The French word for liver is the Latin word for figs, because the Romans knew the recipe for a fatty liver 2,000 years before medicine got round to naming the disease. Iecur ficatum. Fig-stuffed liver. The Romans took a goose, pinned it in a pen so it could not walk, and pushed dried figs down its neck for weeks. The liver swelled to 6 times its size, went pale and buttery, and was carried to the table as the finest thing a kitchen could produce. Horace has a dinner party serving it. The Egyptians had been at the same trick on the walls of tombs at Saqqara 2,500 years earlier, funnelling grain into geese held by the neck. The adjective ate the noun. Ficatum stopped meaning figged and started meaning liver, and it is still there: foie, fegato, hígado, ficat. Every time a Frenchman says liver he is saying figs. Today the goose gets maize, because sugar and starch do the job faster than fruit. Nobody has ever fattened a liver on beef dripping. Nobody has tried, because every farmer since the pharaohs has known what makes a liver fat, and it is not fat. In 1980 a doctor at the Mayo Clinic described the same organ, in the same condition, in people who had never touched a drink. He called it non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. It now sits in about one in three adults on earth. The patients had done to themselves, over 20 years, in a chair, on breakfast cereal and fruit juice and a snack for the road, what a Roman farmer did to a goose in a month. And they were sent home with a leaflet telling them to cut the fat.

a common theme i’ve noticed reading ancient myths is the very act of naming something was an act of creation, a magic spell of sorts. lesson in that

New fav tik tok schizo guy dropped