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

by Stewart Lee Allen

  Deep-Fried Murder

  The notion that anger should be completely disassociated from eating has gone far beyond a question of sauce or butchering technique. The smallest clue that our food came from a living thing has become virtually taboo, as amply illustrated by a visit to any modern supermarket. Cattle are carefully ground up into a polite puree. Chickens come cubed and breaded. One rarely sees a head or hoof, and many children would no doubt be horrified to realize that their morning bacon once belonged to a cuddly little piggy-poo. Not everyone is pleased with this evisceration. Where, whine our intelligentsia, is the sweat of the farmer’s brow, the anguish of the hunted beast? They should look in the snack-food aisle, where delights like potato chips have been specifically engineered to heighten the vicarious violence beloved by America’s football warriors. Approximately half of the $19 billion worth of snack foods sold in the United States every year falls into the category of “crunch” snacks. This sector increases about 50 percent every decade, but the fastest-growing subsector within the crunch family are the so-called “extreme foods,” which put a premium on extreme auditory effects associated with anger: the splintering of skulls, the screams, the shattering bones, the sound track of mankind on the rampage.

  Take a bag of Krunchers, which advertises it sells “no wimpy chips.” First comes packaging designed to create a battle between bag and man, in which the latter drags his prey to ground and then, straining and swearing, disembowels it with his bare hands. The chips inside are almost useless as food. Just fat and salt. It’s their shrieks of terror that we crave. In his book The Secret House, science writer David Bodanis does a marvelous job of explaining how every aspect of the product is designed by food engineers to manipulate our instinctual aggression. The chips themselves are made too large to close your mouth around, so their high-frequency roar will curve around your face and reach your ears without any loss of volume. They’re also packed with miniscule, air-filled “cells” that cause “shrapnels of flying starch and fat” to ricochet within the mouth and produce more of that lovely roar. Bodanis notes the essential violence of the experience when he writes that further chaos is ensured by the “broken fragments boomeranging at high speed inside the now vacated cells, like the lethal metal slivers broken loose inside an enemy tank by the latest shoulder-fired optically tracked missiles… .”

  Corporations refer to this as “exciting” and grow cagey when asked about the relationship. No doubt Frito-Lay’s use of heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman as their spokesman was mere coincidence. It all really amounts to using a simulacrum of violence to whet our appetite, hence high-tech snacks like 3-D Doritos, which supposedly double the potential volume by creating an air pocket between two walls of high-tensile corn “glass.” A tingling chili flavor is added to give us the teeniest adrenaline rush by simulating a mild burning sensation. Food futurists have speculated that chips like these will eventually contain chemical stimulants much like the increasingly controversial hypercaffeinated sodas and “herb” drinks flooding the markets.

  It’s a trend that causes people like Salon’s David Futrelle to question the long-term effect on our already jaded sensory threshold. “Taste in many cases is secondary; we’re talking food as entertainment,” he wrote, comparing some of the crunch snacks to violent video games. Both create not only similar thrills, but also similar action/response conditioning; just replace the tinny explosions and shrieks the video characters make as they are zapped with the chips’ high-frequency roar as they are chewed. While most people accept that violent visual entertainment can inspire real anger, the impact of their culinary cousins is considerably murkier. A person eating a mouthful of potato chips is experiencing an approximately one-hundred-decibel sound level. According to a NASA study, 65 decibels of sporadic noise can cause a 40 percent rise in hypertension and mental illness, especially among children; other studies have found increased anxiety at levels as low as 51 decibels. Laboratory experiments involving college students found that the louder the noise the more aggressive people become. At 95 decibels of sporadic bursts of sound—roughly the volume of most crunchy snack foods—the students showed significant increased aggression. More important, their aggressive behavior continued after the noise ceased.

  “One aspect of this [appeal of crunchy foods] is definitely a primitive sense of the act of destruction,” said Alan Hirsch, Neurological Director of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago. “When you destroy you get a certain sense of power, and that’s why many people find the sensation of ‘breaking’ these foods so satisfying—they were expressing their subliminal anger.”

  If, as brain specialists say, eating and aggression emanate from the same part of the brain, which appetite does the crunch of the potato chip stimulate? We know junk-food junkies usually reach for their treats in moments of anxiety, but nobody knows if they’re experiencing something that enhances their anger or something that soothes it. Hirsch believes high-crunch snacks probably act as a catharsis because the consumer has control over the sound, a belief that appears to be borne out by other sound/anger experiments. Violent visual entertainment, however, also has a cathartic element. Certainly, the connection between junk food and uncontrolled anger has been validated by the numerous juvenile detention facilities that have halved inmate violence by simply eliminating junk snacks from their inmates’ diets. While experiments like these were focused on the effect of excessive sugar and salt typically contained in snack foods, the blood tests performed for hypoglycemia and lower blood sugar did not adequately explain the drop in violence, according to a paper by Stephen Schoenthaler in the International Journal of Biosocial Research. At any rate, there seems to be little doubt that crunch has a psychological impact. According to Hirsch, one study involving 3,193 people indicated that habitués develop a distinct “crunch craving” third in intensity only to cravings for chocolate and salt.

  No one is implying that snack food manufacturers want to stimulate violent behavior. They just want to make their snacks fun to eat. The problem, if there is one, may lie in the average American’s growing inability to distinguish between the two concepts. Even our favorite beverages are a form of pleasant torture. Nobody drinks flat soda, because the drink’s key, if not sole pleasure lies in the subclinical trigeminal pain caused by those bubbles of carbon dioxide exploding on the tongue. Without them they are as exciting as, well, a flat Coke. But then, every culture has its own way of invoking subliminal violence to stimulate appetite. The next time you go to a traditional French restaurant, take a moment to meditate on your kir royale; how the tongue shudders with titillating pinpricks as the bubbles explode; the way the champagne, stained bloodred with cassis liqueur, writhes sanguine in the candlelight. Time to eat.

  Only if It Has a Face

  A peach drifts down like an errant autumn leaf. You pick it up with a sleepy smile and take a bite. No need to peel, for you know it will be honey-sweet, soft, luscious, and divine. Perhaps you share it with a friend, and, sitting in the tree’s fragrant shadow, the two of you make love before slipping into the perfect sleep. You wake up in the dead of night. Something wet is crawling across your feet. You look down and see a huge sabertooth tiger licking your toes. But no worries, mate. You are in the Muslims’ al-jannah, the Greeks’ Arcadia, the Druids’ Avalon, the Judaic Eden, or one of a dozen primordial paradises that many religions remember as the place where we once lived free of death or fear or hunger or—most important of all—red meat.

  The connection between the vegetarian diet and paradise is thought by some to date back to the Miocene period 8 million years ago, when it is conjectured that large parts of the Earth may have been free of significant predators, and hominoids, like everyone else, were strict vegetarians. The collective memory of this time, according to writers like Colin Spencer, supplied the imagery for this 2,500-year-old poem of paradise credited to Pythagoras.

  There are the crops,

  Apples that bend the branches wit
h their weight

  Grapes swelling on the vines: there are fresh herbs

  And those the tempered flame makes mellow

  Milk is ungrudged and honey from the thyme

  Earth lavishes her wealth, gives sustenance

  Benign, spreads, feasts unstained by blood and death

  This prehistoric love fest is thought to have evaporated when the weather went ratty and we were forced to become hunters. According to some dieticians, the increased protein provided by the switch to a carnivorous diet caused an unprecedented growth spurt of the part of the brain called the cerebrum responsible for higher reasoning. This quasi-scientific “fall from vegetarianism,” however, reeks of the Bible. In both story-lines, humanity breaks a food covenant—one with God (don’t eat the apple), and the other with the animals (don’t eat us)— precipitating a profound change in consciousness. Actually, the Bible repeatedly connects our fall from grace with a growing appetite for red meat. God kept us on a strict vegan diet until we got tossed out of Eden. In the second-class paradise where we found ourselves, meat was allowed but under the constraints outlined in the Book of Leviticus: no blood sausage, no fatty steaks, no pork chops, no cheeseburgers. Only after our behavior had grown so revolting that He drowned most of the human race in the flood were the survivors allowed full expression of their bloodthirsty ways. “Just as I gave you green plants, I now give you everything,” God tells Noah in despair. “Everything that lives and moves will be food to you.” Some rabbis claim Jewish dietary laws are really just a ruse to limit Hebrew meat consumption and keep them closer to a vegetarianism suitable for the Chosen People.

  All these theological trappings make perfect sense when you realize that vegetarianism is actually a religion. People “become” vegetarians, they have epiphanies. Vegetarians think they’re better than the rest of us, and, surprisingly enough, we tend to agree. Surveys of students reveal that even devoted carnivores view vegetarians as more moral and spiritual. It is arguably the fastest-growing belief system on the face of the planet. The West’s current interest, however, is, predictably, clothed in pseudo-science of diet and biochemistry. “It’s meat, ma’am,” says Mr. Bumble in the novel Oliver Twist. “If you had kept the boy on gruel, ma’am, this would never have happened.” Mr. Bumble’s explanation of Oliver’s violent temper tantrum summarizes the belief of Dickens’s time—when the term vegetarianism was first coined—that a meat diet led to unnatural bursts of violence, particularly in children. Other writers even credited English world dominance to the aggression created by their penchant for roast beef. At one point, Gandhi realized that his largely vegetarian Indian people could violently overthrow British rule only if they amplified their aggressive tendencies by becoming carnivores. “It began to grow on me that meat eating was good,” he wrote, “and that if my whole country took to meat eating the English could finally be overcome!” He goes to a quiet spot and cooks up some goat, only to find it too tough to chew.

  Goat, of course, is notorious for its propensity to toughen when overcooked. The meat-violence proposition underlying Gandhi’s foray into barbecue, however, is interesting. One could no doubt make a statistical argument that cultures where vegetarianism is the norm, like India, have lower rates of violent crime than meat-gorging cultures like the United States, despite much higher levels of poverty and other crime. It’s also fair to say that the act of eating meat plays on our species’ memories of hunting and killing, which could potentially lead to a different kind of violence in certain individuals. Some vegetarians argue that butchering animals for meat engenders general violence by subliminally sanctioning killing, an argument quite similar to the one made by opponents of the death penalty, who claim that our government’s endorsement of murder teaches our children that it is an acceptable way to solve problems. In 1847, lawyers for two London boys who’d killed their younger brother claimed that they had seen their own father slaughter a pig and were just repeating his behavior in play, the same defense offered in 2001 for an underage boy who’d pummeled a young girl to death, supposedly while imitating a wrestling match he had seen on TV.

  The problem with all this is that there is no real evidence linking T-bone steaks to psycho killers. I believe vegetarianism’s appeal lies not in this supposed ability to decrease aggression, but in its undeniable ability to amplify our capacity to love. Take the almost extinct Jivaro people of eastern Peru. The Jivaro eat meat but have a profound taboo against eating jungle deer. They point to the deer’s nocturnal habits, its shyness, its quietness, the way it melts in and out of the jungle to appear, ghost-like, at the village edge. Then they point to the animal’s fondness for grazing in gardens left abandoned when the people who tilled them died. The deer, the Jivaro conclude, are the ghosts of their dead neighbors returning to tend their gardens. We could never eat them, they say; they are our friends. This was the original reasoning of people like Pythagoras and Buddha, who introduced vegetarianism twenty-five hundred years ago. Like the Jivaro, they believed in a kind of reincarnation and that animals had “human” souls. It’s this underlying concept that gives this religious diet its moral imperative, because by including all animals in “our tribe,” it allows us psychologically to embrace and love more of God’s world. Like throwing a stone into a pond and watching the ripples grow larger and larger and larger until the entire pond—from self to family to tribe to country to race, on to other species and all birds and beasts— falls within its magic circle.

  Hitler’s Last Meal

  Adolf Hitler was the nicest man a pig could meet. Or a cow or a lamb, for that matter. The mass murderer was such a devout vegetarian that he would weep during movies that showed animals being harmed, covering his eyes and begging the others “to tell him when it was all over.” Meat-eaters, he often said, were hypocritical “corpse eaters” and ultimately unsuitable as candidates for the master race. One early Nazi propaganda device was to sell boxes of cigarettes that contained a picture of the nature-loving Führer pensively peeling an apple. In fact, the German vegetarian community was so instrumental in his rise to power that he once considered making a meat-free diet part of the party platform, only stopping when he realized it would damage the food-supply system and hurt his war effort. When he finally came to power in 1933, leaders of the movement hailed him as their savior.

  This bizarre character quirk has been explained in a number of ways. Hitler said it was the writings of opera composer Richard Wagner that made him a believer. “Did you know that Wagner has attributed much of the decay of our civilization to meat-eating?” he told Nazi chronicler Hermann Rauschning. “I don’t touch meat, largely because of what Wagner says on the subject and says, I think, absolutely rightly.” Traditional historians, however, suggest the diet was to alleviate Hitler’s jumpy stomach. Psycho-historians point to his well-known oral fixations, like sucking his thumb during cabinet meetings, as well as to the guilt complex he developed after murdering his niece. It all certainly casts a shadow on the idea that vegetarians are innately peaceful, and to this day his fellow believers (dietary ones) still insist he was not a real vegetarian at all—didn’t his vitamin capsules contain animal gelatin? they ask. His pastries lard?

  Equally odd is the way Hitler treated his fellow carrot eaters once he got into power. According to historian Jane Barkas, Hitler first tried to turn the vegetarian/nature group Wander-vogel into the super-Aryan Union of Teutonic Knights. Next he pressured the vegetarian colony Eden to teach Nazi race theories. When this failed, he banned the entire vegetarian movement. Their main magazine, Vegetarian Warte, was suppressed, and major meeting sites were turned into concentration camps. Known vegetarians were arrested, cookbooks were confiscated, and the owner of Cologne’s popular Vega Restaurant, Walter Fleiss, appeared on the Gestapo’s most-wanted list, apparently just for being a Jewish vegetarian. While the repression was part and parcel of Nazi paranoia about any “group,” the traditional association between vegetarians and the peace movement, and the implication that t
he Führer was a closeted peacenik, were particularly galling to the war-hungry regime. And despite his backsliding during the war, Hitler remained as committed to vegetarian principles of morality as he was to cleaning the world of “subhuman” species. “He believes more than ever that meat-eating is harmful to humanity,” wrote the author of Hitler’s Secret Conversations 1941–44 (supposedly propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels). “Of course, he knows that during the war we cannot completely upset our food system. After the war, however, he intends to tackle this problem also.” The vegetarian Final Solution was never realized. The world’s most-hated murderer and animal lover took his own life to the tune of Russian bombs tinkling down overhead. His beloved veggie cook, Fraulein Manzialy, was one of the few followers to commit suicide with him.

  Little Nigoda

  If Lewis Carroll were the head of a religious cult, I thought, he would have built a temple like this. The main building to my left was covered inside and out with thousands of bits of broken mirror, while a few lungi-clad priests sat meditating under a gaudy chandelier. The steeples looked as if they’d been squeezed out of a pastry tube. The building next to it was pure French baroque, albeit painted hot pink. Statues of the unlikeliest characters were scattered everywhere. Simpering English girls swirled parasols, boys in breeches cavorted with basset hounds. The largest was a six-foot-tall statue of an English soldier twirling his mustache with one hand and pointing furiously at the meditating priests with his other—get up you bloody wogs, his expression clearly said, and get back to work!