By GORDON McLAUCHLAN
Cigarette smokers have been contemplating positive and negative freedoms this week, a subject the late historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin, wrote much about. The pivot of his discourse with himself was: when do you start suppressing the freedom of the few (or the powerless) for the benefit of the many (or the powerful)?
The history of civilisation is littered with campaigns by the censorious to stop the sybaritic from some pleasurable practice, usually, patronisingly, for the good of the indulgent; and mostly the prohibition has involved some food or substance. The trouble is that political success usually validates the health fascists' moral rectitude.
For example, if the argument is that smoking should be prohibitively expensive and banned in all public spaces because of the cost to the health system, then I'd oppose it. The next move may be to ban polyunsaturated fats, including ice cream, because of an alleged economic burden imposed by heart disease, obesity and diabetes. After that, bacon and eggs. And then swimming, which can lead to drowning.
Such proscriptions may see us survive lung cancer and heart disease and die of some lingering ailment to which we have a genetic disposition and which is even more costly to treat.
So let's not allow the puritans to be too triumphant about the fight against smoking or use spurious economic arguments. But we do have to concede that tobacco does present a different set of problems from most substances. It is repellent to many of us to have someone nearby puffing away. If people want to smoke that's fine by me as long as it's somewhere else. One of the major deterrents would be to have smoking cages in public places - such as the glassed-in smoking room at Auckland International Airport - enabling young people to ogle these social outsiders.
But, by temperament, I don't want to tell anyone else what to eat, drink or sniff, or how to behave. And it's futile anyway. Let me offer a brief, discursive history of claims about food and drink.
In the sixth century BC, Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher and mathematician, wrote without equivocation: "Abstain from beans!" He never said why.
A couple of centuries later, Aristotle wrote that Pythagoras didn't like beans because they resembled testicles. Later again, Plutarch, Cicero and St Jerome all claimed Pythagoras didn't like beans because they were an aphrodisiac.
The Elizabethan writers, John Lily and Thomas Fuller, reckoned that because beans were used by the Greeks to vote for magistrates, Pythagoras was warning his followers to stay away from politics.
So there you have it. The first health fascist says "Abstain from beans!" and experts spend the next two millenniums discussing what the hell he meant by it.
My own opinion is that Pythagoras didn't like what the prophet Isaiah once described as the aftermath of bean-eating: "My bowels shall sound like a harp."
This is all true. This is scholarship. And there's more.
Mark Twain once described a cauliflower as a cabbage with a college education, but three centuries earlier a bloke called Andrew Boorde wrote: "Lettuce does extinct veneryous acts."
Now that's not as bad as it sounds. He meant lettuce made men impotent. But like so many of us, Andy didn't practice what he preached and eat enough lettuce. He became the Bishop of Chichester, was unfrocked and later jailed. Yes, for veneryous acts.
In the 16th and 17th centuries even water had a bad press. Tobias Venner described it as "greatly dejecting the appetite, destroying the natural heat, and overthrowing the strength of the stomach." Which makes the workings of the digestive system sound like a heavyweight wrestling bout.
In 1674, "several thousands of Buxome Goodwomen, Languishing in Extremity of Want" petitioned for the banning of coffee because they claimed it was sexually debilitating to men.
The rest of the wording is so explicit and scathing this is not the place to publish it, except for: "Whereas the newfangled, abominable, heathenish liquor called coffee has so eunucht our husbands and crippled our more kind gallants that they are become impotent ..."
The men of the time published a reply so boring it must have seemed to substantiate the Goodwomen's charge. However, 25 years later, London had more than 2000 coffee houses, and it was claimed there were more coffee houses paying more rent in the city than any other trade.
Then there is cocoa, for a century regarded as a mild aphrodisiac, as this old verse, Cupid's Nightcap, implies:
Halfpast nine high time for supper;
"Cocoa love?" "Of course, my dear."
Helen thinks it quite delicious, John prefers it now to beer.
Knocking back the sepia potion, Hubby winks, says, "Who's for bed?"
"Shan't be long," says Helen swiftly, Cheeks a'faintly flushing red.
For they've stumbled on a secret Of a love that never wanes, Rapt between the tumbled bedclothes, Cocoa coursing through their veins.
So there - history has, more often than not, got it wrong when it comes to food.
<i>Dialogue:</i> History has much to teach health fascists
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