Samuel Johnson, about to tuck into a pork roast, is supposed to have said that the only thing that would make the food before him better is if he were a Jew. Stendhal, I years ago heard, said that the only thing wrong with ice cream was that it wasn’t illegal. The question both these men raise is whether the ultimate spice in food, lending it a piquancy otherwise unavailable, is sin.
The first, the ultimately most sinful of all foods, of course, was that apple that the devious Edenic snake encouraged Eve to taste. How good the apple tasted we are not told. Did she even get to finish the damning thing? Imagine what that core would fetch today from the kind of ditzy collector who buys the old clothes of dead celebrities!
Jewish, I did not grow up in a kosher home. Some dietary laws, though, my mother did observe, more through cultural habit than piety. We had no pork of any kind—ham, bacon, sausages—in the house. Milk and meat were not generally mixed. My mother claimed that kosher chickens tasted better than any other and bought and cooked and served them exclusively. Shrimps, however, were also on offer chez Epstein, though as creatures that crawl along the earth (Leviticus 11:9), they are not kosher and known, as all non-kosher foods are, as treyf.
I ate my first pork in adolescence in the form of bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches, though so good is a well-made BLT that even the condiment of sin could not improve it. There ought to be statues raised, perhaps replacing those of Confederacy generals, to the unknown inventor of the BLT, who has brought more satisfaction into the world than the past 50 years of contemporary poetry.
One of the advantages of being a vegetarian, if you happen to be Jewish, is that you are automatically kosher at no extra charge. Isaac Bashevis Singer became vegetarian in midlife and, when asked if he did so for the sake of religion, replied, “No, I did it for the sake of the chickens.” Would a vegetarian plowing into a Big Mac, or an orthodox Jew gobbling down a ham sandwich derive sinful pleasure in doing so? Somehow, I’m not sure why, it seems unlikely.
When the great cholesterol war was being fought, many foods were declared medically out of bounds and thereby sinful because thought dangerous. Perhaps the most punishing of the items on the list was eggs. I have a friend who in restaurants seemed always to be ordering egg-white omelettes, which tended to be a bit more expensive and a lot less tasty than the real thing. He was more than mildly ticked when suddenly, presto change-o, eggs were taken off the banned list. I, who followed the old ban against them, now try to eat an egg (hard-boiled) at least once a day, but at this rate may have to live well beyond 100 to make up for all the eggs I missed during the years of their having been banned.
Perhaps the largest collection of contemporary sinful foods are those declared, you should pardon the expression, “unsustainable” by the foodie division of progressives. Food is at the center of the new progressivism in its more extreme wing. Want to form a Tea Party of the left, it has been said, all one need do is troll the parking lot of Whole Foods. Want to break with a seriously progressive acquaintance, invite him over for a veal dish with perhaps chihuahua tartare as a starter.
Why does the notion of “eating healthy” sound so boring, dreary even? Perhaps, from original sin days onward, food requires just a touch of the sinful to raise it above mere fuel. At an advanced age in a perhaps too quiet life, eating sinful foods is, alas, just about all that is left to me in the way of risky behavior. Yet I may have reached the stage beyond which no foods any longer have sinful or even unhealthy significance.
I seem to have lost my taste for rare red meat, but my sweet tooth is sharp as ever. One of the favorites of the gods at least insofar as I do not seem to have to watch my weight, which does not change, I do not turn away from cheesecake and am up for a black cow if there is root beer and vanilla ice cream in the house. I order, two boxes at a time, dark-chocolate-covered peanut clusters from Oaks Candy Company in Oshkosh, Wisconsin; three or four nights a week, as a late-night snack, I fill an old-fashioned sundae glass with various exotic flavors of Talenti ice cream. What the hell! I figure, to play off the old blues song, I may be beautiful, but I’m gonna die some day, so hows ’bout a box of French macarons before I pass away?
