In pre-Roman times, Spitalfields was a graveyard. Since then, it has held a hospital; a fair ground; and an artillary yard. Since 1682, the area has been primarily known for its market, which has steadily grown over the centuries. As we discover when we arrive there this morning, Spitalfields Market is now a large, glass-enclosed space the size of a large city block, with stalls selling handicrafts, antiques, and food.?
Lauren and I split up, since she wants to look at the jewelry and clothes, and I want to inspect the Japanese import booth for instructions written in humorously inept English. I don’t find any, but as I wander, another stall catches my eye. It’s displaying a bumpersticker with the simple, straightforward message, “Cooked Food Is Poison.” I make a beeline for it, trying to look like the kind of person who would derive an entirely un-ironic pleasure out of such a sticker.
There is a woman squatting next to the booth with what looks like some sort of giant, hollowed-out gourd clutched between her legs, but I am not quite sure whether she is part of the booth or, metaphorically as well as literally, a squatter. I therefore avoid eye contact with her and focus on the contents of the stall. Unfortunately, raw food advocates don’t seem to focus on the more pleasant raw foods, such as grapes or cookie dough. Instead, they are selling items like “un-cookies,” which look very much like raw hamburgers would look if cows had the same color and texture as carrots.
But I have not come to this booth for the food; I have come for the crackpot science, and it does not disappoint. First, I pick up a brochure on the health benefits of drinking urine. For example, “Even though urine contains toxins, it is not harmful to the body it comes from regardless of its condition. Whatever was in the blood cannot be that toxic, or the person would have been dead.” Well, that’s certainly good enough for me! Nothing says Good Eatin’ like a fluid that is not toxic enough to kill the person it came from. Plus, urine is “anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, anti-viral, anti-cancer, anti-convulsive, anti-spasmodic, and anti-tuberculin, among other things.”
I am intrigued by the question of what those other things could possibly be, but the urine-drinking pamphlet is not the main course in my pseudoscience buffet. It is, if you will, a mere palate cleanser. No, the centerpiece of the Cooked Food Is Poison booth is an article explaining the dangers of cooking your food before eating it. As the article observes, it has long been recognized that cancer patients benefit from a raw food diet, but applying heat to foods destroys enzymes and other miraculous substances. (Putting two and two together, I realize that, if you want to cure cancer, you must not heat your urine before drinking it.)
There is also a pamphlet from Hempseed Organics, printed on tree-free hemp paper, offering recipes for hemp butter and hemp marzipan, and concluding “It is taught that Buddha subsisted on one hempseed a day during a six year aesthetic period, prior to revealing the four noble truths and the eigth-fold path to enlightenment.” (The pamphlet also notes, “Hempseed contain no THC or other psychoactive chemicals,” lest you somehow conclude that a group of urine-drinking, cooked-food-avoiding hemp chefs is in anyway associated with the counter-culture.)
So engrossed am I in my reading that I fail to notice I have moved closer to the Squatting Gourd Woman. She interrupts my reverie by asking, “Have you tried some?”
I look down, and am relieved to see that she is merely offering me a spoonful of the pulpy inside of the gourd. “It’s durian fruit,” she says. Durian fruit looks like the inside of the spittoon in a compulsive paper-chewer’s home, but free food is free food, and I accept the spoonful. It tastes pleasantly sweet, and I enjoy the taste for several seconds, until it is replaced by one of the most unpleasant aftertastes I have ever aftertasted. Suffice it to say that I now understand why drinking your own urine seems like a viable alternative.
Hoping that eating lunch will help me lose the taste, I track down Lauren. It turns out that, while I’ve focused like a laser on the one booth that will let me learn the wonders of uncooked urine, Lauren has been browsing the many stalls of fine handicrafts looking for gifts for friends and family members. What an odd person I’ve married.