Taras Grescoe, "The Devil's Picnic"

I picked up this book because I mistakenly thought that it was the source of an essay I read excerpted somewhere, about the custom and the illicit experience of eating ortolan.  Ortolans are wee tiny songbirds, which historically were caught, fed until they became visibly fat, drowned in brandy, and eaten with a white cloth over the head to both trap the delicious smells and hide your sin from God.  In the essay I read, a food critic attended a secret illegal meal, and described the experience of eating ortolan.  

To my mild puzzlement, this essay had nothing to do with The Devil's Picnic, and I am completely unable to find a trace of it online.  So who knows - I may have hallucinated that part.  

The subtitle of this book is "Around the world in the pursuit of forbidden fruit," but this is just a framework on which Grescoe has hung a lengthy discussion on prohibition.  Prohibition doesn't work, we all know this, and yet we continue to prohibit things, as if that's actually going to work.  Grescoe points the spotlight on prohibitions around the world, from America's "War On Drugs" insanity to France's ancient tradition of runny raw milk cheeses.

Grescoe neatly exposes the silliness and futility of this bureaucratic meddling.  But then he keeps talking about it, hammering the same points home.  By the time you're halfway through the book, Grescoe is preaching to the choir, and it starts to get a bit tedious.

The Devil's Picnic is perhaps best read as a collection of essays, and letting a lot of time elapse between reading each essay.  Taken back-to-back, the overall experience is a little fatiguing.  

Which is a pity, because Grescoe's willingness to travel to the origin countries of various forbidden substances is nicely accompanied by his clear prose, and his eternal willingness to puncture the buffoonery of those what need puncturing.  As when he describes the men who travel to Singapore to seek out Asian women, "the notorious Western zero-to-hero, men beset with male-pattern baldness and early onset misogyny, who come to Asia to find the girlfriends their personality disorders prevent them from scoring at home."

I also appreciated an outside view on America's various issues and hang-ups.  Grescoe is Canadian, and like many Canadians, he is obsessed with (deservedly) taking America down a notch.  "Against all evidence, food safety officials in the United States continue to boast that the American food supply is the safest in the world."  He then points out that we have 26 cases of food poisoning per 100 citizens per year, while the United Kingdom has 3.4 cases per 100, and France has only 1.2 per 100.

I quite enjoyed the first-person and travel-focused writing, when Grescoe was on the ground in places as diverse as La Paz, Bolivia (cocaine) and Madrid (criadillas, or fried bulls' testicles).  Grescoe has definitely done his research and pondered the broader questions.  And if he sometimes gets bogged down in discussing those broader questions, on balance this is still a pretty entertaining and thought-provoking travelogue.