Pop anthrop flop
Digby Anderson
IN THE DEVIL'S GARDEN: A SINFUL HISTORY OF FORBIDDEN FOOD by Stewart Lee Allen Canongam £14.99, pp. 315, ISBN 1841952222 Mr Allen is quite the traveller. He tells us that, now living in Brooklyn, 'he has also called California, Kathmandu, Sydney, San Cristobel, Calcutta and San Francisco home'. His book is a collection of tales about food, anthropological snippets. His qualifications for writing it? 'He has worked as a grape-picker, theatrical director, bathroom attendant, grave-digger, punk musician, smuggler and, of course, a writer.'
There is no anthropological method or any other discipline about the choice and validation of these snippets and, after the first one or two, they are about as interesting as a collection of 300 jokes is funny. He has, though, thought of a way to arrange them. Indeed events propelled him into it. One day. Mr Allen was watching his nephew, Jackson, having his nappy changed by his. Jackson's, father. Jackson urinated over his father's head. All the relatives (including, I'm sure, Mr Allen) 'burst into applause'. The boy then ate a nearby grape and everyone was horrified. This 'brought home' to Mr Allen how profound are our taboos and feelings about food. So he decided to write a book organising stories about food taboos around the seven deadly sins.
Thus, under lust — and I need not tell you that Mr Allen thinks lust is great for a joke — we have the story of how the Comtesse du Barry helped Louis XV get an erection with the aid of her special chocolate concoction, and did you know Dickens' portrayal of Monsignor's chocolate ritual in A Tale of Two Cities was a way of showing the cruelty of the French aristocracy? Indeed Cosimo III raped Tuscany to satisfy his appetite for delicacies and liked jasmine-flavoured chocolate. Apparently, Milos of Croton boasted of eating a whole bull at a sitting and then a boy for dessert. because 'classical Greek cultures considered both dishes excellent ways to fortify one's machismo'. Listless Filipino men eat balut, an egg in which a young duck has developed, to restore sexual vigour.
Should you care to discover the reason for the decline of the Roman Empire, you need do no more than look under 'Gluttony', where Allen explains that 'Roman excess eventually ate the empire alive by making it over-reliant on foreign imports'. Such brief excerpts do not do justice to the author's jaunty style. For that see his account of the Last Supper — listed under 'Pride':
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 ... [But] Christ's déclassé dinner parties were tolerated as long as he held them out in the hoonies Jerusalem was another matter.
That's why the Last Supper was kept secret. It was an illegal 'satanic passover'.
Perhaps the Last Supper was the planned confrontation with the cops. If the soiree had been a deliberate affront, his prophecy is no more clairvoyant than a protester foreseeing jail time after staging a sit-in at the mayor's office.
Just take these brief extracts and multiply them up to 300 pages and you will see what this book is like in content and tone. Occasionally the breezy tone evaporates. Lust and pride and all old-fashioned sins the author takes in his stride, but when he finds chaps eating smoked monkeys, then he starts to simmer. That's exploitation! Blasphemy and sloth are good occasions for amusing tales, but what makes a seasoned world traveller and experienced punk musician and smuggler boil is the alleged mistreatment of Red Indians. Why. the US government destroyed their diet! He can get over-excited about multinationals and the World Bank too. But even his delicious moral predictability can't make the 300 pages less dauntingly boring. I used to argue that any food writing would be preferable to recipe books. That was before I came across the pop anthropology genre. I take it all back. I apologise.
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