I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like to cook. I like to eat but am pretty indifferent to what kind of food, and once I find a dish I like I am known to order it in perpetuity. That said, I’m a glutton when it comes to all things sweet. I inhale candy, chocolate, pastries, tortes, you name it and am forever grateful for those who indulge my sucrose addiction.

In unpleasant contrast, I find myself borderline, no, seriously puritan when it comes to other people being preoccupied with and fond of high-end cuisine. There is a little voice in the head that complains when I join my family at a restaurant for a meal the price of which could easily feed half of an African village for a week. Their appreciation and knowledge of, their joy and reveling in good food is completely supported by me, but my participation in those meals is somehow triggering a sense of guilt.

Memories of hunger’s destruction were never far in a post-war German childhood, some of them direct experiences of people close to me, with lingering consequences to their health. Being forced to eat unpalatable food, both at home and in boarding school, did not make it any easier. My political awakening during the late sixties was also colored by issues of famine: Stalin’s punishment for the inability to deliver his agricultural production goals was starving at least 3 million people in Ukraine. The deliberate starvation of Leningrad was the most notorious example of the Nazis’ policy of killing by hunger during their invasion, which in the early 1940s caused the death of four million Soviet citizens in the western parts of the Soviet Union they occupied. These numbers paled in comparison to Mao’s great leap forward which, combined with drought and poor weather-caused the deaths by famine of 36 million Chinese during the period from 1958-1961 (and that is not counting the 40 million births that did not happen because of these 3 bitter years as they are called colloquially.)

Hunger’s Bride (2011) from the Holocaust series: The Defiance in their Faces

Stalin & Hitler: Mass Murder by Starvation

One of my most vivid memories, now 36 years ago, is food related as well. I had just moved to NYC from Germany and found the apartment burglarized, most of what little stuff I had brought, including inherited pieces of jewelry, gone. The walls were smeared with food remnants from the fridge, and the cops judged it to be the work of junkies, who had managed to climb into the 3rd floor bathroom window the size of a postage stamp. I was pretty devastated until my roommate brought home a bagful of luxury food from Zabar’s. I exploded in wrath (another one of the 7 deadly sins.) And I mean exploded. How could you possibly offer food to comfort the loss of mementos?  The realization of cultural differences did not help to make me feel better.

So, perhaps I should apply for the job described in the link below. It turns out that there was such a thing as a sin eater http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-worst-paid-freelance-gig-in-history-was-being-the-village-sin-eater

Village custom had the family of the deceased place a piece of bread on the departed’s chest, and someone hungry enough signed on to eat that bread believed to have soaked up all the sins of the deceased which would now lodge in you. Hunger making you willing to pawn your own soul….. and lest you think this was purely  medieval superstition, the last known sin eater died in England in 1906!

Toffee, anyone?