Free In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food by Stewart Lee Allen Page A

sexiest sin in history to be the gluttony of a woman named Eve. Jerome ended up in some hot water when one of his female followers, Blaesilla, starved to death under his regime. Likewise, reports indicating that the fashion industry’s obsession with emaciated femininity is creating a generation of women riddled with psychological problems relating to food—currently 84 percent of all American women are on a diet and one in two hundred female college students have been diagnosed with an eating disorder—has led nations like Denmark to hold tentative discussions on outlawing unhealthy media images.
    Bitter Herbs
    Christina the Astonishing fed on milk from her own miraculously swelling breasts, but the preferred nosh of saints worldwide is a weed so noxious that its touch burns. It is called stinging nettles and makes a nice soup. The twelfth-century Tibetan saint Milarepa lived on the nettle soup
satuk
for so long that his hair turned green. St. Columba of Ireland followed a similar regime until he developed a mysterious weight problem. When the saint confronted his cook with the situation, he discovered she’d been using a hollow spoon to surreptitiously add milk to his broth.
    Wear rubber gloves while cutting the nettles, and only use the tender tips. Serves four.
    1 heaping cup young nettle leaves
Sliced leeks (for extra flavor)
2 cups combination of boiling milk and stock (or water)
1 ounce butter
2 ounces rolled oats (or rice)
Salt
Pepper
Parsley
     
    Sweat the nettles and leeks without browning for two to three minutes. Add boiling milk and stock combination, the butter, and then the oats (or rice) and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer thirty to forty-five minutes. Taste and correct seasoning. Toss in some parsley and serve forth.
    Red Lady
    John pointed to a watermelon-sized pair of nipples hanging over our heads.
    “These are for her milk, they say,” he explained doubtfully. A pair of worshipers paused to anoint themselves with the milky-looking water dripping from the concrete teats. “They say it is holy.”
    We were in Amritsar’s House of the Red Lady. Amritsar is a city in the northwest of India, best known for the Golden Temple belonging to the Sikh religion. Like dutiful tourists, Nina and I had visited the temple and sat by the Holy Pool (“Please to keep your legs crossed . . .”). We’d watched the screaming, sword-waving worshipers make their pilgrimage. We’d gazed at the Sikhs’ Holy Book, which is surrounded night and day by chanting priests. As we left, our rickshaw driver (John) had asked us if we wanted to visit the “ladies museum.” A ladies museum? Our heads immediately filled with visions of some weird tribute to the women’s liberation movement, and we agreed, only to find ourselves at the house of a woman who’d achieved sainthood by intense dieting. That’s an understatement; the general belief is that she lived almost her entire life without eating a single mouthful. Though this is typical behavior in the West, it’s relatively rare in Hindu culture, where female saints, or gurus, tend to be plumpkins who dispense blessings via distinctly maternal hugs. It’s the men who go for the waif look in India. The Red Lady was almost Christian in her love of misery, spending most of her life alone in a little house where she eventually died in the mid-1980s. Word of her ability to survive on air, however, soon spread, and by the time we visited in late 1999 her house had grown into a temple complex with about twenty rooms.
    The main room, accessed through a filthy alleyway, contained a brightly painted statue of the Red Lady wearing a pair of hornrim glasses. She looked suspiciously well fed. Dozens of older women snoozed on the floor at the base of the statue. The real action was upstairs, which blurred the boundary between a carnival madhouse and a church. You enter by crawling through a minuscule hallway meant to replicate a fetus’s passage through its mother’s uterus. Once