Stewart Lee Allen: In The Devil's Garden

By LAURA KROETSCH

When we lament that it's "sinful" or "decadent", or that we feel "so guilty", what we're usually talking about is food. Ours is an age of anxiety. We worry about food and sex and faith - but mostly we worry about food. What we forget is that we always have done so - ever since, well, Eve and that apple.

To console, or possibly to confound, us in this age of worry, we have food media: cookbooks, magazines, articles, television and celebrity chefs. We also have food histories, stories that help to explain all the carry-on and remind us that we didn't invent anxiety about eating.

Ours is a long and quite fascinating history. And as a history of the forbidden, In the Devil's Garden is a good read. As a history it may not adhere to traditional practice (such as an index), but as popular history it's hard to put down.

For those familiar with The Devil's Cup, Stewart Lee Allen remains the manic globetrotting lad of his earlier work. This time around he seems to have spent a bit more time in the library, which is not to say that his readers will want for exotic locations and hair-raising adventure, including a particularly sad account of travelling down the Congo with a cargo of "bush meat" - smoked monkeys, the nouvelle cuisine of Central Africa and a leading cause of extinction.

In the Devil's Garden doesn't shy away from the more cruel aspects of human behaviour, but generally the book concerns itself with our complicated relationship with taboos.

Take Eve and her apple: the Bible doesn't actually say apple. It's more likely that the grape-loving Christians made the forbidden fruit an apple to help to persuade those apple-loving Celts up north that it was time to convert. So the apple gets associated with sin and wine remains sacred.

Then there's cannibalism, that endlessly fascinating practice. The Aztecs may be the most famous, and the Pacific peoples the most familiar, but the Christian practice is equally compelling.

The argument Allen recounts is that in reaction to the Celtic and Druid practice, the Roman Catholic Church chose to beatify one of civilisation's deepest taboos - transubstantiation began as a literal embodiment. This radical shift did successfully encourage believers to convert. As a practice, it's a show-stopper, then and now.

Which isn't to pick on the Christians. Every culture codifies its rules about food in ritual and in daily use. And given that much human endeavour revolves around efforts to control food and food supplies, the story is bound to be unsettling.

Stories about food are stories about everything - war, murder, desire, religion, government and general human folly. And Allen tells these stories well, though sometimes a little too quickly, and they ring true.

In the Devil's Garden is a gripping and often disturbing book. And while it won't make you rich or thin, it will make you happy.

* Laura Kroetsch is a Wellington reviewer.

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