In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (19 page)

O, Dog

“No one’s eating dogs anymore,” said Don Climent, head of San Francisco’s International Rescue Committee. “My Laotian clients just needed information on what’s acceptable to Americans in relationship to dogs. Besides, I think they were more interested in the squirrels.”

Climent was explaining to me how it was that a group of dog lovers from Laos caused a national panic in the early 1980s. It started one day in August when some cops found five headless dogs lying in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. As the officers stood puzzling over the situation (now if I were a dog, where would I hide
my
head?), they noticed a number of Asians armed with bows and arrows wandering about. The dogs, it seemed, belonged to the Laotians in the gustatory sense. The incident appeared in the papers, and overnight Californians realized that a tribe of quasi-cannibals had invaded their state. Filipino sailors were accused of sneaking into suburbs for nocturnal dog hunts. A lady in Sacramento discovered her children’s favorite pooch hanging by its tail at a neighborhood barbecue, skinned, flayed, and waiting for the kiss of the smoking grill. A San Francisco man found his spaniel in a Chinese neighbor’s garage under suspicious circumstances. A law protecting pets was immediately proposed. Politicians fumed, immigrant groups rationalized, and a brown-and-white springer spaniel named Ringo appeared before the California Assembly wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “I’m for Loving NOT for EATING!” It all went to prove that there are two distinct species of dog in the world. There’s the Western dog, hair flying in the wind as he rushes to the rescue, a pampered, petted deity Europeans revered so much they used dog blood in early transfusions. The other kind of dog is also loved, preferably roasted, sometimes sautéed. The Chinese call them “hornless goats” or “fragrant meat,” and in some restaurants you can pick out which puppy you want cooked for dinner. Connoisseurs recommend red-haired mutts with sprightly ears and black tongues for their veal-like flesh. Dog is an honorary dish, and the Vietnamese say, “It’s going ill for the dogs,” if a legal dispute is dragging on, because it was the custom to serve roast pup at all negotiations.

The Asian cultures are the only modern dog eaters, but the most developed canine cuisine belongs to the people of the Pacific Isles and the New World. The Aztecs had huge puppy farms in which they bred a stocky chocolate-brown pooch related to the hairless Chihuahua. “There were four hundred large and small dogs tied up in crates, some already sold, some still for sale,” wrote Spanish missionary Fray Diego Duran in the early 1500s. “And there were such piles of ordure that I was overwhelmed! When a Spaniard who was totally familiar with that region saw my amazement he asked ‘But why are you astonished, my friend? I have never seen such a meager supply of dogs as today!’ There was a tremendous shortage of them!” The Polynesians and Hawaiians had similar ranches where they raised poi dogs so toothsome that they were largely reserved for the king. The now-extinct poi was a curious creature: bug-eyed and unnaturally plump, it was a strict vegetarian that lived on nothing but sweet potatoes and soup. European visitors described them as semi-amphibious and so lacking in energy they eschewed barking in favor of listless little yelps. They were not, however, mere livestock. Dogs were often spiritually tied to a specific child, like a pet, and were breast-fed with the child at the mother’s breast (a courtesy still offered to young piglets in some areas). If a child died, his or her puppy was killed and buried alongside to guard the infant during its journey in the afterlife. If it was the dog that passed away first, its teeth became a necklace the child wore to ward off sorcery. Dinner, however, was the more common fate. The puppy was usually suffocated by blocking its mouth and nostrils for fifteen minutes. Its delicious blood was made into a pudding by adding hot stones to the liquid, but the body was roasted luau-style in a pit covered with banana leaves and earth. “Few there were of the nicest of us,” wrote Sir Joseph Banks of his time with Captain Cook’s eighteenth-century expedition “but allowed a South Sea dog was next to an English lamb.”

The when, where, how, and why of this split in humanity’s feelings for the species is still hotly debated. Dogs are thought to have initially accepted humans as near-equals about 12,000 years ago, although some put the date as early as 125,000 years ago. The first alliance was over hunting, with humans relying on the wild dogs’ keen sense of smell, while the dogs benefited from our weapons and flexible fingers. Canine historian Mary Thurston reports that as late as 1870 Native American hunters were followed by wolves for weeks, “at a distance of half a mile or so and at night, when he [the Indian] lies down to sleep, they will also crouch at a respectful distance.” This business relationship turned personal when people adopted pups left orphaned by the packs that had begun to hang about the human tribes, a phenomenon which still occurs between Australia’s Aborigines and the wild dingo dogs that loiter near their settlements.

The first dog worshipers were the followers of the Egyptian god Anubis who, 3,500 years ago, preached that their dog-headed deity walked humans to the afterlife. At one point they had a religious city populated by canine “priests” that humans petted to improve their karma, and archaeologists have found thousands of mummified puppies that were used in much the same way as Christians use crosses. The Romans later morphed this idea into “dog hospitals,” where the ailing were given a healing lick. The thirteenth-century Italian St. Roch became famous for a “miracle dog” that kept him alive by feeding him with stolen bread. It is still the custom during the saint’s mid-August festival to let all the village dogs into the church, where they are fed pastries.

The stronghold of the don’t-eat-the-damn-dog contingent seems to have been in Europe, perhaps because the colder climate killed off many edible plants and made hunting essential. My personal belief is that in this era humans and dogs actually ate and slept as equals, rubbing shoulders around the campfire, just as we do now. This hunting bond was so intense that until a few hundred years ago, European hunters still ritually gave their dogs the “soul” of any stag they’d hunted together by soaking bread in the prey’s blood (thought to contain its soul), and then rewrapping it in the stag’s skin. The dogs would then again tear the animal apart and devour its “soul” while the humans held the stag’s head over the feasting pack. For some reason this relationship faded as humans headed east from Europe and into the Americas, at least as indicated by the practices of people from Asia to Mexico. But who really knows why such radically different attitudes developed? Islamic disgust for the canine species apparently formed when they conquered the Persian Zoroastrians around the eighth century. The Persians, it seems, had worshiped dogs and considered killing or eating them a crime, and as part of their cultural subjugation of the area, the Muslims took the opposite stance. The Californians, however, chose neither to demonize nor deify. Torn between the desire to be two kinds of politically correct—culturally sensitive and kind to animals—the politicians simply returned the legislation outlawing dog meat to committee for further consideration. That was in 1982. It has yet to reemerge.

Holy Cow

The weekly market in the coastal village of Anjuna, India, can be quite the scene. Rajasthani women peddle ten-pound silver bracelets; Nepalese merchants offer carved human skulls; English junkies pawn their tennis shoes; neo-Eastern-synthotechno -house-acid-rave-hip-hop-didgeridoo sound tracks fill the air. And there are celebrities everywhere—Julia Cow, Harrison Cow and, yes, even Keanu Reeves Cow—wandering about and mooing at anyone who fails to show respect. My beloved Nina J. and I had our own booth in Anjuna once upon a time. She peddled a soothing balm made of sandalwood. I sold delicious little gâteaus of honey and coconut. Business was rather slow until one day a cowlebrity swooped down on our humble little stall, and in one long, lascivious lick, inhaled every cake I possessed. It also blessed Nina’s perfumes with a liberal douse of spittle. Nina and I were ecstatic, and, just to be sure everyone remembered our celebrity clientele, we built a papier-mâché cow’s head, complete with a pair of glorious golden horns. The cakes looked splendid on its foot-long hot pink cardboard tongue the next market day. But not for long: our two-legged customers were soon lapping them up as quickly (if with less drool) as our Bollywood friend had the week before.

Indian cows live in a realm above and beyond the ordinary travails of mere mortals. Each and every one of them is said to house 330 million deities: Shiva has the nose and his sons the nostrils, while the tail belongs to Sri Hanar, the goddess of cleanliness. This extreme overcrowding means cows drip sanctity. All their products are sacred. Food cooked in butter is called
pacca
, and it’s karmically delicious as a result of its submersion in a cow product. Lesser foods are called
kacca
. Some Hindus refuse to eat cauliflower because the Hindi word for it,
gobi
, is heretically close to that of cow,
gopa
. High-born Hindus returning from life abroad are often obliged to eat a pellet made of butter, yogurt, and urine, all bound up nicely with a bit of dung, to repurify themselves after life among the heathens.

Needless to say, no dutiful Hindu would think of eating the beast. It’s a food taboo that has been widely criticized in the West; how can a country where millions of people die every year from malnutrition, wails the Texas Cattle Rearing Association, afford “cow retirement” homes so a useless animal can end its days in peace? What’s so special about a goddamn cow? The religious response is simple enough. In Hindu theosophy, it takes eighty-six reincarnations for a soul to climb up from a devil to a cow, but only one to leap the gap separating cattle from humankind. Hence, that steak on your dinner plate might have contained the soul of your newborn child. Historians prefer the idea that Hindu religious leaders became cow lovers two thousand years ago to prove that they were more compassionate than those upstart Buddhists. The ecological defense is that the cow’s enormously complicated digestive system, comprising four stomachs, can turn the most wretched of weeds into milk, people food that is both delicious and nutritious. Its dung, dried and molded into patties, provides crucial fuel in the deforested continent. Its piss, chilled, has the same tart flavors associated with Chablis. To wantonly murder such a resource would be ludicrous. Rather, it is the West’s steak fetish that is illogical, because the twenty-two pounds of grain needed to produce one pound of beef diverts human food resources to feed livestock.

Not that anyone is seriously suggesting that the Hindu fetish derives from a deeply logical impulse. Their passion runs too hot for that. When Indian Muslims want to start a ruckus, they need merely to drive a herd of implied ground round past a Hindu shrine. The Hindus elicit equally enthusiastic responses when they “accidentally” lead flocks of pigs to the nearest mosque. There are riots, murders, then everybody goes home with the glow of sanctity staining their cheeks.

It’s the English, however, who proved themselves the masters of boor-dom by offending both Muslims and Hindus in one fell stroke. When the East India Company, then in control of India, armed their native troops with the Enfield rifle in the mid-1800s, the weapon was cutting-edge stuff: three times more accurate and ten times as fast on the reload. The secret was the grease that encased every Enfield bullet. Unfortunately, this supergrease was made from pig and cow fat, the two animals sacred or taboo to every native on the subcontinent. The fact that the soldiers had to bite off the bullet’s tip to load the rifle was pure bad luck. The Indian officers explained their dilemma to the British. If we touch this bullet—much less put it in our mouths!—we will become Untouchables. How will we find wives? Our own mothers will disown us! The English officers wrote to London and urged that the bullets be coated in mutton fat. London bureaucrats told them not to be silly. Indian soldiers started to mutiny. Unrest spread throughout the region.

Then out of the jungle trotted a
sadhu
with four pieces of chapati bread stuck in his turban. To this day the Indians claim to be clueless as to the meaning of the Chapati Movement of 1857, but it appears to have been a culinary chain letter. The first
sadhu
gave his four chapati breads to a village elder with the message to share them with everyone in the village and then bake four more, which in turn were to be delivered to the next village with the same message, etc., etc. Historian Christopher Hibbert speculates that the chapati movement referred to rumors that the British were adding ground cow bones to local flour so as to destroy India’s religious structure and facilitate converting the continent to Christianity. At the time, however, no one knew what it might mean, and everybody was on edge. The breaking point came when an Untouchable asked an Indian soldier for a drink from his canteen. When the soldier politely cited his caste as grounds for refusal, the Untouchable said, “What does it matter? Soon you will be without any caste just like me. You chew the taboo bullets. Cow killer! Pig lover! You are all just Untouchables!”

The Hindu soldiers went wild and started massacring not just the English officials, but women and children. The British responded with a lamentable lack of restraint. They killed innocent children and shot rebelling soldiers out of cannons. Taking up the culinary motif, they sewed some Hindu soldiers into cow carcasses and left them to suffocate. Their behavior was so louche that the British government decided to take India away from the East India Company and make it a member of the British Empire. In fact, this early revolution probably failed only because the Indian soldiers, who outnumbered the English twenty-five to one, refused to use the hated Enfield rifles during the fight.

Revolutions over cow fat, riots over roast beef—it strikes Westerners as preposterous until you realize that we, too, have massacred and tortured thousands over the exact same issue. The first known portrait of God is a horned figure dancing on the walls of a Paleolithic cave in France. Horns, it seems, have always been a sign of supersexual or supernatural power. The ancient Babylonians used them like military stripes and gave their more powerful spirits an impossible number, like the seven-horned lamb in the Bible’s Book of Revelation. At some point this horn fetish became focused on cattle. From the Greeks’ bull-headed Minotaur to the mysterious horn temples of ancient Ur to the modern bullfights of Spain, the entire cradle of Western civilization was once a den of cattle worship. The most eccentric was the early Egyptian cult of Apis, in which a cow or bull was selected based on certain markings and worshiped as a god. The animal was particularly revered by baby-seeking ladies who flashed their genitals at the bemused beast to ensure conception. A pagan horned deity surrounded by naked women indulging in obscene rituals—any medieval Christian would have recognized HIM in a second. Witches kissing the Horned One’s ass were little more than overwrought cow lovers. The Judeo-Christian Church had simply demonized earlier religions and turned the horned deity into Uncle Nick, first in the Golden Calf so disliked by Moses, and then in the horned Lucifer. People who persisted in this original faith were tortured, tenderized, and roasted at the stake. When Linda Blair was possessed by the Devil in Hollywood’s
The Exorcist
, she shouldn’t have spewed vomit and obscenities. She should have mooed.