In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food by Stewart Lee Allen

taboos. This was no accident. The New Testament specifically quotes Matthew as saying, “Know and understand; it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man, but that which comes out.” Christ’s choice of a dinner party to take a theological stand makes sense if you consider that his years of training with the food-obsessed Essene cult would have left him preternaturally aware of the connection between pride and dietary taboos. After all, how can people be truly equal if they can’t all eat the same food at the same table? His manipulation of the Passover feast for political gain, however, was to prove catastrophic; in the ensuing two millenniums, ignorant Christians mourning Christ’s death during Easter routinely massacred Jews because their simultaneous Passover feast—a joyous event commemorating their release from Egyptian bondage—was mistaken as celebration of Christ’s death on the cross.
    Humble Pie
    So here I am in some subterranean dive in Manhattan’s East Village. Everywhere you look, there are Japanese hipsters in hornrim glasses sucking on Sapporo beers and munching omelets covered in writhing bonito flakes that look like barf monsters from a bad sci-fi flick. I take a mouthful of my
motsu yakitori
.
Motsu
means cow intestines. I love ’em, which is just as well, since each
yakitori
—a kind of Japanese shish-kebab—is only three inches long, and I am determined to choke down an entire cow intestine. There’s approximately 150 feet of digestive tract per animal, which means I have another six hundred
yakitori
to go. The divine Nina J. is my companion in this adventure. She looks as if she’s going to throw up. She’s a dainty one, that Nina, who doesn’t eat meat, and is restricting herself to a shrimp.
    “That,” I say defensively, pointing to the pink body on her spear, “is a bottom feeder. Do you know what
it
eats?” Happily, I remember her brother Jerry certifies kosher restaurants for his synagogue. “Jerry would rather be strangled than put one of those in his mouth.”
    Nina ignores me and continues eating. I change tactics. Sure, I say to her, few self-respecting Americans would be caught dead eating cow intestine or heart or liver—at least not publicly—but organ meats like these were once the sacrament of the world’s most powerful priesthood, the Etruscan haruspex. The Etruscans were the original inhabitants of Italy’s Tuscany region. They taught Imperial Rome not only how to read and write but how to foretell future events, and no Roman emperor worth his salt made a political decision without ordering an Etruscan haruspex to read the future in a sheep’s entrails. I describe the scene to Nina: the bleating animals, the incense, the priests pulling the organs out of the beast’s still-steaming body to examine it for prophetic markings. Then, if the lower intestine gave the go-ahead, the politicians would send an army out to conquer, say, Asia Minor and the haruspex priests would sit back to enjoy a snack very much like the one before me now. Charred heart and liver shish-kebab, salted and eaten with the grill’s ashes still sticking to it.
    But that was all a long time ago. Ancient history.
    Or so I thought.
    The guinea pig took another sip of his beer and rolled his eyes in exasperation—was this never going to end?
    “He works better when he’s drunk,” Señor Villanova explained. “You’ll see, señor.”
    My personal journey into the mystic realm of variety meats began in the village of Husao high in the Peruvian Andes. Peru is probably the last place in the world to continue a Tuscan-like reverence for entrails. The only real difference is that the Etruscan priests used sheep. The Peruvian priests,
curandernos,
prefer guinea pigs.
    Villanova poured another mouthful of beer into his pet’s maw. Not all
curandernos
get their guinea pigs drunk, but Villanova had been highly recommended. And that was good, because I was beginning to feel skeptical. For