Jay Rayner - The Ten (Food) Commandments

Jay Rayner is a journalist, writer,broadcaster and musician, with a pronounced love of pig and a fine collection offlowery shirts. He has been the restaurant critic for the Observer for overfifteen years, presents the culinary panel show The Kitchen Cabinet for BBCRadio 4 and is a regular on both The One Show and Masterchef. Heperforms live all over the country, both with his jazz quartet and in one-man shows.A new live show based on The Ten (Food) Commandments will be touringBritain throughout 2016 and 2017. He lives in south London with his wife and twosons. This is his ninth book.

For my sister, Amanda, who hadto budge up at the table when I arrived.

The prophet Moses was many things: rebelleader, font of morality, poster boy for dodgy orienteering. On the tricky matter ofyour dinner he was less helpful, at least if the Ten Commandments are anything to goby. If we assume they really were dictated by God and not something Mosescooked up when he was alone on the mountain top after having stomped off in a huff,the first four reveal the Maker to be a touch self-absorbed. Its allYou shall have no other gods before me and You shall not misusethe name of the Lord your God. Really! Some people!

Thats followed by boilerplatestuff prohibiting murder, theft and lying, before you get to the only one which inany way pertains to ingredients: the instruction not to covet thy neighboursoxen. Always tricky: there are some damn attractive oxen out there.

This is the great failing of theoriginal Ten Commandments. They really dont offer those of us located in thetwenty-first century much in the way of guidance when it comes to thinking about ourrelationship with our food. And Lord knows we need it.

Rabbinical scholars will point out thatthose original Ten Commandments were actually only the headlines, rather than thefull text. This is true, in as much as anything in the Bible is true. According tothe great rabbis, Moses was not given just ten rules on the mountain top. He wasgiven 613, which would have presented a serious challenge to the masons charged withcarving them into tablets of stone, let alone to Moses, who would then have had tocarry them down off the summit. No wonder he decided to stick with bullet points andleave the fine print in his back pocket.

An examination ofthose 613 as listed by the twelfth-century scholar Maimonides reveals them to becurious and, in places, eccentric. Some of them the ones about making sureto lend to the poor, or the imperative for judges to be honest are about theconstruction of civil society. Others read like building regulations: 494.You must make a guard rail around a flat roof. Thats just basic healthand safety. And then there are those that appear to be predicting the rise of www.pornhub.com and are designed to prohibit a few of the more recondite categories: 146. You must not have sexual relations with a woman and her daughter; 151. You must not have sexual relations with your fathers brothers wife. Thank God my dad was an only child or I might have found the latter seriously challenging.

Elsewhere, however, these 613 doactually include an awful lot on how and what to eat. Numbers 176 to 208 are allabout food choices. For example, number 192 is the instruction not to eat blood, thecommandment which underlies the koshering of meat, by the removal of all plasma. Itis also therefore the commandment which has made centuries of bar mitzvah dinners anordeal by dry rubber chicken. Many of the rest seem at best odd and at worst proofthat the Jewish God was just the pickiest of eaters. Number 185 is an instructionnot to eat non-kosher maggots, which presumably means its okay to eat thekosher ones. Number 194 declares that we must not eat the sinew of thethigh. Really? But thats my favourite bit.

As a diehard atheist, its allproof to me that He simply doesnt exist. The French philosopher Descartesargued that God is perfect, the concept of perfection including existence, ergo Godmust exist. For Descartes, philosophy was a fairground ride that just went round andround.

But if He is genuinely perfect He wouldalso have to be the perfect dinner guest, rather than the nightmarish faddy eaterthe 613 commandments reveal Him to be. God would be all No crab for me,please and You know FULL WELL I dont do cheeseburgers. The God of the commandments, 613 or otherwise, would notbe the perfect dinner guest.

Certainly none of this provides theguidance people need when it comes to making modern food choices. Both the headlineTen and the remaining 603 commandments were devised at a time when streetfood meant discarded offcuts found in the gutter by the destitute; at a timewhen the word dirty was reserved for things like a chap having sexualrelations with a woman and her daughter, rather than for a hamburger with seven toomany toppings; when people still bought ingredients rather thansourced them. It was all so much simpler then. After all, the vastmajority of decisions around food in Moses day were to do with basicnourishment, trying not to poison yourself and avoiding upsetting a vengefulgod.

In these, the early years of thetwenty-first century, how and what we eat is so very much more important than any ofthat. Forget upsetting a vengeful god. Theres worrying about what yourfriends would think if you tried to eat a hot dog with a knife and fork.Theres the complex business of knowing whether the global food multinationalsare trying to turn a quick buck by killing you one sugar-infested meal at a time.And theres the dismal, soul-destroying experience of sitting in front of thefridge just before you pack it with the new weekly shop, and wondering whether theamount of things that you didnt eat last week and are now wasted mark you outas an EVIL PERSON. (Ill keep it brief: they do. Sorry.)

What does all this tell us? It tells usthat we need a new set of hand-tooled, subject-specific food commandments,custom-engineered for the modern food-obsessed age.

Which in turn means we need our very ownculinary Moses; someone with the scholarship, dignity, insight and teeth to stand injudgement on everyone else.

I know just the man.

Oh, come on. Who else could it be?

I have a beardflecked with grey. I have shaggy hair and, though I say it myself, I look super-hotin flowing robes. (They rather flatter the more generous figure.) And yes, I reallydo have all my own teeth. I wouldnt mind having someone elses teeth,but Ill settle for mine. Theyve seen me this far.

So come with me as I lay down the law;as I deal once and for all with the question of whether it really is ever okay tocovet thy neighbours oxen (it is), how important it is to eat with your hands(very important indeed), and whether you should cut off the fat (youshouldnt).

I will give you guidance on worshippingleftovers and why you should not mistake food for pharmaceuticals which can cure youof all known diseases, especially cancer. (A quick heads-up: there is not a singlefoodstuff the eating of which will protect you from cancer. Not even a little bit.)I will insist that thou shalt cook while also not running from the stinkiest offoods, even if they smell of death. The best foods in life smell lightly ofdeath.