Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

192 Forbidden Words
still mineral watercress. Let almonds fall where’er they may, at five centimetre
interludes.
Regard your Parsnip and Watercress Salad with amusement. It’s just like the
pugliese, isn’t it? Or that floppy Tuscan mane. It’s all too precise and perfect. So, just
imagine you’re muzzing that young man’s mane. Plunge both hands in and fiddle with
your fingers. Turn it from immaculate to untidy. It may feel wrong, but it’s right. It’s
natural, it’s what happens, he really can’t complain. He may tell you you’ve made him
feel ‘like something leftover on the side of the plate’. Explain that a leftover is
something wonderful. One doesn’t want a five-course meal all the time. (http://
www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/poshnosh/recipes/leftover.shtml; sic. Accessed October 2004)
The link between eating and sex has of course been commercially recognized
and is very much exploited in food and wine advertising. Ravishing photographs
of plump chorizo sausages speckled with globules of gleaming fat,
plump ripe figs split open and nestling in a bed of soft cream cheese,
advertisements with luscious lascivious figures selling everything from chocolate
to spaghetti sauce – when it comes to promoting food and drink, nothing
beats sex.
The long and close association of food and sex is most obvious in aphrodisiacs
– those foods that are claimed to have erotic properties and are used to
stir up sexual desire. Nowadays – the low-fat fads aside – we tend to base our
culinary creations upon our imaginations, upon our fancies and tastes at the
time. In early days, however, it was quite different. Culinary creations were
placed within a strict system of dietary constraints that carefully balanced
hot against cold, dry against moist. The wrong ingredients could provoke
certain ailments, conditions, serious injuries – and of course debauchery. One
fifteenth-century text warns of the risks of eating eggs: ‘All maners of egges
waken a man to the worke of lecherie, and specialli sparowes egges.’ A later
text from the sixteenth century alerts its readers to the danger of figs. ‘Fygges
. . . they doth stere a man to veneryous actes, for they doth auge and increase
the seede of generacion. And also they doth prouoke a man to sweate:
wherefore they doth ingendre lyce.’ 40
Years ago, London’s ‘protein passion man’ used to roam the streets around
Oxford Circus distributing his pamphlet Eight Passion Proteins With Care (in
1983, it cost 12 pence). He advised, ‘read this booklet occasionally and in
times of need . . . at all changes of life: marriage, expectancy, menopause,
retirement, old age, new situations, etc’. His ‘Protein Wisdom’ was straightforward
(typography as in the original):
TOO MUCH protein and passion have afflicted humanity, with much distress and
oppression.
Proteins are for body building; for body maintenance; and for reproduction involving
the build up of passion for mating.