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TARAS GRESCOE INTERVIEW
by Malcolm Jolley

Montréal author Taras Grescoe traveled the world looking for the ingredients to The Devil's Picnic: a collection of prohibited or zealously regulated food and drinks from moonshine to bulls' balls, which took him from apartment blocks of Singapore to the bucolic splendour of  Burgundy. Gremolata caught up to him to discuss his great culinary adventure.

Gremolata: With the success of The Devil's Picnic, you're gaining a reputation as a dare devil eater. But you won't eat meat in North America. Why?

Taras Grescoe: I'll try anything, once, for journalistic purposes. But about ten years ago I decided that eating meat on a daily basis was an unacceptably risky endeavor—especially in North America. At the time, I couldn't afford organically-raised meat, and the alternative--supermarket hamburger and chicken thighs under cello wrap—just seemed revolting. Reading Fast Food Nation, Fat Land, Gina Mallet's Last Chance to Eat, and all the other good investigative journalism that's been done on the topic since then, I've had no reason to regret the decision. The growth-hormone injected, GM-grain-fed, salmonella- and E. Coli-infested ground round that passes for meat here actually scares me. In Europe, there are enough Artisanal traditions, and strong legislation by the EU, that I'm willing to try a good Iberico ham, a prosciutto di Parma, or a poulet de Bresse. It's also part of the experience, and pleasure, of traveling. (I might be willing to put my principles on the shelf to try some caribou or good Southern BBQ too.)

I've confined my protein intake to fish for the last decade, but lately I'm learning that, what with mercury, antibiotics, and pesticides, even that's a risky proposition. Not to mention the fact that a lot of big fish like salmon, cod, and shark are close to commercial extinction. But that's another story--and it's also the subject of my next book.

G: Speaking of artisanal traditions, it doesn't sound like your big fan of Norwegian moonshine. Have you had any offers to try any other home brews since? Also, I was quite surprised that the Scandinavians had a liquor distribution system as silly as ours. I always thought of Nordic Europe as being pretty free and loose.

TG: I'm not a big fan of pure ethanol—except as a potential alternative to gasoline, and even then, I want to see the proof that it doesn't contribute to global warming—and that's what hjemmebrent, meaning "home-burnt", is. The stuff I got was something like 95% alcohol, so strong that it can freeze your mouth if you make the mistake of using water as your mixer. I've since been offered homemade grappa by the older Calabrese gentleman at my local espresso joint (at their annual Christmas party) and that stuff will give you a Viking-sized hangover too. What I retain from Norway is their extensive stock of synonyms for hangover, including tømmermenn (little timbermen, or carpenters, hard at work behind your brow) and fylleangst, "drunkeness-angst", which comes the next day when you remember all the crap you said and did while drinking too many aquavit toasts.

All of Scandinavia is free and loose when it comes to naked saunas and wholesome pornography (the Danish in particular are the let-it-all-hang-out hippies of the north). But Norway is gripped by the legacy of the thunderous preaching of Lutheranism, which goes a long way to explaining such extremes as death metal, the burning of stave churches, and the disastrous policy of protecting the Norwegian people from themselves by locking the liquor in a state-owned cabinet (the Vinmonopolet, or system of state-wide liquor stores) and limiting access through early closing times and exorbitant prices. We have such liquor monopolies in Canada, of course, but they're disguised as country clubs. We seem to be as attached to them as we are attached to the Queen.

G: When you went further south in Europe, to France and Spain, you seemed to be looking for examples of faceless bureaucracy impeding age old traditions, but I’m not sure that’s what you found. Tell me about your thoughts on government regulation. Have they changed?

TG: I started my travels temperamentally sympathetic to such live-free-or-die mavericks as Hunter S. Thompson and Ernest Hemingway (and, more recently, perhaps, Anthony Bourdain), those who believed, and believe, that nobody should tell them what they catch, shoot, or consume. I still firmly believe that nobody should be jailed for what they put into their bodies—whether it's coca leaf tea in Bolivia or the pentobarbital sodium that a terminal cancer patient decides to swallow in Switzerland—but I came to the conclusion that a community has the right to restrict commerce. This occurred to me with the most force in Spain, as I stared at a plate of angulas, or baby eels, and they stared back at me: hundreds of little eyes, delicately fried in olive oil. Eels aren't endangered yet, but they are disappearing from the rivers of western Europe fast (hence their price: up to 850 euros a kilo at Christmastime).

Do my neighbors, my fellow citizens, have the right to tell me I shouldn't be able to profit from the sale of baby eels, or panda steak, blue whale sushi, or etorphine, an opiate 10,000 times more powerful than morphine? Absolutely, particularly when such commerce has the potential to harm everyone (including unborn generations that might never see whales or pandas, or the families that have to cope with a kid in an etorphine coma). The libertarian utopia of a completely free market, I realized while I was traveling, is an absurd chimera. Oddly enough, I have a plateful of baby eels to thank for driving this home.

G: What about your rebirth as a smoker? You started up again for the book. Have you managed to quit again? Is this desirable? What do you make of Anglo-North American smoking laws, now?

TG: I smoked from my late teens to my late twenties--I used to favour Chesterfields, which cost 10 francs a pack, or less than two bucks, when I lived in France--but I gave up when the habit started to feel shabby. (I've always liked the glamour and sophistication of smoking; just couldn't cope with the potential for cancer, emphysema, and impotence.)

I always wondered whether I could get away with smoking like the late Pope John Paul II: three cigarettes a day, one after each meal, and I put it to the test when I went down to New York and San Francisco to investigate what's happened since they banned smoking in bars and restaurants. I started off with the $7.50-a-pack, no-additive, carriage trade brand of cigarettes called Nat Sherman. They're sold in a fabulous boutique across 42nd Street from the NY Public Library. The first couple of days, I limited my intake, but within a week I was up to a pack a day. It was all in the name of research: I tracked down a dozen smoking bars in non-smoking San Francisco, the so-called smoke-easies, proving that after 8 years of prohibition (smoking was banned in 1998) people find inventive ways around a ban. A health enforcement officer told me there were at least 60 smoking bars in the city, and his department was well aware of their existence; they'd just decided to opt for accommodation.

Believe it or not, Montréal is going to try the "noble experiment" of banning cigarettes this May. I think this might be the city in North America where the non-smoking forces will fight their Waterloo. And it won't take 8 years after the law is passed for smoke-easies to develop here; it will take like 8 minutes.

As for quitting, I've been known to accept a Nat Sherman, or even an American Spirit, when the conversation is good and the absinthe is real. Still can't quite get my head around smoking a whole Cohiba, though.

G: I was disappointed to find out one of the main causes for banning absinthe wasn't psychedelic revelry, but shoddy bottling techniques! Is the stuff on the shelves of the SAQ or LCBO the real stuff? What's the deal with the buzz?

TG: Actually, absinthe was banned because it was reputed to be the "boisson qui rend fou", the drink that made you crazy. In the late 1800s, francophone nations of western Europe were undergoing a wave of alcoholism--similar to the gin craze that gripped England in the 1700s--and absinthe became the chief scapegoat. For example, a Swiss man was accused of murdering his wife and daughters after drinking absinthe, but in reality he'd drunk 3 litres of good Swiss white wine before having that final, killer glass of absinthe.

Real absinthe is made with a herb called wormwood, whose chief active ingredient is thujone. It takes an awful lot of thujone to have a toxic effect (certainly more than they've found in historical bottles); the theory is that cheap absinthe, which was made with colorants like cupric acetate, was indeed toxic, but only because of such adulterants. The good stuff, manufactured by Pernod for example, was perfectly safe.

I went to a little valley in Switzerland, the Val-de-Travers, where they've been making the stuff for the last 200 years, and still use wormwood in their home-distilled product. Frankly, it's a little hard to separate the high-proof alcohol buzz (the stuff is 55 per cent ethanol) from the wormwood buzz, but I will give it this: it's a speedier experience than vodka or whisky. You're far more alert after 5 of these than you would be after a corresponding amount of traditional hard liquor.

Liquor stores in BC, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec have been known to sell Hill's (and sometimes Versinthe and Absente) but none of these contain significant amounts of wormwood. Oddly enough, any decent bottle of vermouth (the name comes from wormwood) will contain more thujone than the ersatz absinthes you find on these shores.

Visit www.devilspicnic.ca to find out more.

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