Strange but for once the book about food did not made me run to the fridge, in fact it had quite opposite effect and literary killed any notion of appetite.
The subject is fascinating - food as taboo trough the history - with all different and colourful anecdotes Bill Bryson usually throws out of his sleeve but this author is not Bryson and he kind of enjoys more in gleefully presenting oddities and nastiness about what people considered delicacies at various points trough centuries. The sheer volume of noted bibliography shows that Allen took his obsession very seriously - there are countless stories about societies being suspicious of new unknown objects, adamant of what is proper to cook, how to prepare the meals and even with whom its supposed to dine with. The unfortunate Spanish lady Beatriz Lopez who got burned on a stake (while church chorus sang along to drown out her screams) because she used oil (gasp) in her cooking is just one example of how ridiculously fussy and unforgiving our ancestors were - after reading this, I feel guilty about poring olive oil on my salad and lucky that Spanish inquisition can't see me (I'm sure they would have found thousand and one reason to burn me anyway). Today we take it for granted that we can enjoy fruit & meat & products from all over the world, but according to this book people were darn serious about it and often mixed everything up with religion, so God help you if you took a wrong bite.
Though not really as exciting as I hoped it would be, the book still kept my attention to the end and somewhere along the lines pointed at two interesting ideas. This is something that has been mention only in passing but I remember thinking about it:
- could it be that Israel's "Sons of Abraham" and Indian "Brahmins" share same primordial roots somewhere in a forgotten history?
- the idea of Eden not as a specific place but a time when all living beings on Earth were vegetarian and lived in harmony. Once the climate changed and vegetation became rare, survival depended on proteins and first blood was shared - killing not to protect the territory but to feed changed inhabitants of Earth forever and effectively started the whole chain reaction that led to humans becoming hunters (and inventing a whole bunch of things in order to get that meat). I kind of started to think that the whole Eve/Apple idea was lost in translation and that perhaps its all about meat and killing, more than anything else - perhaps story of Eden is idea of vegetarian world that once was and no killing was necessary.
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