Food - Bee Wilson recalls an eminent omnivore
Jeffrey Steingarten enjoyed a certain vogue last year as The Man Who Ate Everything. True to the title of his book, the American food writer Steingarten described his trials while overcoming an aversion to certain foodstuffs - including clams, lard, chutney, miso, dill, cranberries, kidneys, Indian desserts, Greek food and, above all, kimchi, the national pickle of Korea, whose main component is fermented cabbage - and became a true omnivore. A few months ago, I saw Steingarten at a food conference, and can confirm that he eats a lot. I witnessed him piling his plate with assorted rare sheep's cheeses. He was even unfazed by carabao (buffalo milk) candies. But is he really the man who ate everything? At heart, Steingarten is a picky New Yorker who worries about cholesterol. He shies away from English food. He diets. Omnivorous? I don't think so.
The real man who ate everything was not an American, but an English clergyman-scientist of the last century. William Buckland (1784-1856), Canon of Christ Church Oxford, was perhaps the most tiresomely ostentatious omnivore who ever lived. He boasted that he had eaten his way through the whole animal creation, from mouse to bison. No sentimentality held him back as he devoured slices of crocodile, hedgehogs, puppies and snails. He even weighed his own newborn son in kitchen scales against a leg of mutton, though he abstained from the Swiftian conclusion.
Buckland's diet appears at first to have been a silly distraction from his real work as the first Professor of Geology (he was author of the ground-breaking Reliquiae Diluvianiae, 1823). But Buckland saw his insect-munching as the application of scientific experiment to his own life. His household was a chaos of fossils on the sideboard and snakes slithering round the drawing room. His laboratory was his own stomach. Buckland could state quite categorically that mole was the nastiest meat of all (although he later changed his mind to blue bottle). Hapless friends were also guinea pigs.
One guest wrote of the toughness of ostrich meat at Buckland's table. Another was unimpressed by being given crocodile for breakfast. John Ruskin, more sympathetic than some to Buckland's eccentricity, wrote: "I have always regretted a day of unlucky engagement on which I missed a delicate toast of mice." Implausibly, Buckland claimed on one occasion to have tasted a piece of the embalmed heart of Louis XIV, which was bought by his friend Lord Harcourt from a scavenger in Paris during the revolution: "I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before" was his uninspired comment.
His son, Frank Buckland, followed in William's footsteps, both as a popular scientist and as an omnivore, serving up elephant and rhino, kangaroo and Chinese sea slugs to bemused dinner parties. Noel Annan devotes a chapter to them both in The Dons (HarperCollins, £17.99). Once, when the Bucklands were visiting an Italian cathedral together, they came upon a stain on the flagstones, supposed to be martyr's blood. Buckland senior dropped to his knees and licked the spot. "I can tell you what it is: it's bat's urine," he announced.
The Buckland society, an elite dining club, still meets to celebrate the omnivorous appetites of this father and son, by consuming strange and exotic meats. But a real omnivore doesn't need kangaroo and peacock to show off. Buckland junior could make a performance even out of an everyday fowl. A colleague wrote of the "pleasant sight" of watching Buckland eat chicken "as he performed a Post Prandium examination of the head - and then . . . undeterred by foolish prejudices, he devoured the brain". I'd like to see Steingarten do that; or perhaps, on reflection, I'd rather not.
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