Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and CultureWhy are human food habits so diverse? Why do Americans recoil at the thought of dog meat? Jews and Moslems, pork? Hindus, beef? Why do Asians abhor milk? In Good to Eat, best-selling author Marvin Harris leads readers on an informative detective adventure to solve the worlds major food puzzles. He explains the diversity of the worlds gastronomic customs, demonstrating that what appear at first glance to be irrational food tastes turn out really to have been shaped by practical, economic, or political necessity. In addition, his smart and spirited treatment sheds wisdom on such topics as why there has been an explosion in fast food, why history indicates that its bad to eat people but good to kill them, and why children universally reject spinach. Good to Eat is more than an intellectual adventure in food for thought. It is a highly readable, scientifically accurate, and fascinating work that demystifies the causes of myriad human cultural differences. |
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... fields and highways and city streets—a situation which, if true, one might again reasonably attribute to the ban on slaughter and the aversion to beef. India also has 700 million people. Since no one denies that much of this huge human ...
... must have resonated with the aspirations of the poorer farmers. At a time when ordinary people were starving and in need of oxen to plow their fields, the Brahmans went on killing cattle and getting fat from eating them. 54.
... field almost ten times faster than a pair of oxen, the initial investment in the tractor is over twenty times greater than the investment in the animals. Unless the tractor is used for more than nine hundred hours per year, the hourly ...
... fields and destroy someone else's crops, the loss—if it can be called that from an impoverished animal owner's viewpoint—must be weighed against the advantages of the more socially responsible forms of scavenging. Despite the ...
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Contents
13 | |
19 | |
47 | |
The Abominable Pig
| 67 |
Hippophagy
| 88 |
Holy Beef USA
| 109 |
Lactophiles and Lactophobes Milk Lovers and Milk Haters
| 130 |
Small Things
| 154 |
Dogs Cats Dingoes and Other Pets
| 175 |
People Eating
| 199 |
Better to Eat
| 235 |
References | 249 |
Bibliography | 258 |
Index | 275 |