Listerine

February 10 (1910) is the anniversary of the death of Sir Joseph Lister, unwitting namesake of mouthwash. Rinse, gargle, and celebrate.

n. an antiseptic solution
–Oxford English Dictionary

Single women the world over rightfully curse the men who popularized the phrase “often a bridesmaid but never a bride,” many not realizing that it was part of a wildly successful advertising campaign for Listerine in the 1920s that warned young ladies that their bad breath might leave them old maids before their “tragic” thirtieth birthdays. Had he still been living, no one would have been cursing louder than eminent British surgeon Baron Joseph Lister who spent the last years of his life desperately trying to disassociate himself from a product that he neither invented nor endorsed.

Hospital wards in the mid-nineteenth century were stinking, seeping cesspools of infection. Windows were generally closed (limiting the influx of fresh air), surgeons did not wash their instruments or their hands prior to procedures, and wounds were rarely, if ever, flushed clean, providing literal breeding grounds for deadly microorganisms. When Joseph Lister was a young surgeon in the Male Accident Ward of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary in the 1860s, more than half of his amputation patients died from sepsis, a bacterial wound infection.

Lister became fascinated with Louis Pasteur’s emerging theories on rot and fermentation and was convinced that his findings could be applied to medicine. At the time, Britain was more concerned with the cleanliness of its sewers than its hospitals, and carbolic acid had been used for years to improve the odor of its municipal muck. In 1865, Lister decided that what was good enough for British sewage was good enough for British patients, and he began swabbing his surgical tools and his wounds with carbolic acid. His mortality rate instantly dropped by 35 percent. He formalized his sterile operating procedures in 1867 (including forcing surgeons to wear clean gloves and wash their hands before and after surgeries), and they were quickly adopted worldwide.

Lister was made a baron in 1883 and enjoyed an extraordinarily successful medical career and respectable retirement until his death at the age of eighty-four in 1912. For his pioneering efforts, he became the namesake of the Royal Society’s prestigious Lister Medal and England’s Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine. He was commemorated on two postal stamps in 1965 and has public monuments in both London and Glasgow. Unfortunately, it is the now-ubiquitous Listerine that provides him with the most name recognition today.

In 1879, twelve years after Lister’s groundbreaking discoveries, Dr. Joseph Lawrence and Jordan Wheat Lambert used Lister’s research to formulate a surgical antiseptic that was eventually recommended for dentists in 1895. Over the shy and unassuming surgeon’s objections, the Lambert Pharmacal company marketed the product as Listerine and were selling it as the first over-the-counter mouthwash by 1914. According to company legend, once the general manager first heard that there was a medical term for bad breath (halitosis), his ad men embarked on a spectacular 1920s campaign castigating the social disgrace of foul mouth odor and skyrocketing Lambert Pharmacal’s profits into the millions.

Thankfully, for his sake, Lister did not live to witness the decades of absurd and misleading Listerine marketing ploys that hawked his namesake as everything from a dandruff suppressant, deodorant, and sore throat remedy to gonorrhea treatment, aftershave, and floor cleaner. 

Salisbury steak

January 12 is the birthday (1823) of the titan of TV dinners—Dr. James Salisbury. Bon appétit.

n. Hamburg steak

—Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition

Is it more regrettable that Dr. Salisbury’s medical legacy is his chopped beefsteak namesake or that his professional recommendation was to eat it three times a day?

James Henry Salisbury was born in New York state in 1823 and worked as a chemist before becoming a physician in 1850. Like Sylvester Graham before him (see graham cracker), Salisbury was convinced that personal diet was the cornerstone of good health, though their theories could not have been more different. Graham was a staunch vegetarian who believed that a carnivorous diet led to lustful urges, while Salisbury was convinced that a daily beef tripleheader could thwart pulmonary tuberculosis, asthma, anemia, and gout.

In addition to other battlefield horrors, Salisbury witnessed widespread diarrhea during his stint as a field doctor in the American Civil War. He eventually posited that a steady flow of coffee and ground beef was the best treatment. By 1888, he was the proponent of a full-fledged fad that called for two-thirds of one’s diet to be filled with meat and claimed that too many vegetables and starch produced poisons in the digestive system that led to heart disease and even mental illness. Salisbury further advised that the beef be well-done and accompanied by hot water before and after meals.

By the time of his death in 1905, the ground-beef patty Dr. Salisbury was prescribing was referred to in many parts as Hamburg steak, though historians (and business owners) often argue whether this refers to Hamburg, Germany, or Hamburg, New York. Regardless, the association with Germany was somewhat inescapable, and the advent of World War I and then World War II prompted some unusual patriotic revisionism. At the same time that sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage” and the German measles became “liberty measles,” the Hamburg steak officially became the Salisbury steak.

This was by no means the last time such nationalistic menu-tweaking took place. Following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, restaurants in Greece began serving “Ellinikos kafes” (Greek coffee) instead of “Turkikos kafes” (Turkish coffee). In 2003, following French opposition to the United States invasion of Iraq, the U.S. House of Representatives changed the menus in its cafeterias to serve “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” instead of their French counterparts. Meanwhile, the producers of French’s mustard issued a press release assuring a worried public that its family name should imply no lack of patriotism.

While the original names for hamburgers and sauerkraut have since largely returned to general usage, the Salisbury steak remains a jingoistic holdout. Today, Dr. Salisbury’s prescription—a minced beef patty, shaped like a steak, and typically served with thick gravy—is an all-American icon.

Typhoid Mary

November 11 (1938) is the anniversary of the death of "Typhoid Mary" Mallon.

n. one that is by force of circumstances a center from which something undesirable spreads

—Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition

When wheezing and sneezing employees show up for work instead of taking an allotted sick day, they are often called a Typhoid Mary—invoking the dead and virulent namesake of hash- and fever-slinging Mary Mallon.

Like many unintentional bacterial gifts, typhoid fever is spread through the intake of food or water contaminated with infected feces (see also Maginot Line). While not typically fatal, it nevertheless plagues its victims with fever, sweating, diarrhea, and furious anger at whoever did not wash up after using the bathroom. The height of its mortality rate in the United States was in the late nineteenth century, just around the time Mary Mallon immigrated to the United States from Ireland.

Mallon was born in 1869, sought her fortune in the New World in 1884, and was well established as a cook in New York City by the turn of the century. However, when members of one of the families who hired her unexpectedly contracted typhoid, they hired civil engineer and typhoid research George Soper to investigate. Soper soon discovered that Mallon had sped through seven jobs between 1900 and 1907, leaving a wake of twenty-two typhoid cases and at least one death. Though a complete stranger to her, Soper approached Mallon, suggested she might have typhoid, and requested stool, urine, and blood samples. The Irish cook refused, and the rest is history.

Tensions escalated. Mallon herself did not feel or appear sick and was convinced she was being unfairly targeted as a working-class Irish woman. Soper, meanwhile, returned to question Mallon again, this time with a doctor, followed eventually by a New York City health inspector. Mallon refused them all. She was finally arrested, found to be a carrier for typhoid, and placed in isolation for three years by the board of health. Though Mallon was eventually released with the agreement that she would no longer work as a cook, she soon discovered that work as a laundress or other house servant paid comparatively little, so she assumed a fake name and took a job cooking again in New York’s Sloane Hospital for Women. While there, Mallon passed along her special sauce to twenty-five more unwitting victims, one of whom died.

Mallon’s identity was eventually discovered, and she was arrested and quarantined again on North Brother Island. By this point, Mallon was known to have infected fifty-three people total (three of whom died) and was referred to publicly as “Typhoid Mary.” Sympathy for her cause had evaporated, and she would spend the rest of her life under quarantine, suffer a paralyzing stroke, and ultimately die six years later of pneumonia in 1938 at the age of sixty-nine.

It has since been theorized that Mallon might have contracted typhoid from her mother before she was born and simply never experienced any symptoms. Though she protested her innocence to the end, an autopsy indicated that Typhoid Mary was still harboring live bacteria in her gallbladder when she died.

Bon appétit.

Molotov cocktail

November 8 is the anniversary of the death of Vyacheslav Molotov (1890).

n. a makeshift incendiary device for throwing by hand, consisting of a bottle or other breakable container filled with flammable liquid and with a piece of cloth, etc., as a fuse

—Oxford English Dictionary

How will history remember perhaps the only man to have shaken hands with Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Churchill, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt? With a riot-rousing, tank-busting, flaming bottle of Finnish pride.

Just three months after Germany invaded Poland and sparked World War II, the Soviet Union attacked Finland in 1939 and began what would be called the Winter War. Struggling against woefully outnumbered but frustratingly plucky Finnish snipers and camouflaged ski troops, the Soviets began relying on the RRAB-3, a cluster bomb dispenser. At the time, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov insisted in radio broadcasts that Russia was dropping food, and not bombs, on the starving Finns—which led to the RRAB-3s being dubbed “Molotov’s bread basket.” The Finns had used incendiary devices developed during the Spanish Civil War three years earlier to combat the invading Soviet tanks and called them “Molotov cocktails” as “a drink to go with the food.”

Molotov’s name came to encompass both the flaming mixture of ethanol, tar, and gasoline and the bottle that delivered it. The devices proved to be so successful that nearly a half million were mass-produced (and bundled with matches) during the Winter War. Early prototypes with burning rags in the mouth of the bottle were replaced by storm matches attached to the bottle and then to ones that ignited on impact.

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skriabin was born the son of a shop clerk in 1890. Before he turned twenty he had become a Bolshevik and decided he might bolster his political career by changing his name to Molotov from the Russian word for hammer, molot. Though many of his rivals considered him simply a mindless bureaucrat, he eventually became the protégé of Joseph Stalin. He was reviled by some and feared by many. Leon Trotsky famously called him “mediocrity personified,” while Winston Churchill considered him “a man of outstanding ability and cold-blooded ruthlessness.”

By the mid-1950s, Nikita Khruschev and other Communist leaders began denouncing Stalin’s legacy, and Molotov was first removed as Foreign Minister and then expelled from the Communist party altogether in 1961. He was eventually allowed to rejoin the Party in 1984, but died two years later at the age of ninety-six. The Soviet Union dissolved five years later.

Early in his career, the Soviet leader’s name was also attached to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Hitler and Stalin, a non-aggression treaty that lasted only two years before Hitler turned his conquering eyes from France to the Soviet Union. But this association is just a historical footnote. Molotov’s etymological infamy will forever reside with his “bread basket” and, especially, “cocktail” namesakes—somewhat ironically, as Molotov was actually a teetotaling vegetarian. 

graham cracker

September 11 is the anniversary (1851) of the death of vegetarian, minister, and vehement abstainer Sylvester Graham. Remember him with a flavorless biscuit, a glass of water, and a steamy session of hand holding.

graham cracker

n. a slightly sweet cracker made of whole wheat flour

—Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition

The innocuous brown bookends surrounding the toasted marshmallows and melted chocolate of a s’more are the namesake of one of the founders of the American vegetarian movement—Sylvester Graham. While many associate graham crackers with the dessert course of a summer campfire feast of hot dogs and hamburgers or they pour a hefty serving of milk over a breakfast bowl of Golden Grahams cereal, poor Reverend Graham is rolling over in his grave.

Graham was a nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister who was convinced that an austere diet and healthy living could help curb sexual urges—particularly “self-abuse,” as he called it—as well as alcoholism. Graham was born in 1794, the seventeenth of seventeen children, and became ordained as a minister in 1826 at the peak of a health food craze and temperance movement in the United States.

Though an early and ardent member of the Pennsylvania Temperance Society, Reverend Graham was, first and foremost, a crusader against lust—and he believed that bland foods were just the ticket to put out the forbidden fire. For Reverend Graham, unhealthy diets awoke excessive sexual desire, which led to disease. He once posited that ham and sausage “increase the concupiscent excitability and sensibility of the genital organs.”

The Graham Diet, as it was known, was comprehensive. Fresh fruits and vegetables were okay; meat and spices were not. Only very fresh milk, cheese, and eggs could be consumed, while butter was discouraged. Modern graham crackers, which would not be named as such until nearly thirty years after his death, would have horrified Reverend Graham with their refined, bleached white flour. His original versions—called Dr. Graham’s Honey Biskets—called for the use of a hard, unsifted, and coarsely ground whole wheat flour called “Graham flour,” which was introduced in 1829. The Graham Diet eventually worked its way even into the houses of higher learning. Oberlin College instituted such a strict version of it (abandoned in 1841) that many students opted to eat off campus, and a professor was terminated for bringing in contraband pepper to season his food.

To be sure, Graham was an early whistle-blower on some pretty reprehensible food industry practices. He opposed the increasingly popular bakery additives of the time, such as alum and chlorine, used to make bread bake faster and appear artificially whiter. Many consumers, particularly in urban areas, regarded “refined” bread (i.e., white bread) as a more pure product. Responding to this perception, unscrupulous dairies added chalk and even plaster of paris to their milk to make it whiter. Unfortunately, Graham’s rejection of meat and industrialized bread and dairy led to frequent riot threats from commercial bakers and butchers when his lectures were advertised.

But food was merely one part of a larger puritanical lifestyle. In addition to restrictions on eating, he advocated frequent bathing and hard mattresses and he opposed social drinking. Zealots attended his lectures in droves, and he was famously explicit in his descriptions of despicable behavior. Women allegedly fainted when he outlined the adverse effects of masturbation.

Grahamites, as his followers were called, stayed in “Graham Boarding Houses” in New York and Boston, where they abstained from alcohol, tobacco, meat, and sexy thoughts while reading his many writings—including Lectures to Young Men on Chastity. Among these followers were newspaperman Horace “Go West, Young Man” Greeley and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of cornflakes.

Reverend Graham was instrumental in founding the American Vegetarian Society in 1850, one year before his death.

Though Americans today enjoy a sweetened, less wholesome, and perhaps more lustful version of Reverend Graham’s tasty namesake, it is perhaps more fitting that we remember him as Ralph Waldo Emerson dubbed him—“the poet of bran and pumpkins.”

Tupperware

July 28 (1907) is the birthday of Earl Tupper. Burp.

Inventing Tupperware isn’t really an unfortunate way to be remembered, but Tupper’s rags-to-riches-to-escaping-to-an-island story is still pretty odd.

Tupper was born in 1907 and had a modest upbringing on a New Hampshire farm. Always a tinkerer, Tupper eventually secured a job with the Dupont Chemical Company in 1937 where he figured out how to take a nasty oil refinement waste product and turn it into a tough, flexible, and translucent material. He struck out a year later to form his own company and, in a scene straight out of It’s a Wonderful Life, secured World War II defense contracts to make the plastic parts for gas masks and signal lamps. These successes eventually led to the post-war development of household products with his patented burping “Tupper Seal” and, eventually, Tupperware.

It was his business partner, Brownie Wise, who came up with the idea for the Tupperware Home Parties that became wildly popular in the late 1940s and early 1950s. “If we build the people, we’ll build the business,” she famously said. Tupper fired her in 1958. 

Tupper then proceeded to divorce his wife, sell his company, abandon his citizenship, buy an island, and move to Costa Rica where he could live out his days without paying U.S. taxes. He died in 1983.

gimlet

July 23 (1888) is the birthday of American novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler whose 1954 novel The Long Goodbye brought gimlets into the limelight. But the full story of this citrus cocktail began more than 300 years earlier.

n. a cocktail, usually consisting of gin and lime juice
—Oxford English Dictionary

One widely held theory about the origin of this drink is that it was invented by Sir Thomas Gimlette of the British Royal Navy as a way to combat scurvy. [It should be noted that another competing theory on the origin of gimlet is that it comes from the name of the tool used to bore holes in the barrels of lime juice on nineteenth-century ships.]

If you ever find yourself traveling at sea for years at a time, it is a good idea to avoid developing scurvy. What with the tooth and nail loss, the depression and the skin spots, the bleeding membranes and sunken eyes, and the non-stop diarrhea and the dying, it is in your best interest to heal thyself. Hippocrates first described scurvy around 400 BC. The Crusaders died from it in the thirteenth century, as did the merchants, sailors, and other scallywags of history who spent more time aboard ships than perishable fruits and vegetables could survive. Scurvy is caused by a deficiency of vitamin C, whose chemical name (ascorbic acid) comes from the Latin name for scurvy—scorbutus.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, British doctors had pretty well figured out that it was the acid from citrus fruit that scurvy-ridden sailors were lacking. It also did not help that many undernourished seamen were fond of eating the fat that was scrubbed from ships’ copper pans, the chemical reaction of which prevented the absorption of vitamins. James Cook subsequently outlawed this practice during his circumnavigation of the globe.

As early as 1614, the Surgeon General of the East India Company recommended fresh food as a cure—particularly oranges, lemons, and limes—and Scottish surgeon James Lind offered formal proof that it worked in 1747. But it would take the Merchant Shipping Act of 1867 to require all ships of the British military and merchant fleet to provide sailors with a regular dollop of lime juice—leading to the nickname “limey” for English immigrants in the early British colonies. What made this possible was a now-ubiquitous cocktail mixer. By the time the act was passed, Lauchlin Rose had patented a method for preserving citrus juice in a sugar syrup without alcohol—Rose’s Lime Juice. Unfortunately, it tasted like bilgewater.

All of which leads us to the beloved Dr. Thomas Gimlette, who is believed to have joined the Royal Navy in 1879. It took him eleven years, but Gimlette finally hit on a solution for encouraging sailors to drink their daily dose of lime juice—adding gin. The now infamous surgeon cum mixologist was subsequently knighted and eventually retired as the British Surgeon General in 1913.

The gimlet began to rise in popularity in the 1920s. It also developed an artistic cult following. Raymond Chandler allegedly revised portions of his 1953 novel The Long Goodbye to include mentions of the gimlet after he and his wife discovered it on a return trip from England aboard the RMS Mauretania. Chandler had his enigmatic private eye Philip Marlowe share a few with a war-scarred Terry Lenox in a darkened bar:

“The bartender set the drink in front of me. With the lime juice it has a sort of pale greenish yellowish misty look. I tasted it. It was both sweet and sharp at the same time.”

Over the years, the gimlet has been created with varying amounts of lime juice, and today the gin is often replaced with vodka. Indeed, legendary cross-dresser and B-list movie director Ed Wood was so fond of a vodka gimlet that he spelled it backward to form his literary pseudonyms—Telmig Akdov and Akdov Telmig. But most limeys will insist (and Raymond Chandler would agree) that there’s only one proper way to mix a proper gimlet, as Terry Lenox explains to Philip Marlowe:

“A real Gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats Martinis hollow.” 

grog

Raise a glass of cheap swill to celebrate the memory of Edward "Old Grog" Vernon, who died on October 23, 1757.

n. a mixture of rum and water not sweetened; hence, any kind of alcoholic drink

—Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition

It is perhaps doubly insulting to the grand and venerable Admiral Edward Vernon that his nickname “Old Grog” should come from the material of the coat he wore (grogram) and that his military legacy should be the concoction of cheap and diluted spirits to sober up the seamen who loathed him.

Edward Vernon was born in 1684 in Westminster, England, and rose quickly through the ranks of the British Royal Navy, achieving the rank of captain by the age of twenty-two. In his other role as a Parliamentarian, he famously argued in favor of retaliation against Spain in the case of Robert Jenkins, a British mariner whose ear was cut off by a Spanish commander in 1731, leading to the—honestly—War of Jenkins’ Ear waged between Britain and Spain in 1739. Vernon was eventually promoted to Vice Admiral and was somewhat conspicuously detested by the majority of the sailors who served under him—the notable exception of whom was George Washington’s half-brother, Lawrence, who had served under the admiral in 1741 and decided to name the family estate Mount Vernon after his commander.

When strutting gallantly across the sea-swept decks, Vernon’s preferred outerwear was grogram, a coarse and all-weather weave of silk, wool, and mohair often stiffened with gum. John Ciardi* relates that Vernon further waterproofed his cloak with pitch and beeswax, which rendered it so stiff in the cold that both the grogram and the salty admiral had to be warmed by a stove to soften them—leading to the nickname of Old Grog.

Drunkenness once ran rampant on British ships as a result of spoilable fresh water being replaced first by a daily ration of a gallon of beer, then brandy, and finally a half pint of rum. To curb the inevitable alcohol-induced brawling aboard his vessels in 1740, Old Grog declared that rum rations would henceforth be cut with water (and eventually lemon juice to improve the stagnant flavor of the water). In howling opposition, the outraged sailors quickly dubbed the unintoxicating dilution grog, though the Royal Navy made the practice part of its official regulations in 1756 and Britain’s Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) asserted that Vernon’s declaration was “perhaps the greatest improvement to discipline and efficiency ever produced by one stroke of the pen.”

What Vernon’s grumbling sailors did not realize at the time was that the occasional addition of citrus juice for flavor was giving them the extra vitamin C they needed to avoid scurvy, and, seven years later, James Lind formally proved the efficacy of citrus to curb the disease. The British Royal Navy eventually mandated a daily dose of what would become Rose’s Lime Juice, the bitter flavor of which was eventually improved with the addition of gin (see gimlet).

Old Grog himself died in 1757, but his name lives on in word and song.

Well it’s all for me grog
Me jolly jolly grog.
It’s all for me beer and tobacco.
Well I spent all me tin with the ladies drinkin’ gin           
Far across the Western ocean I must wander.

*Good Words to You, Harper and Row, 1982.

Fanny Adams

Normally we celebrate birthdays here on the site, but the birth date of poor little Fanny Adams is unknown. What is unfortunately known is the the day she died—August 24, 1867.

n. tinned meat

n. stew

n. Freq. prec. by sweet: nothing at all

­—Oxford English Dictionary

Perhaps no one has been treated more unfairly both in her lifetime and by posterity than young Fanny Adams who endured not only grotesque murder at the hands of a madman but also an eternity of insult added to injury at the hands of the British Navy. (As an unrelated etymological aside, it would be nearly twenty years after her death before the Brits began coincidentally using the lowercased form of her first name to describe a woman’s front-side unmentionables and nearly seventy years before Americans began using it to describe a woman’s back side. But that that does not mean that poor Fanny did not suffer at the hands of the English language.)

Fanny Adams was born in 1859 in Hampshire, England. When the child was only eight years old, she was brutally murdered and dismembered by Frederick Baker, a twenty-nine-year-old clerk. Parts of her body were flung all over a hops field, and it apparently took days to piece her back together. Baker protested his innocence, but the blood on his clothes, the two blood-stained knives, and the entry in his diary that said “24th August, Saturday — killed a young girl. It was fine and hot” convinced a jury otherwise. Despite making a plea for insanity, he was publicly hanged in Winchester on Christmas Eve, 1867.

Unfortunately, the indignities for poor Fanny continued two years after her death when the Royal Navy began issuing new rations of unappetizing tinned mutton. Joking that the victuals must be the chopped remains of Fanny Adams, the catchy name stuck and came to be used for all mystery meat. In time, the large tins that delivered the meat came to be called “Fannys,” as did the mess kits and cooking pots used to prepare it. Believe it or not, it gets worse. The final transformation for dear Miss Adams began when sailors further adapted her name to mean “nothing at all” or the more emphatic “f*** all.” It is not uncommon to hear “Sweet Fanny Adams” or, more often, the shortened “sweet F.A.” cursed aboard a British vessel. Though it is principally a British phrase, it has recently made its way across the pond into American urban slang in its obscene capacity.

The more sympathetic citizens of Fanny Adams’s community all pitched in on subscription to give her a proper headstone. It reads, in part, “Fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both body and soul in hell.” There are some in the Royal Navy as yet unsatisfied with merely invoking Fanny’s name for their rustic rations who also refer to steak and kidney pudding as “baby’s head.” One can only assume that a special circle of hell awaits them.

epicure

Historians believe that Epicurus, namesake of the word epicure, was born some time in February of 341 BC.

n. one who gives himself up to sensual pleasure, esp. to eating; a glutton, sybarite

n. one who cultivates a refined taste for the pleasures of the table; one who is choice and dainty in eating and drinking

—Oxford English Dictionary

The Greek philosopher Epicurus would likely be horrified by the dinner-party dilettantes who invoke his name as a coat of arms for their hedonistic pursuits, and he certainly would not be swapping recipes with them at Epicurious.com. The unfortunate legacy of this peaceful thinker is a misunderstanding that has overshadowed his original beliefs for more than two thousand years.

Epicurus was born in 341 BC at the tail end of the golden age of philosophy. Plato died seven years before he was born and Aristotle died nineteen years after. Contrary to the modern gastronome perception, Epicurus was a model of moderation and self-control. The very inscription above the gate to his garden warned visitors that they might expect only bread and water. The philosopher took little pleasure in eating or drinking or any other physical pursuit (including sex) and taught that comfort can best be achieved through simple existence free of family and political life.

Epicurus founded the “Garden School” in Athens, where students ate his bread, drank his water, and shared his noble thoughts for more than two hundred years. He posted another sign at the entrance to his garden (next to his culinary warning about prison victuals) welcoming, “Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.” This concept of hedonism has always been a bit of a sticky wicket, and part of the confusion of the epic of Epicurus lies in his notion of pleasure. He certainly argued that pleasure provided the happiness of life—but he had no use for sensuality. Unfortunately, over time, some of his students did. Many began buttering their daily bread and some later toasted it into croutons on beds of arugula. Epicurus’s serene and secular individualism became bastardized into wantonness and debauchery. It is only in recent memory that epicures are even considered discerning connoisseurs—for years they were merely self-gratifying slobs.

For centuries after his death, some of Epicurus’s followers were equated with another gluttonous gathering of ancient Greeks—the Sybarites. Representing their own notorious namesake in the modern form of sybarite (notoriously luxurious), their legacy is a key descriptor in the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of epicure. Predating Epicurus by a few hundred years, the inhabitants of the Greek colony of Sybaris in southern Italy were extraordinarily wealthy and self-indulgent. In a Grecian version of the princess and the pea, legend has it that a Sybarite was once unable to sleep because of a single rose petal under his body.

 
As for Epicurus, he suffered from kidney stones into his seventies. Given this diagnosis, today’s holistic foodies would have approved of his love of water but probably would have warned him away from salty snacks. Calm and cheerful to the end, gentle Epicurus died in 270 BC.