@msolga,
Quote:It seems likely to me that the number of listed ingredients in ehBeth's meal description does not mean some huge glut of ingredients used in producing the meal. In any case, these are hardly enormously expensive, super exotic ingredients at all! Quite the opposite. Haven't you ever produced a meal with lots of different ingredients, a variety of side dishes? I certainly have. It didn't necessarily mean I'd cooked enough to feed an army!
I think your post is completely unfair & out of line.
It always makes me laugh to see self indulgent Americans, or Brits, "saving" the eco system. The reason most of these things are cheap is because the natural environment has been shunted to one side.
How does "yum" square with such a pious agenda as "saving" the rainforests. "Yum" garuantees them gone.
Quote:Athenaeus, the learned grammarian, was a contemporary of Heliogabalus: a degenerate whose languid appetites could be roused only by the unnatural and the nearly unobtainable. "To confound the order of the seasons and climates, to sport with the passions and prejudices of his subjects, and to subject every law of nature and decency were in the number of his most delicious amusements," Gibbon wrote. Rewards were offered for the invention of new sauces, but if the new concoction was not relished then the inventor was allowed to eat of nothing else till he had discovered another more agreeable to the Imperial palate. To tempt this elevated organ, pies were made of song-birds, or tongues from those birds able to imitate the human voice; sows' wombs * were served filled with stifled pigs, or red mullet brought gasping to the table , to be cooked inside a glass vessel, slowly, before their prospective customers, who watched greedily and attentively as the fish passed through a succession of the most beautiful shades as they died. Another degenerate, Vitellius, on his entry into Rome was served a feast consisting of 2,000 fish and 7,000 game birds. One dish he dedicated to the goddess Minerva: the recipe comprising pike-livers, pheasant, and peacock brains, flamingo tongues and lamprey milt, the ingredients having to be collected from every corner of the empire.
* Sows' wombs together with sows' udders were considered great delicacies. They were frowned upon by the more austere members of the community, such as Pliny, who considered such dishes to be extravagant depravities.
Consuming Passions by Mrs Philippa Pullar.
Nothing there was expensive to those involved.
And the sex is something else. Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins by which is meant things destructive of society.
In our world the consumer is always right just like an emperor.
Socrates also condemned the elaboration of taste experiences as degenerate and depraved. As has Woody Allen.
You might like that book Olga. She also wrote a biog. of Frank Harris.
Crikey!