The oldest written story of a border dates back to 2,400 BC, carved in cuneiform into a half-meter-tall pillar of crystalline limestone. It tells of an argument between two cities over a stretch of Mesopotamian barley fields called the “edge of the plain”—now part of the deserts of Iraq. For a century and a half, these fields changed hands, most often violently. The pillar, which was placed on the border between the cities, gave only one side of the dispute. Among other details, it explained the origin of the line it demarcated: that it was drawn by the father of all the gods, at the very beginning of time. Territory, it said, was eternal.
I began to learn beekeeping in 2020, six months into the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly everyone who works for Two Hives Honey, the Austin company that now employs me, had some previous career. I had been a bookseller at Malvern Books, an independent Austin store specializing in experimental literature, and I had sent my first novel out on submission two weeks before Austin temporarily shut down nonessential businesses. In the months that followed, the bookstore drastically cut its hours and lost much of its staff, including me. My novel waited in limbo.
In virtually every circumstance that comes to mind, a steaming pile of rice is stellar on its own. But to top those grains with ingredients simmered in dashi and soy sauce, before they’re set into a bowl and sprinkled with scallions and shichimi, culminating in delicious donburi, is another plane of pleasure entirely. As straightforward as these Japanese rice bowls may seem — (perfect) rice! Covered with (perfectly) poached ingredients! Served in a (perfect) bowl! — their understatedness belie their exquisiteness.
It is a bright summer’s day on the Eurasian plains, sometime in the neighborhood of 4000 B.C. As children shout at each other in a Proto-Indo-European language and pursue each other through the tall grasses, you milk the hoofed animal standing in front of you, a horse. Her young foal is tied to her rear leg to trick her into thinking that its mouth, not your hands, is tugging at her teats. The milk splashes into a textured earthen pot and you smile as you see that the liquid has already started to curdle, the sign of a healthy food brewed by nature and enjoyed by you and your kinfolk.
For Anne Mendelson, a culinary historian, this is the paradise we have lost. In “Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood,” she chronicles how modern society fell away from this symbiotic relationship with dairy and how, in what she calls “one of the great flukes of food history,” liquid cow’s milk cheated its way into becoming a darling of the medical community. She demonstrates that physicians and public health officials, some of them charlatans, most of them well-meaning, all of them under-informed, waged a public relations crusade in which they touted liquid milk’s supposed nutritional benefits, such that by the 20th century, the public came to accept it as an essential item on the grocery list.
The beauty of Baddiel’s paradoxical book is that, after admitting his attraction to a God that offers deliverance from death, he confesses he loves his ancestral religion for its unceasing struggle for life in this world. “If I am moved by Jewish survival,” he writes “I am moved by Judaism. There’s no getting around it.” He has no need to regret the absence of a death-denying God. The story of survival is enough. But if there is inconsistency here, it is more than forgivable. Baddiel’s contradictions are like his jokes – pointers to truths that bring us back to earth.