The lore of insects and allure of eateries
Despite the best efforts of scientific-minded killjoys to stamp it out, the natural impulse to think of animals as persons and to assign them moral (and immoral) qualities remains as vigorous today among ordinary people like me as it did in days of yore. To be sure, it may be that there are few adults around who will admit, as did the 12th-century author of “The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts’’ (wonderfully translated by T.H. White, now out of print), that he finds monkeys “disgraceful,’’ but who has not felt it at times? Indeed, I am sure there is at least unspoken agreement that, as that ancient sage put it, “their bottoms really are excessively disgraceful and horrible.’’ That offensiveness probably belonged to baboons, but let’s not quibble; we take the point. And what of the llama? Is he not, as Hilaire Belloc noted in one of his own bestiaries, “a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat,/ With an indolent expression and an undulating throat/ Like an unsuccessful literary man?’’ Of course he is, and our appreciation for both species is much enhanced by the comparison.
This brings me to “The Earwig’s Tale: A Modern Bestiary of Multi-legged Legends’’ by May R. Berenbaum (Harvard, $23.95). It is this book which has made me think again of how our own tendency to place animals in a moral universe and to compare their ways with ours lends the creatures a dimension of interest that is at least as great as the scientific one. The 26 animals treated here are all arthropods and have been subjects of urban legends or other unfortunate misunderstandings. Berenbaum, an entomologist, aims to correct the record scientifically, but also to identify “the germ of truth’’ that has inspired the error. She goes about her business in a way that is meant to be entertaining, a tactic that has led her not only to address these bugs in what we may call human terms, but also to stray very far from the matter at hand.
Sometimes, as when the subject is, say, “The Brain-Boring Earwig’’ or “The Venomous Daddy Longlegs,’’ she is engagingly informative. It is the cockroach, not the earwig that is likely to be found in your ear; and the fearsome daddy longlegs is not a spider and is not venomous - though it has what human beings would consider to be a disproportionately long penis. But other times, Berenbaum lays on such an abundance of extraneous matter that the expression “padding’’ arises in the reader’s mind.
A case in point is her approach to the apparently much-circulated claim that an ant, when drunk, will invariably fall over on its right side. Her attempt to track down both the genesis and truth of this assertion causes her to mention, among other phenomena, the supposed universal left-handedness of polar bears, the porcupine’s ability to float, and the time it takes to hard boil an ostrich egg - until she finally arrives at the Victorian banker, politician, and natural historian, Sir John Lubbock. The great man plied 41 ants with strong drink and observed that their sober brethren “seemed somewhat puzzled at finding their intoxicated fellow creatures in such a disgraceful condition.’’ Nonetheless, good Samaritans that they were, the teetotalling ants carried most of their dissolute friends home, throwing only nine of them into the water. Still, no sooner is that edifying tale told, but Berenbaum veers off toward bees, beans, and sand-beach isopods, before concluding with pickled scorpions in vodka. It’s all very amiable, but the original claim is neither refuted nor proven.
It seems that Berenbaum, like many of us, spends too much time Googling things and reeling at the misinformation thus chanced upon. Recorded willy-nilly as it is here, all this chaff soon becomes as wearing as accounts of someone else’s dreams. It’s all nonsense; it all stems from something or other; but, really, who cares? Though less than 200 pages long, this would have been a much better book if its Googlings had been replaced with more of the inspired, quasi-medieval line drawings by Jay Hosler that ornament each section.
“Any given bestiary,’’ writes Berenbaum in a preface, “is an illustration of the powerful cultural symbols of the particular era during which it appeared.’’ The same could be said of what one might call “festalaries,’’ or books celebrating food. One such is William Grimes’s “Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York’’ (North Point, $30) As restaurants are, in fact, his subject, I cannot imagine an equivalent history of Boston, or, at least not happily; but eating out is of the essence of New York and here is its adventurous tale complete with a bestiary of cooks and proprietors: the salesmen, showmen, artists, and despots.
Grimes moves from brutal early 19th-century food-bolting venues and various chop houses, through the rise of the French and the virtual sacralization of the dish and deification of the chef. He takes in the arrival of diverse ethnic peoples and their cuisine, the rise and fall of German beer “gardens,’’ the reign of the Italians with their contribution of “a simple, Latin variety of hedonism,’’ and the hectic city’s fascination with its technocratic reverse: the Automat. On and on plates clatter and goblets jingle through scenes of high life, celebrity, and the exotic, to the advent of the fresh Californian table, thence down and down to the vile ironies of the deconstructionists whose contempt for the “notion that food should please’’ produced the worst meal Grimes ever had during his tenure as restaurant critic for The New York Times. (It was “three seared scallops draped with a tender slice of squab, then lined up and capped, Stonehenge-style, with a large chip of emulsified cocoa paste. Somehow, sea urchin mousse found its way into the equation.’’) He has larded the work with amusing quotations from contemporary accounts of the city’s eateries, high and low, and with excellent photographs of restaurants, their patrons and staff, as well as with reproductions of past bills of fare. As a professional diner, Grimes is far better acquainted with - and, indeed, more interested in - the city’s highest-flying restaurants than ordinary mortals are or can be. On the other hand, he has got across, almost palpably, New York’s spirit of public dining, its rage for the new, and the curious culinary creatures who flourish there.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net. 
