5.10-5A Food and Cultural Diversity

The late anthropologist Marvin Harris hypothesized that cultural dietary preferences frequently have an adaptive significance. According to Harris, despite the increasing costs associated with pig raising, people were still tempted to raise them for nutritional reasons. He hypothesized that the pig taboo was established to inhibit this practice through religious authorities and texts that redefined the pig as an unclean animal. Neighbors of the ancient Israelites, such as the Egyptians, began to share the abhorrence of the pig. The pig taboo was later incorporated into the Islamic religious text, the Qur’an, so that today both Muslims and Jews are forbidden to eat pork. Thus, according to Harris’s hypothesis, in the hot, dry regions of the world where pigs are poorly adapted and extremely costly to raise, the meat of the pig came to be forbidden. He emphasized the practical considerations of pig raising, including the fact that they are hard to herd and are not grazing animals like goats, sheep, or cattle. In contrast, in the cooler, wetter areas of the world that are more appropriate for pig raising, such as China and New Guinea, pig taboos are unknown, and pigs are the prized foods in these preferences of Jews and Christians.

Anthropologists such as Harris and others have been studying dietary diversity, such as why some people prohibit the eating of beef, whereas other people have adopted it as an integral aspect of their diet. Food preferences illustrate how humans the world over have universal needs for protein, carbohydrates, minerals, and vitamins but obtain these nutrients in different ways, depending upon the dietary preferences established within their culture. Anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Christine DuBois have summarized how other anthropologists have studied food and eating habits around the world and how these developments are associated with ecological conditions, technological requirements, biological factors, but also with patterns of identity, gender, class differences, and ritual and religious beliefs.

Anthropologists have continued to explore these numerous dimensions of food and eating habits in many different societies. For example, Daniel Fessler and C. D. Naverette looked at a broad cross-cultural sample of food taboos. They found that food taboos are overwhelmingly associated with meat and animal products compared with fruits or vegetables. Animal foods are viewed as much more dangerous than fruits and vegetables with respect to disease or death. The high cost of trial-anderror learning about which animal foods would be harmful would be counterproductive in any cultural tradition; thus, food taboos associated with animals tend to become more pervasive than prohibitions against fruits or vegetables. Research on the cultural aspects of food is an important arena for contemporary anthropological research.