The Banal Hegemony of Garlic (o, Anticipando Lautsi)

Every so often, I spend the whole day cooking.  Generally it's Italian cuisine, though occasionally I will venture off as far as the hinterlands of France.  Yesterday was a day in the kitchen: a Bolognese sauce, a lobster bisque, and the beginnings (to be finished today) of a wild forest mushroom risotto -- oysters, morels, and porcini mushrooms.  And all of this with appropriate libationary accompaniments. 

Whenever I have days like this, my thoughts turn routinely and as a matter of natural and quite obvious course to religion.  Lately I've been waiting for the decision of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in Lautsi v. Italy -- the case dealing with the permissibility of displaying the crucifix in Italian public schools.  The decision of the full chamber is, according to the ECtHR's web page, coming this Friday the 18th.  (Here is a translation of the original decision from the French by "The Humanist Federation"). 

I've been anticipating it, but not with much optimism that the Grand Chamber will do anything to rectify the inadequate opinion that it had issued earlier.  And so, in my high state of readiness, I thought I'd share the best criticism I have read of the earlier opinion: this elegant rumination from last June by Professor Joseph Weiler emphasizing the uniqueness of the histories and cultures of each individual Western European nation, and the need for the ECtHR to be sensitive to those special and specific qualities in discussing these issues.  

I may have mentioned before at MOJ that food metaphors are frequently illuminating, and this affair is no exception.  Consider the hegemony of garlic.  Insisting on the domination of "laique," or secular, neutrality to the exclusion of all other values is like insisting on the domination of garlic over all other tastes in one's cuisine.  Of course, garlic's crude appeal will draw in and placate the broadest range of palates; just about everybody has a taste for the potently thick-booted allure of garlic, and, oh great, it's healthy too!  That is why restaurants that don't know what they're doing frequently mask their ineptitude by loading up on the garlic -- it disguises lack of depth and the complications of culinary tradition with an easily appealing, eminently recognizable little taste.  

But the trouble with garlic is that it overpowers everything with which it comes into contact.  Garlic is the suffocating equalizer of the kitchen.  And demanding that garlic be prominent in every dish, no matter the provenance or the particular, local flavor, will kill the dish -- it will destroy that which is distinctive, and uniquely pleasurable, about it.  Whatever it is that renders Italian and French cooking the grandes dames of gustatory delight (as they are) is choked off and flattened out by the common, acrid banality of garlic.   

More and related thoughts, Lucullian and otherwise, on the 18th.