, I thought, was a witch doctor who knew how to dress the part! She should give her husband some tips. We began the session with some prayers to a pile of coca leaves (the base for cocaine, and considered sacred). These were then laid on a piece of gift-wrapping paper and covered with dried moss, pink cooki
es, a couple of marbles, the hand off of a Barbie doll, mattress stuffing, and some confetti. This was my symbolic “body.” My mind began to wander. I was already feeling rather spacy from the three days I’d spent sitting in Husao’s single dirt street begging the Villanovas to see me. They actually had quite a following, and I often found myself in a crowd of patients outside—men shaking with palsy, ominously limp infants, boys with purple mold covering their faces. Serious stuff. And not just dirt-poor peasants. Some of these suckers were rich. One even arrived in a BMW. You would think with that kind of money coming in, the Villanovas would spruce up their operation, but no. Roosters wandered in during my séance. A hunchbacked boy stuck his head in the door for a stare. By the single naked lightbulb I could make out some decorative touches. A pink-and-yellow plastic reindeer head. Donald Duck statues covered in muck. Not as grand as the gory altars of the Roman haruspex but an Etruscan priestess would probably find a Day-Glo pink reindeer pretty damn impressive. Only a truly powerful deity, they might reason, would possess such an otherworldly color. That strangely dressed duck was obviously a lesser wood spirit.
I suppose it was sometime during my little daydream that two other women, identical to Señora Villanova in every respect, sneaked into the room. Before I knew it, they were all jabbering away with one another and throwing golden flower petals at me. I felt as if I was on Mars—three sisters bent double with age, their wrinkled faces glowing a bright parchment yellow and dressed in matching white top hats and blue velour dinner jackets. Blue velour dinner jackets. Where, I wondered, did they get outfits like that? One of them pulled out a jet-black guinea pig and started pouring beer down its gullet. Another tied a mass of pink and green ribbons to each of its paws. Then a bundle of pink ribbons was knotted about its waist.
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