DRINKIN' WITH DEITIES

I was chatting with my god the other night and he said, “Geoff, you shall drink red and white wine, and beer, and gin martinis ...”  He didn’t do any of that “thee” and “thou” stuff, for which I was grateful.  “And you shall on occasion drink a vodka and tonic or a Manhattan.  But you shall not drink Malibu or Bailey’s Irish Cream, for they are an abomination.”

         And you know the amazing thing was, that’s EXACTLY what I’d been thinking myself.

I now read that the god of the northern Nigerians has decided that 240,000 bottles of beer needed to be destroyed in order to curtail immoral behavior in the area, perhaps of the sort seen above and below. 

God of course worked through a police force who smashed the bottles while yelling,  "Allahu Ahkbar." I’d have thought that yelling “God moves in mysterious ways” would have been just as appropriate.

The attitude of the Jewish god toward alcohol is mixed as far as I can tell.  A little wine here is good, too much wine there is bad; which is pretty much what my god thinks too.  The Jewish scriptures are silent on matters of the Martini and the Moscow Mule, as far as I know.  But I did just find this classic ad:

The essence of Jaffa orange with just a hint of fine chocolate, indeed.  Sabra Liqueur is still being made, I discover, and the bottle is based on the design of a 2,000-year-old Phoenician wine flask found in a Tel Aviv museum.

         Leviticus does tell us, “Do not drink wine nor strong drink, thou, nor thy sons with thee, when ye go into the tabernacle of the congregation, lest ye die;” which is pretty definitive.  Sabra Liqueur may look all soft and smoochy, but it’s 27% alcohol by volume, so perhaps best avoided on tabernacle night.  That’ll make god happy, which is the whole point, right?

BOOZING WITH BUDDHISTS

Say what you like about most modern Christians (and I realize there are exceptions, and I know it wasn’t always thus) but they know how to take a joke. Make a chocolate Jesus or put his face on a piece of toast and they don’t crusade against you because they’ve been “offended.”

This is a Good Thing, whereas, if you suggest to certain Jews that the food rules in Leviticus are a bunch of absurd, grumpy old man ramblings then you’re suddenly an anti-Semite.  Sculpt a bust of Mohammed out of butter and ... don’t even go there.

And the Buddhists?  Well, one of the Five Precepts of Buddhism warns against intoxicants cause they cause “heedlessness,” but these are precepts, not commandments.  If you’re a Buddhist and you want a beer with those potato chips, you go right ahead.  You have to make your own your way to Enlightenment.

Which I suppose is why nobody has said they’re offended by Lucky Buddha beer, which comes in a bottle shaped like the Buddha.  They were selling it at a discount in my local supermarket, so I guess it hasn’t been a great success, and the beer is made in China, which of course makes you wonder if there’s melamine or something in there, but I can’t say this stopped me drinking it.   It tastes fine.  It isn’t the greatest beer in the world, but I wasn't offended by it, and you know, even if I had been, I could probably somehow have lived with that.

HOW ODD OF GOD

Lately I’ve been sitting here thinking, “I wonder what vulture tastes like.”  Probably not all that great: I imagine that an all-carrion diet probably doesn’t result in great flavored meat.  In any case, unless there’s a sudden dramatic change in my lifestyle, I suppose I’m not ever likely to experience that funky vulture flavor.  For that matter, I don’t imagine I’ll ever get to taste the osprey, the raven, the night wing or the great owl.

I am, of course, listing the feathered critters that Leviticus tells me I shall “have in abomination.”  Leviticus is also down on the pelican, the stork and the swan (among others).  But I really don’t think the swan can be considered an abomination.  If it’s good enough for the Queen of England it’s good enough for me.  In fact the Queen of England would have you believe it's TOO good for the likes of me (and you).  All swans in Britain belong to the crown, so killing (much less eating) one would be regarded as destruction of royal property, though obviously it’s all right to eat it if you get invited up to the palace for a swan feast.

I’ve been thinking about abomination partly because I was asked to contribute my lofty opinions to one of the odd features that occasionally appears in the LA Weekly.  They create a Venn diagram – in this case one circle of “What do Angelinos think Jews eat,” up against another circle, “What do Angelino Jews actually eat.”  As I said to Elina Shatkin of LA Weekly, who’s working on the piece, most of the Jews I know in LA eat bacon sandwiches and pulled pork, but then I do run with an unorthodox crowd.

And, life being like that, I was already thinking of abomination, because I’d just read a piece titled “Craving the Food of Depravity” by Elissa Altman, a title so zesty that any article would be hard pressed to live up to it, but she does pretty well. You can find the whole thing on her blog Poor Man’s Feast:

http://www.poormansfeast.com/archives/craving-the-food-of-depravity.html 

Mostly she talks about the things you eat when your judgment is impaired by intoxicants of one kind or another.  After a night at the Au Bar in New York, for example, she says she used to go for a Gray’s Papaya hotdog.  In England her debauchery extended to the Scotch egg.  Leviticus doesn’t specifically declare the Scotch egg an abomination (though personally I would) but the chances are there’s going to be some pork in that sausage around the egg, so the good book doesn’t need to be specific.

Since Elissa Altman is Jewish she obviously has a particular line on abomination.  She writes, "I took the conversation to my Facebook page, where I learned that, like pimiento cheese, smoked oysters are just something that my people aren’t aligned with, which is odd given the whole lox thing. Culturally, these particular foods of depravity aren’t, as I like to say, Jew food. (It’s a game: Mallomars? Jew food. Twinkies? Not Jew food. Ritz crackers? Jew food. Club crackers? Not Jew food. Veggie cream cheese? Jew food. Pimiento cheese? Not Jew food.)"   I’ll have to take her word for all that.

Religious food prohibitions aren't entirely my area, though I do get the notion of “forbidden fruit,” and it seems to me that if you’re going to have a night of debauchery why not extend the debauchery to the food – monkey brains, bush meat, long pig, hell, why not some vulture?

All of which brings me one of my favorite Kliban cartoons; there are plenty to choose from.  I have no idea whether this kind of thing is politically correct anymore, or if it ever was, and I certainly don't want the Anti-Defamation League coming after me, but I’m pretty sure that Barry Kliban was Jewish, so I guess that makes it all right, doesn’t it?