The Whitewashed Charcuterie Board and its Malevolent History
A kind gesture now was once a ruse to trick insincere converts to the Christian religion
Every religion invented before the 20th century has a prohibition on what you can and cannot eat.
The Catholics once held that you could not eat meat on Fridays, though they seem to have relaxed this policy. Even more confusing, during Lent, when one would have to give up meat for long stretches of time during years past, you could only eat meat on Fridays and even then, only fish.
For Jews and Muslims, dietary restrictions are a bit more straightforward—no pork whatsoever. The pig is quite universally deemed unclean. Hindus have a similar prohibition against the sacred cow.
For a plant-based eater like myself, this is archaic, superstitious, and confusing. My impetus is quite clear: to reduce the aggregate suffering of conscious creatures and the burden of carbon release on the planet. The same causality can’t be established for the superstitions of old.
This is my own personal choice and in no way do I have any intentions of ramming it down the throats of others. Which is why it strikes me as rather baffling that people of a certain religious bend would try to do just that—force their superstitions on the rest of us.
And I find it equally as puzzling that people can conceive of an all-powerful deity, supreme creator of the Universe, would be so utterly distraught, nay, downright heartbroken over our benign and everyday dietary habits. Of course, this is only to be outdone by the absurd idea that such an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient creator would care so precisely about the things that we do in the bedroom.
With all of the atrocities, bloodshed, and horror going on in the world that needs to be stopped, including climate change, what we eat and who we have sex with seems the least important of all things that the grand universal creator could concern himself with—and I say himself, because only a male figure could be so utterly controlling over our banal and inconsequential minutiae.
Today, the charcuterie board is a friendly gesture to offer to friends, food presented quaintly on a neat little plate. But it actually has a rather malevolent past that’s now been whitewashed. Take the traditional charcuterie board in the photo above and notice that much of it contains pork, something Muslims and Jews both do not eat.
This friendly gesture was dreamt up in the Middle Ages by the Spanish Catholics as a litmus test during a period of heightened phobia against blasphemers and unbelievers. When someone enters your house, you offer them the charcuterie board, with pork that they cannot eat. If they refuse, off to the Inquisition dungeon they go.
As Christopher Hitchens wrote in his 2004 book:
In medieval Spain, where Jews and Muslims were compelled on pain of death and torture to convert to Christianity, the religious authorities quite rightly suspected that many of the conversions were not sincere. Indeed, the Inquisition arose partly from the holy dread that secret infidels were attending Mass—where of course, and even more disgustingly, they were pretending to eat human flesh and drink human blood, in the person of Christ himself. Among the customs that arose in consequence was the offering, at most events formal and informal, of a plate of charcuterie. Those who have been fortunate enough to visit Spain, or any good Spanish restaurant, will be familiar with the gesture of hospitality: literally dozens of pieces of differently cured, differently sliced pig. But the grim origin of this lies in a constant effort to sniff out heresy, and to be unsmilingly watchful for giveaway expressions of distaste. In the hands of eager Christian fanatics, even the toothsome jamón Ibérico could be pressed into service as a form of torture.
And before you raise that finger in protest, I’ll quote the wise words of my friend Chris Carroll of the two things he believes one simply should never do:
Never get into a land war with Asia.
Never argue with Christopher Hitchens.
Thanks to modern science, we have a vague, albeit increasingly refined hypothesis of why these kinds of superstitions evolved and, rather unfortunately, led to the pointless slaughter of millions of people. One of the central tenets of most religions is the idea of cleanliness. Sin literally translates to “unclean” and one who was seen to be in sin was perceived by bronze and iron-aged peoples as being “unclean.”
The Jesus of the Gospels was a radical in this regard as he is said to have healed the sick, not have shunned them or locked them away in tents, as the Old Testament commanded us to do with menstruating women, labeling them as “unclean.” Jesus’ rejection of these archaic notions was essentially what all four books were about, yet, getting modern-day people to see this has proven rather difficult, hasn’t it?
The COVID-19 pandemic helped this understanding plod along in real-time as we finally could observe a large-scale pandemic as it unfolds with the technological tools we have today. It’s been observed that when pathogens in circulation increase, so do measures of disgust among individuals. People feel more and more disgusted at the benign, everyday things that were once deemed the providence of vehement deities.
The hypothesis is that disgust evolved as an imperfect signal in our brains telling us to stay away from certain things so we don’t wind up getting sick. Before microbiology, we had no idea what microorganisms were, let alone how badly they could ravage our bodies. Plagues were deemed the work of gods, or fate, or both.
But in a world where smallpox and influenza ravaged entire populations, both human individuals and societies had to do something to try to avoid getting sick. So their bodies raised their sense of disgust in order to keep them from coming into contact with the things most likely to make a person sick—food and each other.
I suspect this is the origins of much of what’s wrong with the world. Our own biology comes with built-in hardware that sometimes tells us that we need to be hyper-vigilant and watchful of one another, but for reasons we can’t quite articulate. So we articulate those raw emotions through the voice of god, the voice of the state, the voice of some absolute universal authority, and we divide one another.
Keeping all this in mind, the central theme here is that human division is usually quite poisonous to our health and well-being, on both the individual and societal scales. It wouldn't shock me in the least bit if the U.S. had higher rates of superstitions of all stripes than the rest of the world.
But how do we help one another to comprehend and overcome this disgust response that lends itself so effortlessly to the desire to discriminate and, eventually, to control?
At some point, humans simply have to learn to live and deal with other humans no matter how much they may find it distasteful, if we’re to survive the Information Age and the Nuclear Age we find ourselves in. Are we up for the task? If so, a number of things has to go and I can’t help but wonder if all of this sanitization theater and excessively scrubbing everything does more harm than good.
I’m no fan of biological disease but is it not possible that some of our behaviors reinforce these biological flaws rather than counter them? And how about our hiding in cars to avoid what’s become for many in America a phobia of strangers, the kind that might get rattled at a moment’s notice on a metro car or a city bus? We build ever-larger McMansions in our attempts to escape the other, but these attempts will only further kindle the flames of our isolation-fueled, paranoid madness.
This is why I’ve said continually, again and again, over at
, that there is a link between sexuality and the tendency for men to be controlling and domineering, forcing their views—no matter how bizarre—upon the rest of us.And it’s true. Societies where women have more freedom, that embrace love, compassion, touch, cooperation, and yes, sexual openness, have always tended to be less violent, less controlling, and far less subject to the whims of authoritarian rule.
When do we ditch our differences and embrace our similarities? When do we abandon the archaic ways of intolerance and learn to just enjoy and appreciate life and let one another do the same? I say that’s the future we need to build.