The Devil's Picnic

The Devil's Picnic by Taras Grescoe

An account of the writer's travels to sample legally forbidden foods around the world. Each chapter focuses on a particular food item (coca, moonshine, raw milk cheeses, poppy seed crackers and chewing gum, absinthe, hot, chocolate, bull's balls, Cuban cigars and pentobarbital sodium) with emphasis on currently prohibited foods except for the chapter on chocolate, coffee and tea. Accounts of the author's attempts to procure and sample the forbidden foods are mixed with descriptions of the history and current status of prohibition. The author argues convincingly that criminalization of foods is more often an attempt to control the working class or dissent, than because of the health or moral reasons often cited. For the most part I found the book enjoyable and interesting, with the sole exception being the chapter on poppy seed crackers and chewing gum, where Grescoe spends too much time chronicling his ostentatious gum chewing on the Singapore subways rather than delving into the history of prohibition and control in Singapore.

Sweets: a history of candy

Sweets: a history of candy by Tim Richardson.

France, Britain and the US are particularly well-represented in this history of sweets broadly defined. There are some attempts to include the influences of other world regions such as Arabia on Western sweet culture, and more coverage of the history of sweets in Turkey and India, with one final catch-all chapter for the entire world. Descriptions of historical and modern sweets such as manus christi "a [gold-leaf covered] stick of hard sugar candy flavoured with violets, cinnamon or rosewater", Rhubarb and Custards and Dutch salty licorice are particularly intriguing. A chapter on the modern candy industry delineates the rise of companies such as Cadbury, Suchard, Hershey. This book attempts to cover a lot of ground from the history of sugar to health fears and claims, the history of chocolate to international candy. Written with humour this leaves me wanting to know more.