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Resurrect Christianity? Literary corner Blood, Bones & Butter


BOOK


Religion For Atheists Alain de Botton


UNIVERSITY College London


has never been the ideal place to advance an argument in favour of the uses of religion, however tentative that argument might be; the trendy Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton’s argument in his latest book is very tentative indeed. UCL is, of course, the “godless


college on Gower Street”. Jeremy Bentham, its spiritual father, was a non-believer who wrote damningly of the Church of England in 1818 that “he who has entered into that fold cannot have entered into it without having sold himself to the practice and service of vice”. Bentham himself was a very rich man who would have had little need to sell himself “to the practice and service of vice”, if that is the right way of putting it. His philosophy of Utilitarianism – the greatest good for the greatest number – lies beneath much modern political and social thought but, as de Botton recognises, in reducing men to social statistics rather


than immortal souls it is not much more inspiring than what it replaced. In fact, looking around the modern


world, de Botton sees that the decline of religious belief can be blamed for many of our ills. Our architecture and art are shoddy; we lack formal outlets for expressions of uncomfortable emotions like shame and weakness; seduced by a false romantic ideal of love, to the exclusion of other kinds of love, our relationships and marriages inevitably tend to end in frustration and disappointment. To this list I would like to add digital projection in cinemas, unisex toilets and that kind of shrink wrapping which is impossible to get open. Strangely enough, for someone who


was raised as an atheist Jew, his book is in many ways a panegyric for the role of the old Catholic Church in Europe. A single hierarchical organisation, both spiritual and worldly, enthroned above the sceptred sway of kings and governments, it provided a common aesthetic and moral standards for an entire civilisation. De Botton does not follow the logic of this position and pray for the reconversion of England, though this would have been rather


less silly than the proposition he does advance, which is (I think) for modern- day corporations such as McDonald’s to take up this abnegated role, and for us all to worship at state-run religions “of humanity”, like they do in China. Poor de Botton! It would have been


better to have stuck merely to defending the uses of religion and criticising the modern world; it is when he starts suggesting a positive alternative that he tends to incur the ridicule of his English readers. This is a shame, since there is much to recommend his book. For anyone who has spent the last three years in lecture theatres and seminar rooms around Foster Court, de Botton’s picture of the sterility and vacuity of modern humanities teaching, which no longer feels able to make moral value judgements on works of art or literature, is hilarious and devastatingly accurate. He is also quite right that churches


(and temples and mosques) are the only places in human society where all, young and old, rich and poor, can mix with complete equality. But he does not seem to understand why this is so; or indeed why religions uniquely provide an outlet for expressions of love, shame and weakness which humanist systems struggle to do, and why they feel comfortable making moral value judgements on the worth of things. To suggest, as de Botton does, an


“agape restaurant” where we would all have to sit together, since men no longer mix with each other at church, or art galleries and museums reorganised around moral principles, like works of devotion, misses the point. When a man goes to a restaurant, it is because he wants to eat with his friends and companions; he goes to an art gallery or museum to see an exhibition or work of art, not to be taught a lesson; and if he goes to church, it is because he wants to worship. De Botton writes at the end of his


book, with supreme understatement, “religions are intermittently too useful, too effective and too intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone”. It seems to me the opposite point is more valid. If modern man no longer has the instinct or inclination to worship, there seems very little point in trying to resuscitate that instinct by artificial means. Religions such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England have already tried and failed to do so, to the extent of abandoning many of their traditions and alienating many of their followers. Far better for the religious, and for the well-being of Mr de Botton, if they should concentrate themselves on the religious alone.


Samuel Johnson


childhood in rural Pennsylvania, to her delinquent and nomadic adolescence and coming-of-age. She ends with a peculiar romance with her Italian husband, Michele, and its corrosion amidst holidays in Italy – Hamilton is a lesbian, and it is with her girlfriend that she started up Prune. Hamilton’s memoirs are


BLOOD, Bones & Butter: The


Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef is the memoir of New York chef and restaurateur Gabrielle Hamilton, owner of celebrated dining place Prune. As the axiomatic title implies, Blood, Bones & Butter is a succinct and straight-talking autobiography that wastes no time or sentiment in getting to the heart of a universal truth: that life is messy, gory and tantalising, just as cooking is a physically visceral and primordial affair. This is not a conventional memoir of a chef that romanticises cooking and food as pastoral and picturesque. Chef and food critic Anthony


Bourdain has dubbed it as “simply the best memoir by a chef ever. Ever.” Such accolades from the notoriously hard-talking and exacting Bourdain come both as affirmation and illumination of the book. For if Gabrielle Hamilton had a male counterpart, it would be Bourdain, a fellow New Yorker. From her self- portrayal in the book, Hamilton is as unapologetic as her writing style, which is crisp, intelligent, blunt and singularly unique in description. In recounting her love of the smell of manure, a fact quite repulsively incompatible with the sanitised notion of a chef today, Hamilton elaborates, “I like it in my food and my wine and even in certain body odor. That milk was so thick and shitty that the cream separated and rose to the top.” It is anecdotes like these that pepper the book and make it so thoroughly engaging. The simultaneous play of repulsion, perverse curiosity and genuine pleasure that Hamilton’s accounts and writing stir make the read incessantly alluring. The book, according to its


tripartite header, is divided into three sections. Each progresses from the other as Hamilton moves from one formative stage of her life to the next. Beginning with her unorthodox


colourful and richly textured. So colourful in fact are her tales and experiences that they seem garish to the point of in-your-face crude excess and brutal detail. The first time she slaughters a chicken out of college, initial sadistic drive to kill soon gives rise to a panicked blubbering scene of botched decapitation. With her father swearing in the background, Hamilton presents this barbaric hysteria with all the theatricality of a vivid moralistic drama that makes one gutturally aware of just how gory and macabre the life of food really is. In yet another stomach- turning episode, Hamilton watches a rat cadaver explode with violently squirming maggots. Grim-faced, she promptly proceeds to clean the vile debris. With all the hardship, struggle,


poverty and soul-searching Hamilton goes through, food is both the saving grace of the book and of Hamilton herself. It is the primal flavour and material that permeates the entire text. In essence, food is the sensuality that makes Hamilton’s memoirs so seductive and tangible. Her unique flair for description ensures that food always remains real, uncensored, raw but irresistibly close and human. In an interview with the New York


Times to promote her book, Hamilton comments, “Books, movies, music, restaurants, advertising: something’s happened to us. We’re not telling the truth. We don’t stink. We don’t have yellow teeth. We don’t have crooked teeth. We don’t have to suffer disagreement or pain or setbacks anymore. You can go to your doctor and get a pill — you don’t even have to be melancholy anymore, right? I mean, it’s just incredible what the new way of being is. We’ll see how that works out.” Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef is a hearty, unforgivingly sincere account of one woman’s journey to find the flavours and tastes that make an alchemy of life’s experiences; turning the bitter, sweet, sour, salty and sublime into a living substance that goes beyond the palatable, toward the truly honest and invigorating.


Rachel Ng


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