A Natural History of the Senses

  We tend to see our distant past through a reverse telescope that compresses it: a short time as hunter-gatherers, a long time as “civilized” people. But civilization is a recent stage of human life, and, for all we know, it may not be any great achievement. It may not even be the final stage. We have been alive on this planet as recognizable humans for about two million years, and for all but the last two or three thousand we’ve been hunter-gatherers. We may sing in choirs and park our rages behind a desk, but we patrol the world with many of a hunter-gatherer’s drives, motives, and skills. These aren’t knowable truths. Should an alien civilization ever contact us, the greatest gift they could give us would be a set of home movies: films of our species at each stage in our evolution. Consciousness, the great poem of matter, seems so unlikely, so impossible, and yet here we are with our loneliness and our giant dreams. Speaking into the perforations of a telephone receiver as if through the screen of a confessional, we do sometimes share our emotions with a friend, but usually this is too disembodied, too much like yelling into the wind. We prefer to talk in person, as if we could temporarily slide into their feelings. Our friend first offers us food, drink. It is a symbolic act, a gesture that says: This food will nourish your body as I will nourish your soul. In hard times, or in the wild, it also says I will endanger my own life by parting with some of what I must consume to survive. Those desperate times may be ancient history, but the part of us forged in such trials accepts the token drink and piece of cheese and is grateful.

  FOOD AND SEX

  What would the flutterings of courtship be without a meal? As the deliciously sensuous and ribald tavern scene in Fielding’s Tom Jones reminds us, a meal can be the perfect arena for foreplay. Why is food so sexy? Why does a woman refer to a handsome man as a real dish? Or a French girl call her lover mon petit chou (my little cabbage)? Or an American man call his girlfriend cookie? Or a British man describe a sexy woman as a bit of crumpet (a flat, toasted griddlecake well lubricated with butter)? Or a tart? Sexual hunger and physical hunger have always been allies. Rapacious needs, they have coaxed and driven us through famine and war, to bloodshed and serenity, since our earliest days.

  Looked at in the right light, any food might be thought aphrodisiac. Phallic-shaped foods such as carrots, leeks, cucumbers, pickles, sea cucumbers (which become tumescent when soaked), eels, bananas, and asparagus all have been prized as aphrodisiacs at one time or another, as were oysters and figs because they reminded people of female genitalia; caviar because it was a female’s eggs; rhinoceros horn, hyena eyes, hippopotamus snout, alligator tail, camel hump, swan genitals, dove brains, and goose tongues, on the principle that anything so rare and exotic must have magical powers; prunes (which were offered free in Elizabethan brothels); peaches (because of their callipygous rumps?); tomatoes, called “love apples,” and thought to be Eve’s temptation in the Garden of Eden; onions and potatoes, which look testicular, as well as “prairie oysters,” the cooked testicles of a bull; and mandrake root, which looks like a man’s thighs and penis. Spanish fly, the preferred aphrodisiac of the Marquis de Sade, with which he laced the bonbons he fed prostitutes and friends, is made by crushing a southern European beetle. It contains a gastrointestinal irritant and also produces a better blood flow, the combination of which brings on a powerful erection of either the penis or the clitoris, but also damages the kidneys; it can even be fatal. Musk, chocolate, and truffles also have been considered aphrodisiac and, for all we know, they might well be. But, as sages have long said, the sexiest part of the body and the best aphrodisiac in the world is the imagination.

  Primitive peoples saw creation as a process both personal and universal, the earth’s yielding food, humans (often molded from clay or dust) burgeoning with children. Rain falls from the sky and impregnates the ground, which brings forth fruit and grain from the tawny flesh of the earth—an earth whose mountains look like reclining women, and whose springs spurt like healthy men. Fertility rituals, if elaborate and frenzied enough, could encourage Nature’s bounty. Cooks baked meats and breads in the shape of genitals, especially penises, and male and female statues with their sexual organs exaggerated presided over orgiastic festivities where sacred couples copulated in public. A mythic Gaia poured milk from her breasts and they became the galaxies. The ancient Venus figures with global breasts, swollen bellies, and huge buttocks and thighs symbolized the female life-force, mother to crops and humans. The earth itself was a goddess, curvy and ripe, radiant with fertility, aspill with riches. People have thought the Venus figures imaginative exaggerations, but women of that time may indeed have resembled them, all breasts, belly, and rump. When pregnant, they would have bulged into quite an array of shapes.

  Food is created by the sex of plants or of animals; and we find it sexy. When we eat an apple or peach, we are eating the fruit’s placenta. But, even if that weren’t so, and we didn’t subconsciously associate food with sex, we would still find it sexy for strictly physical reasons. We use the mouth for many things—to talk and kiss, as well as to eat. The lips, tongue, and genitals all have the same neural receptors, called Krause’s end bulbs, which make them ultrasensitive, highly charged. There’s a similarity of response.

  A man and woman sit across from one another in a dimly lit restaurant. A small bouquet of red-and-white spider lilies sweetens the air with a cinnamonlike tingle. A waiter passes with a plate of rabbit sausage in molé sauce. At the next table, a blueberry soufflé oozes scent. Oysters on the half shell, arranged on a large platter of shaved ice, one by one polish the woman’s tongue with silken saltiness. A fennel-scented steam rises from thick crabcakes on the man’s plate. Small loaves of fresh bread breathe sweetly. Their hands brush as they both reach for the bread. He stares into her eyes, as if filling them with molten lead. They both know where this delicious prelude will lead. “I’m so hungry,” she whispers.

  THE OMNIVORE’S PICNIC

  You have been invited to dinner at the home of extraterrestrials, and asked to bring friends. Being considerate hosts, they first inquire if you have any dietary allergies or prohibitions, and then what sort of food would taste good to you. What do humans eat? they ask. Images cascade through your mind, a cornucopia of plants, animals, minerals, liquids, and solids, in a vast array of cuisines. The Masai enjoy drinking cow’s blood. Orientals eat stir-fried puppy. Germans eat rancid cabbage (sauerkraut), Americans eat decaying cucumbers (pickles), Italians eat whole deep-fried songbirds, Vietnamese eat fermented fish dosed with chili peppers, Japanese and others eat fungus (mushrooms), French eat garlic-soaked snails. Upper-class Aztecs ate roasted dog (a hairless variety named xquintli, which is still bred in Mexico). Chinese of the Chou dynasty liked rats, which they called “household deer,”* and many people still do eat rodents, as well as grasshoppers, snakes, flightless birds, kangaroos, lobsters, snails, and bats. Unlike most other animals, which fill a small yet ample niche in the large web of life on earth, humans are omnivorous. The Earth offers perhaps 20,000 edible plants alone. A poor season for eucalyptus will wipe out a population of koala bears, which have no other food source. But human beings are Nature’s great ad libbers and revisers. Diversity is our delight. In time of drought, we can ankle off to a new locale, or break open a cactus, or dig a well. When plagues of locusts destroy our crops, we can forage on wild plants and roots. If our herds die, we find protein in insects, beans, and nuts. Not that being an omnivore is easy. A koala bear doesn’t have to worry about whether or not its next mouthful will be toxic. In fact, eucalyptus is highly poisonous, but a koala has an elaborately protective gut, so it just eats eucalyptus, exactly as its parents did. Cows graze without fear on grass and grain. But omnivores are anxious eaters. They must continually test new foods to see if they’re palatable and nutritious, running the risk of inadvertently poisoning themselves. They must take chances on new flavors, and, doing so, they frequently acquire a taste for something offbeat that, though nutritious, isn’t the sort of thing that might normally appeal to t
hem—chili peppers (which Columbus introduced to Europe), tobacco, alcohol, coffee, artichokes, or mustard, for instance. When we were hunter-gatherers, we ate a great variety of foods. Some of us still do, but more often we add spices to what we know, or find at hand, for variety, as we like to say. Monotony isn’t our code. It’s safe, in some ways, but in others it’s more dangerous. Most of us prefer our foods cooked to the steaminess of freshly killed prey. We don’t have ultrasharp carnivore’s teeth, but we don’t need them. We’ve created sharp tools. We do have incisor teeth for slicing fruits, and molars for crushing seeds and nuts, as well as canines for ripping flesh. At times, we eat nasturtiums and pea pods and even the effluvia from the mammary glands of cows, churned until it curdles, or frozen into a solid and attached to pieces of wood.

  Our hosts propose a picnic, since their backyard is a meadow lit by two suns, and they welcome us and our friends. Our Japanese friend chooses the appetizer: sushi, including shrimp still alive and wriggling. Our French friend suggests a baguette, or better still croissants, which have an unlikely history, which he insists on telling everyone: To celebrate Austria’s victory against the invading Ottoman Turks, bakers created pastry in the shape of the crescent on the Turkish flag, so that the Viennese could devour their enemies at table as they had on the battlefield. Croissants soon spread to France and, during the 1920s, traveled with other French ways to the United States. Our Amazonian friend chooses the main course—nuptial kings and queens of leaf-cutter ants, which taste like walnut butter, followed by roasted turtle and sweet-fleshed piranha. Our German friend insists that we include some spaetzle and a loaf of darkest pumpernickel bread, which gets its name from the verb pumpern, “to break wind,” and Nickel, “the devil,” because it was thought to be so hard to digest that even the devil would fart if he ate it. Our Tasaday friend wants some natek, a starchy paste his people make from the insides of caryota palm trees. The English cousin asks for a small platter of potted ox tongues, very aged blue cheese, and, for dessert, trifle—whipped cream and slivered almonds on top of a jam-and-custard pudding thick with sherry-soaked ladyfingers.

  To finish our picnic lunch, our Turkish friend proposes coffee in the Turkish style—using a mortar and pestle to break up the beans, rather than milling them. To be helpful, he prepares it for us all, pouring boiling water over coffee grounds through a silver sieve into a pot. He brings this to a light boil, pours it through the sieve again, and offers us some of the clearest, brightest coffee we’ve ever tasted. According to legend, he explains, coffee was discovered by a ninth-century shepherd, who one day realized that his goats were becoming agitated whenever they browsed on the berries of certain bushes. For four hundred years, people thought only to chew the berries. Raw coffee doesn’t brew into anything special, but in the thirteenth century someone decided to roast the berries, which releases a pungent oil and the mossy-bitter aroma now so familiar to us. Our Indian friend passes round cubes of sugar, which we are instructed to let melt on the tongue as we sip our coffee, and our minds roam back to the first recorded instance of sugar, in the Atharvaveda, a sacred Hindu text from 800 B.C., which describes a royal crown made of glittering sugar crystals. Then he circulates a small dish of coriander seeds, and we pinch a few in our fingers, set them on our tongues, and feel our mouths freshen from the aromatic tang. A perfect picnic. We thank our hosts for laying on such a splendid feast, and invite them to our house for dinner next. “What do jujubarians eat?” we ask.

  OF CANNIBALISM AND SACRED COWS

  Even though grass soup was the main food in the Russian gulags, according to Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, humans don’t prefer wood, or leaves, or grass—the cellulose is impossible to digest. We also can’t manage well eating excrement, although some animals adore it, or chalk or petroleum. On the other hand, cultural taboos make us spurn many foods that are wholesome and nourishing. Jews don’t eat pork, Hindus don’t eat beef, and Americans in general won’t eat dog, rat, horse, grasshopper, grubs, or many other palatable foods prized by peoples elsewhere in the world. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss found that primitive tribes designated foods “good to think” or “bad to think.” Necessity, the mother of invention, fathers many codes of conduct. Consider the “sacred cow,” an idea so shocking it has passed into our vocabulary as a thing, event, or person considered sacrosanct. Though India has a population of around 700 million and a constant need for protein, over two hundred million cattle are allowed to roam the streets as deities while many people go hungry. The cow plays a central role in Hinduism. As Marvin Harris explains in The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig:

  Cow protection and cow worship also symbolize the protection and adoration of human motherhood. I have a collection of colorful Indian pin-up calendars depicting jewel-bedecked cows with swollen udders and the faces of beautiful human madonnas. Hindu cow worshippers say: “The cow is our mother. She gives us milk and butter. Her male calves till the land and give us food.” To critics who oppose the custom of feeding cows that are too old to have calves and give milk, Hindus reply: “Will you then send your mother to a slaughter house when she gets old?”

  Not only is the cow sacred in India, even the dust in its hoofprints is sacred. And, according to Hindu theology, 330 million gods live inside each cow. There are many reasons why this national tantalism has come about; one factor may be that an overcrowded land such as India can’t support the raising of livestock for food, a system that is extremely inefficient. When people eat animals that have been fed grains, “nine out of ten calories and four out of five grams of protein are lost for human consumption.” The animal uses up most of the nutrients. So vegetarianism may have evolved as a remedy, and been ritualized through religion. “I feel confident that the rise of Buddhism was related to mass suffering and environmental depletions,” Harris writes, “because several similar nonkilling religions … arose in India at the same time.” Including Jainism, whose priests not only tend stray cats and dogs, but keep a separate room in their shelters just for insects. When they walk down the street, an assistant walks ahead of them to brush away any insects lest they get stepped on, and they wear gauze masks so they don’t accidentally inhale a wayward midge or other insect.

  One taboo stands out as the most fantastic and forbidden. “What’s eating you?” a man may ask an annoyed friend. Even though his friend just got fired by a tyrannical boss with a mind as small as a noose, he would never think to say “Who’s eating you?” The idea of cannibalism is so far from our ordinary lives that we can safely use the euphemism eat in a sexual context, say, and no one will think we mean literally consume. But omnivores can eat anything, even each other,* and human flesh is one of the finest sources of protein. Primitive peoples all over the world have indulged in cannibalism, always ritualistically, but sometimes as a key source of protein missing from their diets. For many it’s a question of headhunting, displaying the enemy’s head with much magic and flourish; and then, so as not to be wasteful, eating the body. In Britain’s Iron Age, the Celts consumed large quantities of human flesh. Some American Indian tribes tortured and ate their captives, and the details (reported by Christian missionaries who observed the rites) are hair-raising. During one four-night celebration in 1487, the Aztecs were reported to have sacrificed about eighty thousand prisoners, whose flesh was shared with the gods, but mainly eaten by a huge meat-hungry population. In The Power of Myth, the late Joseph Campbell, a wise observer of the beliefs and customs of many cultures, tells of a New Guinea cannibalism ritual that “enacts the planting-society myth of death, resurrection and cannibalistic consumption.” The tribe enters a sacred field, where they chant and beat drums for four or five days, and break all the rules by engaging in a sexual orgy. In this rite of manhood, young boys are introduced to sex for the first time:

  There is a great shed of enormous logs supported by two uprights. A young woman comes in ornamented as a deity, and she is brought to lie down in this place beneath the great roo
f. The boys, six or so, with the drums going and chanting going, one after another, have their first experience of intercourse with the girl. And when the last boy is with her in full embrace, the supports are withdrawn, the logs drop, and the couple is killed. There is the union of male and female … as they were in the beginning.… There is the union of begetting and death. They are both the same thing.

  Then the couple is pulled out and roasted and eaten that very evening. The ritual is the repetition of the original act of the killing of a god followed by the coming of food from the dead savior.

  When the explorer Dr. Livingstone died in Africa, his organs were apparently eaten by two of his native followers as a way to absorb his strength and courage. Taking communion in the Catholic Church enacts a symbolic eating of the body and blood of Christ. Some forms of cannibalism were more bloodthirsty than others. According to Philippa Pullar, Druid priests “attempted divination by stabbing a man above his midriff, foretelling the future by the convulsions of his limbs and the pouring of his blood.… Then … they devoured him.” Cannibalism doesn’t horrify us because we find human life sacred, but because our social taboos happen to forbid it, or, as Harris says: “the real conundrum is why we who live in a society which is constantly perfecting the art of mass-producing human bodies on the battlefield find humans good to kill but bad to eat.”*