Do Not Touch: Forbidden Foods

The Chinese so famously eschew food taboos, it’s said they eat anything that flies but a kite, anything with four legs but a table. Yet everybody else has one thing or another they flatly refuse to eat. Islam says: "A man can not be truly pious until he has come to be pious in a way he approaches the dining room... .” The disparity in what to eat or not has made it difficult to understand why what’s sacred to one religion is vile to another. Determined to tackle the mystery, anthropologist Marvin Harris studied the varying taboos and detected a universal logic that seems to unite them. The ancients, it seems, were as environmentally and economically conscious as we are. Out of respect for the survival of the world and its humans, what they found neither efficient, effective nor sustainable, they codified as “thou shalt not eat.”

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Fish

“Speak not to me with a mouth that eats fish.” —Somali nomad taunt

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