Read Online In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food by Stewart Lee Allen - Free Book Online Page B

kvetching. “We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt,” they whined, “the cucumbers and the melons, and the leeks and the garlic. But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, besides this manna, before our eyes.” So Jehovah obligingly sent over some delicious little chickadees, actually quails, which, just like the manna, fell from the sky at their feet and waited to be eaten. Fires were kindled, wine decanted, and everybody set to. But it was a trick. The LORD, it seems, was “most wroth” at their display of gluttonous ingratitude—what if all his angelic employees started complaining about manna?— and “while the flesh was yet between their teeth . . . the LORD smote them with a very great plague.” Food poisoning, in other words. It turns out that this tale is also likely true because quails traditionally migrate through the area en route to Africa. It’s a long flight, and by all accounts the birds arrive completely exhausted, hence the bit about their flopping down at the Israelis’ feet. The Heaven-sent “plague” stems from the fact that quails eat the herbs hellebore and henbane, both of which contain toxins. This is not normally a problem, but when the birds are seriously dehydrated, the poisons can get dangerously concentrated in musculature. The Greeks knew about this, but the Jews did not, and the quails gave the entire Nation of Israel one serious stomachache. Those who’d complained loudest about the manna were buried on the spot.
    Saints and Supermodels
    Medieval saints and modern fashion models may seem to strive for very different types of perfection—one strictly spiritual, the other physical—but both have traditionally chosen extreme dieting as the surest means to express their divine natures. The current vogue for skeletal beauty is too well known to require comment. But they were closely paralleled by medieval holy women, half of whom engaged in compulsive dieting, often to death, and who were twice as likely as their male equivalents to engage in starvation fasts. In his book
Holy Anorexia
, Rudolph Bell postulates that the two ages’ shared obsession stems from outbreaks of anorexia nervosa, a psychological condition in which women starve themselves under the delusion that any eating is an act of gluttony. Others suggest it stems from women’s unique relationship to food and motherhood. Whatever the reason, the menus put together by both are enough to take away the appetite of even the most devout sinner. St. Veronica spent most of her life eating spiders and cat vomit, but eventually settled into a regime consisting of vegetable soup and two ounces of fruit for breakfast. Dinner was a few grapes. Margaret of Cortona in the 1200s lived on nothing but dry bread and minuscule amounts of raw vegetables. Modern models often follow remarkably similar regimes, especially in the weeks before a major shoot or show, during which they eat nothing but cabbage soup in order to reduce their body fat to an absolute minimum. One famous ballerina reportedly survived for years on an apple a day, while others have deliberately induced starvation by drinking enormous quantities of water to kill off their appetite. A number of well-known actresses follow more modern versions of the saints’ regimes by replacing the stale bread breakfast with a fat-free muffin and the raw vegetable dinner with a lightly dressed arugula salad.
    What’s interesting about the female saints’ fasting is their motivation. Food deprivation among Judeo-Christians originated as a form of penance and as a reaction to the indulgence of pagan Rome. These female Christian mystics, however, used it primarily to alter their consciousness, a technique summed up by Margaret of Cortona’s comment that she fasted obsessively “in order to be more light headed and allow her soul to be fervent.” True starvation can lead to a complete absence of daydreams— or even dreams—but controlled deprivation tends to