The Singular Beast or Coffee

The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians, and the Pig (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

Author: Claudine Fabre Vassas

Throughout history, the breeding, slaughter, and consumption of the pig has been the inspiration for both religious and secular rituals and taboos. In The Singular Beast, a daring and original account of the role of the pig and its relationship to Jews in European Christian culture, Claudine Fabre-Vassas argues that these practices defined the very boundaries between Christians and Jews. Chronicling the cultural and religious significance of a creature that occupies an ambiguous place in the families of those who raise it - as a member of the family and a potential meal - The Singular Beast reveals the continuing power of symbols to sustain or create ethnic identities. Fabre-Vassas details the folkloric beliefs and rituals that have been associated with the slaughter and consumption of pigs from the Middle Ages until today by both provincial and urban Europeans - such as the myth that Jews do not eat pork because their children had been transformed into pigs and the story that they crave the flesh of Christian children because they are deprived of pork. Ranging from early Christianity to the present, from Spain to Scandinavia, The Singular Beast is both a broad study of the extraordinary, complex role of the animal central to the diets and rituals of most European populations and a close historical analysis of anti-Semitism and the creation of real-life myths.

New Republic

[A] wide-ranging and stimulating book.

Times Literary Supplement

A stunning compendium of porcine and theological folklore. . . . With remarkable acuity, The Singular Beast shows how the pig, the Jew and the Christian have been locked in a fatal and macabre pas de trois for the past two millenniums.

David Gordon White

[A] masterful demonstration of the role of the pig as that animal which, because of its own natural and cultural anomalousness, came so powerfully to symbolize the dialectic of identity and difference obtaining between Christians and Jews.

New York Times

Fabre-Vassas argues that the cultural tension between those who did and those who did not eat pork helps set the stage for a murderous anti-Semitism. . . . Taking her cue from Claude Levi-Strauss, [she] studied the culinary habits of southern France, and the way in which the pig began to be associated with the Jew in the anti-Semitic imaginings of peasant culture, and by implication the rest of Europe.

Janet Liebman Jacobs

Fabre-Vassas's work in particular illuminates the fear of otherness that, as a dimension of human consciousness, underlies the relationship between those who are persecuted and those who persecute . . . The extensive and detailed research in The Singular Beast provides ample evidence of how Jewishness became imbued with all manner of hateful traits. . . . Through ethnography and text, Fabre-Vassas offers a rich and nuanced protrait of anti-Semitic beliefs and practices that remained deeply embedded in twentieth-century European society.

Booknews

From the author's introduction: "We know that the world's cultures readily designate others by what they eat; in Europe we call one another frogs, roast beefs, or macaroni eaters...a very rare exception should have aroused suspicion: Jews are called `pigs,' imagined to be bloodthirsty, identified precisely as what they forbid themselves." This study details the folkloric beliefs and rituals associated with the slaughter and consumption of pigs from the Middle Ages until today, and explores what they reveal about the cultural boundaries between Christians and Jews. Translated from the French (1994, <'E>ditions Gallimard). Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Table of Contents:

One. An Anological Being
One. The Red Men
Two. Children's Stories
Three. The Circle of Metamorphoses
Two. From One Blood To the Next
Four. The Jew's Sow
Five. Red Easter
Six. Old Jews, Young Christians
Seven. The Little Jew
Three. Christian Flesh
Eight. The Return of the Pig
Nine. Blood and Soul
Ten. The Bone That Sings. The Time of Sacrifice

Books about: Thin for Good or Pr cticas hol sticas para la salud

Coffee: A Dark History

Author: Antony Wild

Reveals the shocking exploitation that has always lurked at the heart of the industry.

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

Antony Wild isn't kidding. The history of coffee is indeed as "dark," as his subtitle puts it, as the cup of Colombian that sits on my desk as these words are written. Himself a coffee lover and an expert on the subject -- he worked for more than a decade as the buyer for a prestigious British specialty-coffee company -- Wild is nonetheless no sentimentalist when it comes to the human and natural toll the bean has extracted -- "poverty, violence, exploitation, environmental devastation, political oppression, and corruption" -- nor to the threats that caffeine poses to the health of those who consume it. As he writes, with the wry touch that makes his book a pleasure:

Publishers Weekly

While coffee historian Wild brings enthusiasm to this tome on the 500-year history of the caffeinated bean, it doesn't match the simple passion with which coffee lovers enjoy their morning java. (In fairness to the author, how could it?) Wild (The East India Company) traces the bean as it makes its way from Africa to the Middle East (it was once known as the "wine of Araby") to the West, and the rise in cafe culture across Europe and eventually the New World, where, thanks to the Boston Tea Party, coffee surpassed tea as the patriotic drink of choice for a fledging nation. But Wild repeatedly reminds readers that for all the pleasure a cup of coffee brings to its drinker, the history of this beguiling brew is indeed dark. As long as there has been coffee, Wild asserts, there have been colonial powers-and now corporations-to exploit the workers that grow it. While this is a fascinating story that combines history with anthropology, too often the writing is buried under the heartless statistics of economic formulations. However, the work does provide caffeine junkies with intriguing reading material next time they find themselves waiting in line to order their grande vanilla latte. Illus. (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Wild (The East India Company) has been widely recognized for introducing specialty coffees to Great Britain. Here, he presents a 500-year history of the much-loved drink, drawing on science, politics, anthropology, and alchemy before concluding that today's large companies, with their demand for lower prices, have put coffee farmers out of business and thousands of workers out of jobs in Africa and Central America. Wild's explanation of how major corporations have taken over the coffee industry, supported by public information direct from the coffee distributors themselves, will inspire readers to comtemplate their contribution to this global situation. The only comparison would be Stewart Lee Allen's The Devil's Cup, which describes similar facts but from the first person. With its political and historical perspectives, this book reads more like a textbook. Recommended for academic libraries; an optional purchase for others.-Jennifer A. Wickes, Suite101.com, Pine Beach, NJ Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.