Diasporic Dining XXVIII: Feeling His Neurogastronomic Juices

You’ve heard of neuroeconomics, neuro law and a host of other disciplines which try to isolate areas of the brain that are involved in undertaking  particular types of thinking or emoting. Neurogastronomy is the latest entry into the neuro sweepstakes and it’s the “brain” child of Miguel Sanchez Romera, a neurologist who has named a restaurant after himself, and whose pretensions, which include a $245 prix fixe menu, have provoked the ire of one time Times restaurant critic now Op Ed columnist Frank Bruni (“Dinner and Derangement,” NYT, 10/17/11). Here is a quote from the restaurant’s web site: “Neurogastronomy embodies a holistic approach to food by means of a thoughtful study of the organoleptic properties of each ingredient. The result is a natural cuisine driven by the importance of neurosensory perceptions, the taste-memory and the emotions of food.”  Some restaurants get bad reviews, but few get lambasted on the editorial page of the paper of record. Bruni’s wrath was such that he wrote a an op-ed piece about it proclaiming how the restaurant exemplified “the way our culture’s food madness tips into food psychosis.” “While blazers are optional at Romera,” Bruni remarked, “straitjackets would be a fine idea.” Though Bruni’s biting humor might not spare Dr. Romera’s feelings, there’s a certain poetic justice in this fillip against a provider who doesn’t spare his patrons’ purses. Bruni’s verdict on Romera is a kind of culinary Sharia since it hits Dr.Romera where it hurts. But Bruni’s Inquisition is a breath of fresh air at a time when it’s increasingly difficult to find simple well cooked food at moderate prices. Food has become like the emperor’s new clothes. People actually fall over each other paying exorbitant prices for increasingly microscopic portions, while this time Chicken Little may turn out to be right. The sky is falling.

The Grand Inquisitor

The Times reported that two of the names on the bomb packages sent to synagogues in Chicago by Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen were addressed to famous Inquisitors who had persecuted Muslims in medieval times. Diego Deza, a successor to the infamous Tomás de Torquemada, was one of the names, and Reynald Krak “…is another name for Reynald of Châtillon—a French knight of the Second Crusade who wantonly killed Muslim pilgrims and was later beheaded by Saladin, the Kurdish warrior famous for his defeat of Western invaders in the 12th century” (“In Parcel Bomb Plot, 2 Dark Inside Jokes,” NYT, 11/2/10). It is curious that the terrorists sent bombs addressed to Inquisitors to synagogues, since both Jews and Muslims faced a common fate at the hands of the Inquisition. In any event, this strain of terrorism seems like something out of a Dan Brown novel in which the past itself actually plays a murderous role. But the curious element is the significance that centuries-old conflicts hold for the modern-day terrorist mind. This was particularly obvious in the massacres at Sarajevo during the Bosnian-Serb conflict, in which the place itself was so resplendent with both relatively recent (the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which precipitated World War I) and more ancient hostilities between Christians and Muslims. These conflicts seethed beneath the surface normalcy that had been cultivated during the Tito era, in which ethnicity was subsumed under the ideology of a benevolently despotic totalitarian state. Stephan Daedalus comments that “history is a nightmare,” and it always creates a shudder when one realizes how powerful historical memory is and how it’s passed on to generation after generation. Who would have thought that names like Reynald de Châtillon and Diego Deza could be on the minds of jihadists in Yemen, a country that, on the space-time continuum, seems light years from The Crusades?

Little Murders

Are there bad people, or just people with problems that get of hand? The former Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic is now on trial in The Hague, accused of war crimes, but he was once a psychiatrist, a person trained to understand and treat the condition of those suffering from mental illness. Is this a contradiction? For many years following the war, Karadzic lived incognito, sporting long hair and a beard and practicing alternative medicine. His training and the identity he adopted are belied by the fact that he was a murderer and a killer. But surely manifest content is significant; surely some part of him was interested in healing.

Hitler loved dogs. The young Stalin wrote poetry and there were those who thought he might become a priest. What is it that unites these murderers? How do human beings whose behavior shows signs of empathy for others make an about face whereby the brother becomes the other?  Only last week, another crime shocked the nation: the murder of 13 people at Fort Hood, by yet another psychiatrist. What made Major Nidal Malik Hasan open fire? Was he bad or mad?

Little Murders is the title of a play by Jules Feiffer. In a sense, all of us are capable of homicide, and maybe even genocide on a small scale. The beloved wife, friend, business associate, or relative suddenly becomes the enemy, the other, and the vitriol is directly proportionate to the love that once existed. A sense of victimhood can always be counted on to induce revenge. Racial pride was an organizing principle of the Third Reich, allowing for whole new classifications of others. The notion of a shared injury can also become a unifying force that unites a whole population in mass paranoia. Historic feelings of persecution by Christians may have been one of the many causes of the Turkish massacre of its Armenian population. What set the Hutus against the Tutsis, the Janjaweed against the rebels in the Sudan? And what explains the viciousness with which Bosnian Serbs turned against the Muslims with whom they had lived in peace for decades? 

These are no mere squabbles of property lines, money and political power. The depraved indifference to human life that is characteristic of mass murder has the quality of a passion, the kind of passion that once contained the germs of human love. Weren’t the Crusades and the Inquisition about love of God? And yet an academic understanding of the roots of conflict does little to assuage the pain. The guilty still must face trial, even if, as in the case of Karadzic, they refuse to show up.