Why have some of the best things to eat and drink been banned over the centuries? The diverse list of beverages includes coffee, chocolate, and absinthe, with savory items including poppy seed crackers, and unpasteurized raw cheese. In the book The Devil’s Picnic, Taras Grescoe makes a strong case that each of the foodstuffs he studies has been banned for reasons related to morality and not to health. The dozen chapters each deal with a different banned food, detailing the reasons why authorities believed that the general population should not be consuming them.
Coffee, for example, was banned by Kha’ir Beg, the chief of police in Mecca during the 1500s, because he believed the drink was an intoxicant. Fortunately, the Sultan of Cairo was a coffee aficionado and overturned the ban, allowing the continued spread of coffee from the Middle East into Europe where it soon became a dominant beverage. Chocolate suffered a similar fate during the 1600s in Mexico when a bishop, tired of seeing women drinking cups...
