During a recent visit to a brew pub, Glenn Reynolds asked a good question:

I wonder if there were people who feared brewing technology when it was new? "They put in water and stuff, and out comes beer, which alters your consciousness. It's evil magic!"

Actually, I'm pretty sure that there were people like that. Would Leon Kass have been one of them, had he lived back then? I'm just, you know, asking.

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone --a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.

I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many reader, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America's rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions -- their reasons long before forgotten -- that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners. To cite one small example: yawning with uncovered mouth. Not just the uneducated rustic but children of the cultural elite are now regularly seen yawning openly in public (not so much brazenly or forgetfully as indifferently and "naturally"), unaware that it is an embarrassment to human self-command to be caught in the grip of involuntary bodily movements (like sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing). But eating on the street -- even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat -- displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one's food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior."

Kass, Leon: The Hungry Soul at 148-149. (University of Chicago Press, 1994, 1999)

I could be wrong, of course....

(Readers whose appetites were whetted by the above and hunger for more might enjoy my previous post, "Quotations from Chairman Kass.")

UPDATE: Yup, beer is definitely Satanic. Read this tidbit (via Glenn Reynolds):

The Babylonians made sixteen kinds of beer, using everything from white and black barley to wheat and honey. Beer was extolled in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, where the varieties listed include "beer of truth" and "beer of eternity."

UPDATE (3-25-04): I just learned that this post was linked by Farhad Manjoo in a very scholarly analysis at Salon.com. Many thanks to Mr. Manjoo, and a warm welcome to all visitors from Salon.com.

Readers might also enjoy this hysterically funny post by Elizabeth Riba, documenting the little-reported fact that according to Miss Manners, Dr. Kass is wrong about ice cream etiquette!

Those with an interest in an offbeat, occultish look at Dr. Kass can read about his planets here and here.

Finally, I have more archival posts about Dr. Kass here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Once again, welcome Salon readers!