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. |
From inside the book
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... nutritional needs by ingesting a very broad variety of substances. We can eat and digest everything from rancid mammary gland secretions t0 fungi to rocks (or cheese, mushrooms, and salt if you prefer euphemisms). Like other paragons of ...
... Nutritional costs and benefits form a fundamental part of the balance—preferred foods generally pack more energy, proteins, vitamins, or minerals per serving than avoided foods. But there are other costs and benefits that may override ...
... nutritional benefits of carnivory that meat is avoided—bad to eat, and therefore bad to think. An important point to bear in mind is that nutritional and ecological costs and benefits are not always the same as monetary—“dollars-and ...
... nutritional, ecological, or dollars-and-cents choices. Some may suspect that I have elected to attack only those citadels of arbitrariness whose fatal flaws were known to me beforehand. For the record, this is not true. When I began ...
... nutritionally speaking, but they are also especially hard to produce. Animal foods get their symbolic power from this combination of utility and scarcity. I do not think that it is an arbitrary cultural fact therefore that all over the ...
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 |