Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [35]
In 1906 the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company was created, soon to be renamed the Kellogg Company. Competitors sprang up, and Kellogg decided to distinguish his product by putting a copy of his signature on every box. His success was global, and from the beginning, he wanted to share his wealth. He created the W. K. Kellogg Foundation in 1930, which during his lifetime gave away almost his entire fortune—sixty-six million dollars dedicated mostly to helping children, with special emphasis on health and education.
BUDDHISM
April 8 is the traditional birthday of the Buddha, who was born a prince, Siddhartha Gautama, and lived in luxury. He withdrew from the world at the age of twenty-nine to seek an answer to the suffering he saw around him, and after six years of searching, received enlightenment. The last forty-five years of his life were spent teaching and founding the religion.
Muslims eat no pork, Hindus no beef, and Buddhists nothing that has been slaughtered, since the first precept of Buddhism is that there is to be no taking of life. Reincarnation is a Buddhist belief that one’s soul may have or will someday inhabit an insect or animal, giving more reason not to kill them.
The real wrong is in the killing, not so much the eating, and to some Buddhists, an animal that has been killed in an accident or by another (evidently non-Buddhist) animal or person is all right to eat. Buddhist monks, though, strictly do not eat meat and take nothing solid after midday.
Buddhism is important or dominant in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, and Japan, but oddly has nearly disappeared in India, its country of origin. It is said that the prohibition against killing is observed by Thai fishermen through their regarding fish as not being killed when caught, but merely removed from water.
RABELAIS
François Rabelais died on this day in 1553. Rising early was no happiness, he wrote, drinking early was far better. He was born, it is believed, in Chinon ca. 1493, became a monk and then a doctor, and his name has become an adjective for wild imagination, bawdy humor, and gluttonous feasting. His great comic novels, Pantagruel, 1532, and Gargantua, 1534, were condemned by church authorities but were enormously successful. The king, François I, to whom they were read, enjoyed the books thoroughly. Even Shakespeare made reference to Gargantua’s large mouth.
Rabelais’s dying words were “Draw the curtain, the farce has ended.”
MANNERS
The place of honor at the dinner table is the seat to the right of the hostess or host, given to a man or woman. In ancient times, though, it was always to the left of the host, that being nearest to his heart. The Romans ate lying down, and belching for them was a sign of politeness, as it still is in the Middle East.
Manners have evolved through the centuries. Among the Greeks, the guest or stranger was offered a foot wash. Erasmus, in his Treatise on Manners in 1530, advised that it was absolutely not done to throw bones under the table or lick your plate. There are accepted rules for the use and placement of knives and forks, the removal of plates, the amount that should be poured into wine glasses, etc., but generally whatever is inoffensive is now permitted.
The true mark of courtesy is for the host or hostess to casually commit the same mistake as the guest to show that it is perfectly all right. The opposite of this once took place at the White House after lunch when President Calvin Coolidge, a taciturn man, put some milk into his coffee and slowly poured it into his saucer. His guest politely imitated him. Then Coolidge reached down and put the saucer on the floor for his cat.
AGNÈS SOREL
It was said of Agnès Sorel, the first mistress of a French king to be more or less officially recognized as such, that she knew the value of satisfying the royal appetite