Forbidden foods ...and with good reason

When you can't have it, you want it. It's simple human psychology, but generation in, generation out, governments fail to understand this and try to restrict access to certain goods on the grounds they're harmful, addictive, immoral or demotivating. Then they react with shock when their citizens act like naughty children, breaking the law to get at what they've been deemed too immature to handle. The situation is as absurd as it is wasteful: punishing and incarcerating people for their appetites and excesses costs governments billions of pounds a year.

After a descent into opiate addiction in my early twenties, I quit smoking, drinking and doing drugs for a decade. However, I decided to end my period of self-imposed abstinence two years ago, in order to research The Devil's Picnic: A Tour of Everything the Governments of the World Don't Want You to Try. In my quest for the forbidden - including coca leaves and Swiss absinthe, Cuban cigars and Norwegian moonshine - I visited seven countries on four different continents and encountered everything from urbane indifference to xenophobic hysteria.

Everywhere I went I saw confirmation of a lesson humanity should have learnt in 17th-century Constantinople (where the sultans tried, and failed, to ban coffee); Enlightenment London (where Parliament, overstocked with brewers, strove to ban imported gin); and jazz-age Chicago (where forbidding alcohol corrupted city hall and empowered gangster such as Al Capone): ban something, and it only becomes stronger, costlier and more coveted than ever before. I've returned from the experience, my liver weakened but my eyes opened, with a renewed disdain for the simple-minded - and simply bad - idea we call prohibition.

What follows are some of the fruits that the various governments of the world, in all of their nanny-state wisdom, have deemed forbidden.

Norwegian moonshine

Outside the Islamic world, no country has a more restrictive alcohol-control regime than Norway. Wine and spirits can be purchased only in state-monopoly liquor stores, most of which are open till 6pm on weekdays, 3pm on Saturdays, and not at all on Sundays. A litre bottle of Smirnoff costs £34, fully 86 per cent of which is tax.

The results are entirely predictable: there is extensive cross-border smuggling from Sweden, people make their own booze at home and every drinking occasion turns into a binge. Most disturbingly, the enlightened inhabitants of the world's richest welfare state are reduced to drinking the Scandinavian equivalent of bathtub gin. I bought some hjemmebrent (literally "home-burnt") in a back alley from a massive neo-rockabilly moonshiner; it was noxious stuff, at least 95 per cent alcohol, more useful for lighting fires than actually drinking. But it turns out that I was lucky to escape with only a hangover; before my arrival, 20 Norwegians died after drinking cheap, methanol-laced spirits smuggled from Portugal.

Epoisses unpasteurised cheese

This so-called "killer cheese" is a product that is seen by many as further proof that the filthy French are as sloppy about food safety as they are about driving... except that this is complete nonsense. I visited the Burgundian village of Epoisses, and discovered that the cheese said to have provoked an outbreak of listeriosis which killed a young woman was in fact made from pasteurised milk.

The simple fact is, unpasteurised cheese (which people have been eating for millennia) is perfectly safe if it's well inspected, as it currently is, with almost ludicrous efficiency, in new EU-approved French factories. The danger actually comes from pasteurisation, which produces a false sense of security - as in the case of the 224,000 Americans who were severely sickened by pasteurised ice cream in 1994. Every year, 500 people in the US alone die due to listeria, commonly from hot dogs or luncheon meat. Poultry alone has provoked 355 separate foodborne illness outbreaks, but no illness outbreaks have been reported from hard-aged unpasteurised cheeses. And yet, when I try to bring cheese-lovers in New York some nice Epoisses, the FDA inspectors systematically chuck it into a garbage bin. While holding their noses.

It's important to note that this is an entirely North American obsession: in the UK, where one can enjoy such delights as Stinking Bishop, no such culinary prudery exists.

Marks & Spencer savoury crackers

Though you would have to consume several hundred packets of such crackers to induce the least narcotic effect, Singapore's official policy on drug-smuggling is zero-tolerance. Since 1991, 400 people have been executed there, most of them for drug trafficking, including an 18-year-old Hong Kong shop assistant who had been given a suitcase with a hidden compartment filled with heroin. (Stupid? Yes. Worth being hanged for? No.)

As it happened, though my own suitcase contained 27 sticks of illegal chewing gum and such corrupting pornography as Fanny Hill (still banned, along with the entire oeuvre of the Marquis de Sade), I made it through customs without a second glance. As my contacts in Singapore later told me, the government is more lenient with Western tourists, reserving the most Draconian punishments for its own citizens.

I took every opportunity I could find to eat my poppy-seed crackers in public places, even wolfing them down in front of police officers. I also crumbled them beside a ginger tree in some botanical gardens, so that Singaporeans could one day hope for a plantation of daydream-inducing poppy plants of their own.

'Criadillas', or animal testicles

During the mad-cow scare, bulls' testicles were briefly banned in Spain, but I figured if any place was up to resisting the ambient healthism of the EU, it would be lusty, devil-may-care Spain. To an extent, I was right: you can still find dodgy deep-fried lamb's intestines in Madrid's Lavapies neigbourhood. Cuts of dusty, mould-covered hams hang from the ceilings of bars whose floors are covered with greasy napkins.

But Spain, like Japan, may actually be in need of the curbing of some of its appetites: its vast and efficient deep-sea fishing fleets are sucking the oceans of the world dry. Sitting over a plate of angulas, or baby eels, which cost €51 (£35) a serving, I found myself admitting - much to my surprise - that in certain cases, some kind of oversight and control over human appetite is not only justified, but essential.

As for the testicles, I finally tracked them down in a little restaurant, the Casa Rodriguez, after several days of searching. They tasted garlicky, winey, and porcine. Which was appropriate, because I'd missed bullfighting season by several months and the testicles I was served - 20 in all - were actually pig's balls.

Castro's Cohiba cigars

In California, the US state that banned smoking in all public workplaces - including bars and restaurants - in 1998 and arguably kicked off the international stigmatisation of tobacco-lovers (bans are now in effect in several other US states, as well as in countries as varied as Ireland, India, Sweden, New Zealand and Italy), prohibition has entered its mature phase.

In the 1920s, it only took a few years of alcohol prohibition to create the speakeasy underground bar. And, in modern-day San Francisco, after eight years of tobacco prohibition, there are at least 60 smoke-easies, where proprietors take advantage of a loophole in the law that allows smoking in owner-operated bars (many bars have up to 14 owners, who all do double-duty as bartenders). It's entrepreneurial and ingenious: an example of real American know-how.

I happily lit up smuggled Cohiba Esplendidos - the cigar invented for Fidel Castro and now America's most demonised smoke - in owner-operated bars and smoke-easies, not only thumbing my nose at all the joggers with yoga-mats under their arms, but also making businessmen smoking second-rate Dominican tobacco green with envy.

Authentic Swiss absinthe

The absinthe fad has come and gone: virtually every punter in the UK has knocked back a shot of 140-proof ersatz, which contains virtually none of the essential herb, wormwood. However, there is a tiny valley in Switzerland where they've been making absinthe, with locally grown wormwood, for the last two centuries. In local bars and restaurants, you ask for "une petite bleue" and they hoist a bottle from behind the counter and pour you a shot - or four - so that Van Gogh's paintings suddenly start to make sense as naturalistic still-lifes.

In 2005, the Swiss House of Representatives lifted its ban on absinthe, which some people fear will put an end to the clandestine industry. I rather doubt it: the weak, legal commercial crap that will now be made will be no substitute for the real thing, with its hints of hyssop, Melissa, anise, and that evil presence that brings lucidity to one's intoxication: wormwood.

Mate de coca tea

As I predicted in my new book, Evo Morales, from a family of coca growers, has become the new president of Bolivia. In La Paz, coca leaves are chewed to fight altitude sickness, and visiting dignitaries, among them Princess Anne and the late Pope John Paul II, have accepted soothing cups of coca tea.

In its non-industrial form, coca is a relatively mild intoxicant whose health consequences are far less severe than alcohol and tobacco, which, according to the WHO, account for 8.1 per cent of the developed world's burden of disease. The need to temporarily escape reality is universal - drunkenness has been observed in birds, monkeys, elephants - and should not be demonised. Nor should the US spend $40bn (£22.5bn) a year on the War on Drugs, and billions of dollars a year spraying South America with toxic defoliants when it should be tackling a much bigger issue: the despair and anomie that leads people to become addicted to gambling, tobacco, alcohol and drugs. Such a plan, however, has one major drawback: it would require some thought, imagination and compassion.

Chocolate mousse

Estimates vary, but there are anything from a few hundred to over a thousand different chemicals found in chocolate, and enough of one, theobromine, in a standard-sized bar to send a dog into convulsions. Bayonne, France, where the streets are esculent with the odour of vanilla, cinnamon and roasting beans, is still a capital of chocolate-making, but it was once banned there: in the 18th-century, a guild of French chocolate-makers forbade the manufacture of chocolate by Sephardic Jews, who had brought the recipe to France in the first place.

The most powerful psychoactive substance in chocolate is caffeine, which has been banned by such luminaries as Charles II of England, Sultan Murat IV, and Frederick the Great. Caffeine is now the most widespread drug in the world - 80 per cent of newborns have detectable levels in their blood at birth. Up until the 19th century, opium was as common in medicine chests as aspirin is today. But caffeine, once banned for exciting seditious gatherings, poses little threat to the business world. It's opium that no longer conforms to our productivity-obsessed, reverie-adverse age.

Pentobarbital sodium

I did not partake of Pentobarbital sodium, the last sip taken by "suicide tourists" in Switzerland. However, I met the founder of Dignitas, a non-profit organisation that allows foreign visitors suffering from terminal diseases - so called suicide tourists - to kill themselves painlessly. Pentobarbital is a powerful barbiturate, and ingesting it induces death - peacefully, and without fail, in under 30 seconds. Helping a suffering person who has repeatedly expressed a desire to die can land a doctor, nurse, husband or wife in jail for 14 years in the UK.

My conclusion is not particularly original; John Stuart Mill said it best in 1859: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others... over himself, over his own mind, the individual is sovereign." s

'The Devil's Picnic: A Tour of Everything the Governments of the World Don't Want You to Try' by Taras Grescoe (Macmillan, £12.99) will be published on 17 February