In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food

by Stewart Lee Allen

  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 forcefed 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.

  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 butc
hery 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 w
ith 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.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  “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.

  Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Random House, 1990.

  Ackerman, Marie. Das Schlaraffenland in German Literature and Folk Song. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1944.

  Acton, Harold. The Last Medici. London: Faber & Faber, 1932.

  Adair, Nancy (ed.) Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives. San Francisco: New Glide, 1978.

  Albert-Puleo, Michael. “The Botany, Pharmacology and Chemistry of Thujone-containing Plants.” Economic Botany 32 (Jan. 1978).

  Aldana-Benitez, Cornelia (ed). Unmasking a Giant. Philippines: IBON, 1992. Includes The Silent Slaughter by Fides Lim of Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.

  Al-Gazalli. The Revival of Religious Learnings or Gazzali’s ihya Ulum-id-Din, translated by Alhaj Maulana Fazlul Karim. Dacca: F. K. Islam Mission Trust, 1971.

  Allen, Louis A. Time Before Morning: Art and Myth of the Australian Aborigines. New York: Crowell, 1975.

  Allen. J. B. (ed). First Images of America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

  Allison, Dorothy. Trash. Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books, 1988.

  Amnesty International. “USA: Police Use of Pepper Spray Tantamount to Torture.” Nov. 4, 1997.

  Andrews, Jean. Red Hot Peppers. New York: Macmillan, 1993.

  Archetti, Duardo. Guinea-Pigs: Food, Symbol and Conflict of Knowledge in Ecuador. Oxford, England: Oxford Press, 1997.