A.J. Jacobs Omnibus: The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment

by A. J. Jacobs

  The problem is, forbidden foods are hiding everywhere. Bacon lurks in salad dressings. Gelatin is sometimes derived from pig bones, so an argument can be made—and often is—that it’s forbidden. And pig fat. That terrifies me. Typical is this recent exchange I had with a waitress at a midtown restaurant:

  “Do you know if the piecrust is made with lard?”

  “I don’t think so, but I’ll check.”

  “Thanks. I can’t eat lard.”

  “Allergies?”

  “No, Leviticus.”

  It’s a conversation stopper, that one. It’s hard to trot out the Bible at a New York restaurant without sounding self-righteous or messianic. But the Proverbs say I must tell the truth, so I told the truth.

  It’s often pointed out that following religious food laws sharpens your discipline. The famous twelfth-century philosopher Maimonides says this is precisely their purpose: “[They] train us to master our appetites; to accustom us to restrain our desires; and to avoid considering the pleasure of eating and drinking as the goal of man’s existence.”

  The thing is, I’ve been mastering my appetites since my cholesterol first bubbled up in my early twenties. For years, I’ve been eating Styrofoam-like fat-free cheese and scouring ingredient labels for the evil hydrogenated oil. It seems most people nowadays have some sort of food restriction, whether it’s avoiding carbs, sugar, or nonorganic vegetables. My friend’s sister refuses to eat nightshades, whatever they are.

  So if self-regulation of our urges is the purpose, perhaps the Bible laws are no longer necessary. As a society, we’ve outgrown them. I told this idea to my Orthodox adviser Yossi. He shook his head. “You can’t know the mind of God,” he said. “There may be benefits beyond what we know now or can imagine.”

  So I sucked it up and stuck with the laws, still hoping to trip over one of those elusive benefits. And maybe I did. It happened about three weeks ago. I was following one of the most obscure food taboos in the Bible. This one concerns forbidden fruit. According to Leviticus 19:23–25, you cannot eat fruit unless the tree that bears said fruit is at least five years old. If a tree is four years old or younger, its fruit is not for human consumption. (Some Orthodox Jews follow this but say it applies only to fruit grown in Israel or fruit grown with your own hands.)

  I tried to find out the ages of all the fruits I ate by emailing and calling grocery stores and companies. This was not a success. I got a lot of terse responses like this one, from the corporate headquarters of Polaner All-Fruit spreads:

  Mr. Jacobs,

  Unfortunately there would not be any way for us to guarantee the age of the plants from which our suppliers pick the blackberries.

  I was reduced to researching which kinds of fruits came from slow-bearing trees and which from fast-bearing. I learned that peach trees can bear fruit in two years. Too dangerous. Pear trees in four. Again, too risky. But cherry trees, those are slowpokes. They take at least five to seven from planting to produce.

  Cherries are safe. Not my favorite fruit, but they will be my fruit for the year. I went to Fairway supermarket, bought a half pound and began eating them out of the plastic bag on the walk home, spitting the seeds into garbage cans on the street corners.

  Each cherry took about three seconds to eat. Three seconds to eat, but at least five years in the making. It seemed unfair to the hard-working cherry tree. The least I could do was to devote my attention to the cherry in those three seconds, really appreciate the tartness of the skin and the faint crunching sound when I bite down. I guess it’s called mindfulness. Or being in the moment, or making the mundane sacred. Whatever it is, I’m doing it more. Like the ridiculously extended thank-you list for my hummus, the fruit taboo made me more aware of the whole cherry process, the seed, the soil, the five years of watering and waiting. That’s the paradox: I thought religion would make me live with my head in the clouds, but as often as not, it grounds me in this world.

  Of them you may eat: the locust according to its kind…

  —LEVITICUS 11:22

  But anyway, back to the bugs. To really connect with my forefathers through my stomach, I decided the food taboos were only half the story. I’d have to do more. I’d have to eat the same foods Moses and Jesus did.

  To help me with this, I bought the aforementioned The Maker’s Diet, a 320-page book by an evangelical nutritionist named Jordan Rubin. It’s a helpful guide. The basic idea is a modified Mediterranean diet, which means our refrigerator is now packed with even more hummus, tahini, and pita bread. At the suggestion of The Maker’s Diet, I’ve also cut out all cow’s milk. Cows in biblical times were mainly used for dragging farm implements. The beverage of choice for Israelites was goat’s or sheep’s milk.

  I called around, and, sure enough, I found a health food store in midtown that stocks fresh goat’s milk from upstate New York. They stash a few half-gallon cartons in the fridge behind the massive display of vitamin B and echinacea.

  Every morning I splash a little goat’s milk on my oatmeal. It’s not bad, really. It’s like regular milk but thicker, the consistency of those overpriced blackberry Odwalla smoothies.

  Also, I’m eating a lot of honey. Honey is one of the few certain pleasures in the Bible. It’s the very description of the Promised Land—a place God says is “flowing with milk and honey”—so my oatmeal gets a healthy dollop of honey.

  (My aunt Marti, the vegan and animal rights activist, found out about my honey eating and sent me a rebuking email. The subject header was “The bitter truth about honey.” She listed all the ways the commercial honey industry mistreats bees. I won’t reprint it here, but her description of artificial bee insemination was disturbingly graphic. She signed the note, “Your eccentric aunt Marti.”)

  The Mediterranean cuisine is working out well. Maybe it’s buried deep somewhere in my DNA, this love of chickpeas and flat bread. It’s my kind of Semitic food. Incidentally, I can’t stand that other Jewish food: the Eastern European variety. I don’t know why—a shrink would probably say it’s because I have conflicted feelings about Judaism in general—but I can’t eat it. The single most nauseating meal I’ve ever had was at a Lower East Side Jewish restaurant called Sammy’s Roumanian Steak House. This is a place where, instead of salt and pepper, the condiment of choice is liquefied chicken fat. They put a big bottle of thick yellow chicken fat—schmaltz is the official term—smack in the middle of the table, just in case your potato pancakes aren’t quite sopping wet enough with grease already. I ate at Sammy’s with a guy who, after a couple of vodkas, mistook the chicken fat for a complimentary bottle of orange juice, and downed several gulps before turning white and excusing himself for the bathroom.

  Where was I? Oh yes, the bugs. Now, this doesn’t get much play in The Maker’s Diet, but there was one other source of protein in biblical times: insects. Leviticus forbade the ancients from indiscriminate bug eating, condemning most insects as “abominations” (anything that creeps, swarms, or has four legs and wings is off limits). So, no beetles, no mosquitoes, no bees, and so on.

  But there are exceptions: “Of [insects] you may eat: the locust according to its kind, the bald locust according to its kind, the cricket according to its kind, and the grasshopper according to its kind.” (Leviticus 11:22) In other words, locusts, crickets, and grasshoppers are fine.

  It’s not clear from the Bible how often our forefathers actually ate them. Were they a popular meal? Or just in case of famine? The Bible’s only other reference to bug consumption comes in the story of John the Baptist, who was reported to have survived on locusts and wild honey (though even this is controversial; some say the word locust here is a mistranslation, and he really ate carob pods).

  Regardless, since the Bible diet contains so many restrictions, I figured I’d try to take advantage of this loophole. Maybe it’ll make me feel manly and adventurous. It’ll be Fear Factor, Old Testament style.

  It isn’t hard to find the bugs. The internet is teeming with edible insects, or �
��microlivestock,” as they are called. There are chocolate wafers with ants sprinkled in. And beetle toffee bars. And larva cheddar cheese snacks. And plenty of crickets, which are apparently called “the other green meat” (high in protein, low in fat). The most promising supplier is named Fluker’s Farms, which describes its crickets as “oven roasted to perfection and then covered with the finest chocolate available to create one truly unforgettable exotic snack.” Plus, you get an “exclusive” I Ate a Bug Club button.

  A few days later, I get a purple box with two dozen individually wrapped chocolate crickets. I’m going to need a fellow traveler on this one. I ask Julie, but she gives me another in a long line of overly enthusiastic “Thanks for asking! But I’m going to take a pass this time!”

  So I take a couple of crickets along to dinner with my friend John. For my last book, John went to singles bars and tried to pick up women using facts from the encyclopedia about penguin mating rituals, so I figure he might be willing. He wasn’t so sure.

  “If I feel sick in the next couple of days, I’m going to blame you.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  After we finish dinner at a downtown diner, I eat my cricket. Or at least I swallow it. I pop the cricket in my mouth, bite down twice, then chug water, ingesting it like a chestnut-sized pill. I tasted nothing.

  I offer the other one to John.

  “Come on. Just one.”

  “Fine,” he says.

  John unwraps his cricket and takes a bite, chewing slowly while looking at the ceiling, brow furrowed in thought.

  “You like it?”

  “A little crunchy,” he says. “Hard to actually taste the cricket.”

  “I read it’s supposed to be tangy. Is it tangy?”

  “The chocolate is overpowering. But you do get a nice crispness.”

  He takes in the other half.

  “It tastes like that candy bar Krackel. Same consistency.”

  A couple of days later, I am at my grandfather’s house boasting about my insect eating. My cousin Rick, who is a high-school sophomore, isn’t impressed.

  “You eat insects all the time,” he says. “There are insect parts in everything.”

  Rick has embraced entomology with a passion that most kids reserve for baseball and illegally downloaded music. If E. O. Wilson had a poster, Rick would have it on his wall. So presumably he knew what he was talking about.

  And he did. I found a tremendously disturbing Food and Drug Administration website that lists the “natural and unavoidable” amounts of insects for every kind of food.

  One hundred grams of pizza sauce can have up to thirty insect eggs.

  One hundred grams of drained mushrooms may contain twenty or more maggots.

  And if you want oregano on your mushroom pizza, you’ll be enjoying 1,250 or more insect fragments per 10 grams.

  So I was violating the Bible rules even without intending to. Or maybe not. Depends on the interpretation. Orthodox Jews usually reason that since they didn’t have microscopes in biblical times, then a bug must be visible with bare eyes to be forbidden.

  Why would God weigh in on any insects at all, visible or not? Once again, my secular mind wanted to know the reason for the Lord’s decrees. What’s the logic? The Bible doesn’t say—it’s one of the unexplained laws.

  But one book I read—The Unauthorized Version by Robin Lane Fox—had a theory. It said that in biblical times, swarming locusts would often devour the crops and cause famines. The only way for the poor to survive was by eating the locusts themselves. So if the Bible didn’t approve of locust eating, the poorest Israelites would have died of starvation. This I like. More and more, I feel it’s important to look at the Bible with an open heart. If you roll up your sleeves, even the oddest passages—and the one about edible bugs qualifies—can be seen as a sign of God’s mercy and compassion.

  You shall rise up before the grayheaded and honor the aged…

  —LEVITICUS 19:32 (NASB)

  Day 142. I’m currently in Florida. Julie and I have made a trip to Boca Raton for the wedding of Julie’s college friend. We got through airport security without a second glance, which made me both happy and slightly concerned about the screeners’ vigilance.

  It’s the day before the ceremony, and we’re at a strip mall restaurant. It’s 5:00 p.m., Jasper’s mealtime. Florida, 5:00 p.m. dinner. As you can imagine, the average age approached that of a Genesis patriarch—maybe not Methuselah’s 969 years, but perhaps Mahalalel, who saw 895 years.

  The Bible has a lot to say about your elders. In fact, there’s this one law that I keep meaning to abide by, but so far it has gotten lost in the avalanche of other rules. It is Leviticus 19:32: We should not only respect our elders, but stand in their presence. If there’s a time to laser in on this rule, it is now. So as we wait for our pasta, I start standing up and sitting down. I pop up every time a gray-haired person enters the restaurant. Which is pretty much every forty-five seconds. It looks like I’m playing a solitaire version of musical chairs.

  “What are you doing?” asks Julie.

  I tell her about Leviticus 19.

  “It’s very distracting.”

  I stand up and sit down.

  “I thought you had a wedgie,” Julie says.

  I stand up and sit down.

  “Are you going to do this for the rest of the year?”

  “I’m going to try,” I say. I know I’ll fail—there’s just too much to remember to follow in biblical living—but I don’t want to admit that yet.

  There’s a reason the Bible commands us to respect the elderly. According to scholars, many of the ancient Israelites lived a subsistence-level nomadic life, and the elderly—who couldn’t do much heavy lifting—were seen as a liability.

  The command seems disturbingly relevant today. After the ancient times, the elderly did have a few good centuries there. Victorian society especially seemed to respect those with white hair and jowls. But now, we’ve reverted back to the elderly-as-liability model of biblical times. This has become increasingly troublesome to me as I speed toward old age myself. I’m thirty-eight, which means I’m a few years from my first angioplasty, but—at least in the media business—I’m considered a doddering old man. I just hope the twenty-six-year-old editors out there have mercy on me.

  And I have pledged to have mercy on those even older than I. A week ago, when I volunteered at the soup kitchen, I sat next to this fellow volunteer; she must have been in her seventies. And she complained…for a half hour straight. She was like the Fidel Castro of complainers—she spouted a never-ending stream of faultfinding. She spent five minutes alone on how the tree roots in her neighborhood make the sidewalk uneven. But instead of trying to stuff my ears, I attempted to empathize. Yes, that must be hard. Uneven sidewalks. I never noticed it, but, yes, someone could trip.

  As Julie and I finish our dinner, we watch an old man get up from his table and shuffle off to the bathroom. He emerges a few minutes later and sits down at an empty table. It is a table two tables away from the table with his wife and kids. He sits there alone for several minutes, his head cocked, staring into the middle distance. What’s going on? Is he mad at his family? I didn’t see them fighting. Why his banishment?

  Suddenly the daughter notices her father sitting two tables away.

  “Dad!” she calls. “We’re over here. Over here!” He looks over, suddenly remembering. He returns to the table, still somewhat dazed.

  I turn to Julie. She looks like she’s about to cry.

  “The standing stuff I could do without. But I think it’s good that you’re honoring your elders. That’s a good thing.”

  Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you.

  —PROVERBS 4:25

  Day 143. My glasses broke today. Jasper grabbed the wire-rimmed frames and stretched out the temples, so the glasses keep slipping off my nose. I’m reduced to keeping my head tilted
up at a forty-five-degree angle as we walk around Boca Raton. My neck is killing me.

  Plus, I look arrogant; my nose stuck in the air all day. I wonder if I’m breaking a biblical rule. I’m not sure. Maybe. In the Talmud, there’s a ban against walking more than four cubits in what one translator calls “a jaunty, insolent, upright position.” This is one reason you see some old Jewish men and women walk with such a pronounced stoop, their hands folded behind their backs. In America, land of Trump and self-esteem, humility isn’t much of a virtue. But my ancestors wouldn’t even stand up straight for fear of looking boastful.

  I keep my chin in the air while watching the wedding the next day. It’s a lovely, quiet outdoor ceremony in a Japanese-style garden. You can barely hear the bride and groom, but it doesn’t matter.

  I try not to think about the propolygamy parts of the Bible. That would be disrespectful to the event at hand. I try to focus instead on those parts of the Bible that say one wife per husband is a good ratio. In Genesis 2:24—a passage quoted by Jesus—we read about how man and woman are not complete until they cleave to each other. They are two halves. Only together can they create a full being.

  So you shall do with any lost thing of your brother’s, which he loses and you find.

  —DEUTERONOMY 22:3

  Day 148. On the flight back from Florida, I found the checkbook of a Fort Lauderdale woman in the seat pocket in front of me. The Bible says that if your neighbor loses an ox or a sheep—or anything, for that matter—you are to return it to him or her.

  So I sent back the checkbook. I felt good, honorable. I’m not a hard-hearted New Yorker: I’m acting with random kindness. And the beauty part is, it actually worked out to my benefit. The Fort Lauderdale woman sent me a thank-you note (the stationary had a cartoon of a fat guy wearing an “I’m Too Sexy for My T-shirt” T-shirt), and enclosed a Starbucks gift card.

  The checkbook triumph gives me such a moral high, I use the card to pay for the latte of the guy behind me at Starbucks. I got the idea from a religious website devoted to kindness. Just tell the cashier that three bucks of the next guy’s bill is on you.