The Reader Travels

Catholics embrace the story of the wedding at Cana so they can enjoy their liquor and still be like Jesus. Weddings and other earthly celebrations are given the blessing of God because Jesus performed his first public miracle turning water into wine. 

Of course, some Protestants might argue that they were simply using the wine to sterilize the water since they didn’t have the benefit of Louis Pasteur’s wisdom back in those days, and if they drank plain old water, they might get sick. So, yeah,  this was a great miracle indeed.

Personally, I believe in moderation versus austerity or debauchery, but I think it was totally cool of Jesus to keep the party going like that, whatever your interpretation. Life simply wouldn’t be the same without celebration, good food, good drink, good friends.

So in this time of year where the harvest and winter celebrations abound, may your glass be ever full.

My preferred translation of Bethlehem is “House of Meat,” and it reminds me that the little manger where Jesus was born was there to house livestock who would one day become supper for the town’s residents. So really, the tiny Messiah came to this world in a little meat room in the big house of meat.

I’m getting hungry just thinking about it. So, in honor of this new discovery, I think I will buy everyone sausages for Christmas.

I will repeat myself. I am not, nor will I ever be, a Bible scholar. But I do know a few things. The Bible is filled with gruesome and violent tales, there are lots of rules and prophecies, and there’s a whole lot of eating going on.

Since I was raised Catholic, we were not encouraged to actually read The Bible and spout out chapters and verses. I remember getting little red copies of the New Testament in grade school, but I was never able to get past the “begats.” In my freshman year of college, I took a humanities class where we studied a few books of The Bible and discussed them as literature. I managed to read all of Genesis and get the gist of Exodus, so after college, I thought I might pick up where I left off with Leviticus.

This was the book that kick-started the idea of moralizing about food within the whole judeo-christian-islamic belief complex. There’s all this stuff about what to eat and what not to eat in Leviticus and later in Deuteronomy. I especially like the rules about not eating the meat of a baby goat that’s cooked in its mother’s milk. So you have to realize that people must have been doing a whole lot of that if they had to make a rule against it, right?

Sure, there are some good common sense reasons not to eat vultures and pigs, who will eat just about anything. Best to stick to the chickens and the “cud-chewers,” who can keep us closer to the top of the food chain. Oh, and vegetables, of course.

It reminds me once again of the ancient Mexican tribes who shared their peyote trips on down the line. Of course, in this situation, only the priests were able to remain “clean.” At least with the early people of God, they shared their superiority with each other and only dumped the unclean food on foreigners and outsiders.

I know this may sound irreverent, but for my nephew’s First Communion, I gave him a little speech about the awesomeness of ritual cannibalism. We talked about the Karankawa tribes of Gulf Coast Texas who would eat the flesh of their fallen enemies to gain their power. The very idea of eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus to gain his strength, love and forgiveness is pretty powerful stuff. You have to admit.

But it’s become such an oft-repeated ritual that the power is lost on most Christians. Although my nephew was a little older for his First Communion, most Catholics indoctrinate their kids into the ritual at around seven years old. By the time they’re old enough to think about how cool it really is, the repetition has numbed them to it.

The numbness might also have something to do with the fact that Jesus doesn’t taste like anything at all. I remember as a kid when my young cousin, who had never been to the Catholic church, visited us one summer. We took her to church with us and sat in our usual spot in the front row. The rest of us went up to stand in line, and my mother made sure she stayed back in her pew.

When she saw us go up and take the wafer , she protested quite loudly, “Is that a potato chip? I want a potato chip!” I assured her when I returned to her side, scrunching up my nose, “You don’t really want that. It doesn’t taste anything like a potato chip.”

What if the second coming was a Martian who liked free sex and free meat? Personally, I might become a believer.

In Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith is a human raised on Mars, who has been taught it’s the worst kind of sacrilege not to eat the flesh of your fallen friends. It’s truly a sin to “waste food.”

In a later work, Heinlein would goof on himself about Stranger, pondering what some writers would do “for money.” But I actually think it’s quite a poignant novel that helped me to see my religious upbringing in a different light. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Stranger is my Bible, but I will say it was more fun to read, more sex, less violence, and it had Martians.

Even though all of Heinlein’s women were hot nurses, hot secretaries or hot strippers, he was quite the forward thinker. And he turned the words, “eat me,” into the greatest of compliments.

Can you grok?

Anthony Burgess was just cool — a world traveler, linguist, novelist and thinker. In 1962 he wrote two different novels about crazy future worlds, the most popular, of course, being A Clockwork Orange because Stanley Kubrick went off and made a movie about it.

While I think Clockwork is thought provoking and a great display of Burgess’s linguistic talents, my favorite of the two dystopic novels is The Wanting Seed. With all its closet heterosexuals, warfare and cannibalism, what’s not to like?

Much like the father and son in The Road, our main character travels the countryside when his world falls apart back home. But his countrymen haven’t turned savage. They’re still proper Englishmen, and as such, they politely call what they’re eating, “meat,” and pretend to themselves there’s nothing untoward about it.

Of course, some might argue it’s not much worse than what Englishmen eat today. Before I traveled to the UK two years ago, I got plenty of warnings about how bad the food was. Granted, there wasn’t much appreciation for leafy green vegetables in the pubs where we found ourselves eating most meals, but I actually liked the food — meat pies, sausages, potatoes, fried fish, good comfort food, all of it.

I was also reassured by the pig and sheep farms we passed by in Suffolk County. It’s still nice to know where your meat is coming from.

I read The Road during the 2009 road trip travels. In this post-apocolyptic world, the father-son duo travels across country in search of cans and crumbs of food to keep themselves alive. And while they’re searching, they have to keep from being eaten by all the crazies on the road.

So I’m still debating about seeing the movie.  I’m always interested to see how a movie adaptation captures the real themes of a book and how it changes to feed trends and the appetites of movie watchers. I try to not to be appalled by how they “ruined” it or how the author might have “sold out.” I only observe the choices made to get them from the book to the movie, eternally fascinated by human behavior and market drivers.

Going back to Chocolat, I thought it was quite interesting that they changed the chocolatier’s nemesis from a priest to a town mayor. Maybe they didn’t want to upset the Pope, or maybe it just wasn’t politically correct to show priests in such a bad light. They also played up the romance angle, which is just the thing to do in Hollywood. I’m not judging. After all, the key to marketing is to know your audience.

Sure I’d be interested to see what they did with The Road to make it appeal to American movie-goers. Since the book is short and fairly thin on plot, I’d think it would be easy to adapt. The cameras need something to focus on, so I’m guessing they played up the apocolypse and the violence. That’s what movie-goers want, right?  I’m not opposed to a bit of movie action, but I’m still not sure I want to see it.

Don’t get me wrong, I did like the book.  The problem is that I’m not sure I want to be in that world again. It didn’t taste very good.

Over lunch with my man yesterday, I was feeling a little insecure when I said, “Sometimes I feel like I’m normal.” Then he answered, “Do normal people obsess over cannibalism while discussing food?” And that reassured me. I’m feeling much better now.

We were discussing survival cannibalism before, and my mother-in-law brought up Cabeza de Vaca, Spanish explorer who toured the coast of Texas in the 1500s, checking out the local lifestyles and cuisine. While the explorer observed a few different types of ritual cannibalism among the natives, his hosts were completely disgusted when learning that a part of the expedition party stranded on an island with no food had resorted to eating each other to survive.

Cabeza de Vaca called it Isla de Malhado, or Island of Misfortune, and there is debate over exactly where this island was on the Texas coast. Many historians believe it was Galveston Island, but some debate that it was Bolivar Penninsula, while others claim it’s a little further west at San Luis Island. Either way, I’m sure I’ve stepped foot on the Isla de Malhado, having grown up in Galveston County, Texas, stomping along the coast line from Beaumont to Freeport.

I’m suddenly feeling nostalgic for home. I think I’ll stick to the seafood, though.

A friend asked me when I was going to stop dwelling on the morbid and start talking about something lighter, perhaps the erotic aspects of food. The problem is that I have a certain goal in mind, and I’m just not there yet. There are two more books to cover on the topic of cannibalism before we reach the climax, and yet, we need some sort of release, a breath, before we can go on.

I just finished reading Chocolat by Joanne Harris, so it only seems right to flow in the wind with Vianne. She blows through town bringing a little taste of joy and freedom. From the first words of the book, everything is delicious. “We came on the wind of the carnival. A warm wind for February, laden with the hot greasy scents of frying pancakes and sausages and powdery sweet waffles cooked on the hot plate right there by the roadside…”

Her air infects the ascetic with temptation. His thoughts become beautiful even as he rails against their ugliness, “I feel the insidious creeping of doubt in my mind, and my mouth fills at the memory of its perfume, like cream and marshmallow and burnt sugar and the heady mingling of cognac and fresh-ground cocoa beans. It is the scent of a woman’s hair, just where the nape joins the skull’s tender hollow, the scent of ripe apricots in the sun, of warm brioche and cinnamon rolls, lemon tea and lily of the valley.”

Ah, this one is worth tasting, again and again.

Speaking of cannibalism, some families tend to eat each other alive. Three books come to mind when I think about some of my extended family: Little Altars Everywhere and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells, and A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. Theirs are the types of secrets that make siblings scatter and look back at each other with anger and disgust.

But then it’s real food, not sibling-steak, that connects across physical and emotional miles. My grandmother’s funeral service was rushed, and the only personal words spoken were about her wonderful cooking. But then it was a topic that everyone could agree on, this love for good food and the sharing of kitchen knowledge.

After the funeral, one of my aunt’s friends asked about her favorite meals cooked by her mother — stewed chicken and crawfish etouffee were her answers. My aunt is more likely to buy me a good meal than to make it these days, but she knows good food and she knows how to cook it. One of the last meals she made for me was a delicious roast beef po-boy, its roots in her mother’s kitchen, its finesse learned from her daughter’s tour at culinary school. Nearing her husband’s retirement, she ponders moving to the condo in the city and selling the house in the suburbs, but she hasn’t figured out where she’ll put all her pots.

As brash as he is, my oldest uncle will light up when he talks about cooking. He visited a year ago, and stood in my mother’s kitchen describing the arduous, three-day process of making a good crawfish bisque. He’s a master of the crawfish boil and is not stingy with the knowledge. His son-in-law conducted his first crawfish boil last year, and it was a huge success.

My youngest uncle said to me last time I visited that he had cooked his father’s final meal, an omelette, something his mother had taught him to cook, just as she had taught my mother, who in turn taught me. I will make omelettes for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, doesn’t matter.

Although she did not teach me directly, I think of my grandmother every time I make spaghetti sauce. My mother used to cut her tomatoes in the can with a butter knife clicking against the tin. She told me her mother would always crush the tomatoes in her fingers to break them up, but she didn’t really like the squishy feeling, so she did it this way instead. I gently remove the bald tomatoes one-by-one from the can and stick my fingers into them. They shred with ease, leaving fleshy edges that feel good in the mouth. And as I feel the cool tomato juice in my fingers, I thank her for this gift of food.

Forget the rest.