Food Taboos

 

     Among the magical strategies people have used to influence unpredictable and uncontrollable elements of life are the observation of taboos.  Often such rules govern the boundaries of the body, with anxiety focused around, on the one hand, materials cast out of the body such as  excrement and the trimmings of hair and nails and, on  the other, food, drink, and medicine taken into the body.  According to Frazer among taboos none “are more numerous or important than the prohibitions to eat certain foods.” (24)

     One of the most widespread food taboos is that against eating meat.  Often rational bases are provided for vegetarianism, and one may well justify a meat-free diet on the grounds of health or the prudent use of resources, though probably the most common explanation is ethical, based on a reluctance to cause pain to other living things.  This moral objection seems weak, though widespread.  Apart from salt everything we eat is organic, and if one does not kill animals, one kills plants.  Further, carnivorous animals are common and presumably blameless.  The necessity that life can live only on life is clearly encoded in nature and is thus for those of theistic sensibilities part of God’s way and for others simply natural.  Were I to die in an open field, in less than a minute insects would begin to gather to dine on my remains, to be followed by scavengers and immense populations of bacteria.  As long as one breathes, and indeed no less afterwards, the cycle of birth and death is inescapable. 

     Indeed, in general food taboos are fundamentally symbolic rather than functional, more likely to be justified by scriptural mandate rather than by practical motives.  Various degrees of vegetarianism are practiced by nearly all Jains and many Seventh Day Adventists, while about a third of Hindus eschew meat, as do substantial numbers of Buddhists and Sikhs, as well as some Rastafarians, Baháʼís, and members of the Nation of Islam.  Past vegetarian cults include Pythagoreans, Manichaeans, and Mazdakist Zoroastrians [1]. 

     Each of these sects could cite authority for their practice.  Some Christian vegetarians would point to Genesis 1:29–31 and Isaiah 11:6–9 as evidence that God originally prescribed vegetarianism (though their carnivorous confrères might counter with Acts 10:10-15 which seems to declare that no meat is ”unclean”).   Buddhist and Jain traditions are more decisive with explicit recommendation  of a meat-free regime, while the Hindu attitude characterizes a meat-free diet as characteristic of spiritual seekers and Brahmins [2].

     Among the best-known food taboos is the Jewish and Muslim prohibition against pork, based on Leviticus 11:7-8 [3].

And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.  Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcase shall ye not touch; they are unclean to you. 8 And the swine, because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud, it is unclean unto you: ye shall not eat of their flesh, nor touch their dead carcase.

     Though in modern times the threat of trichinosis is often alleged as the basis for the prohinition of pork, this motive is not asserted in antiquity.  Maimonides did seek to rationalize the rule, noting that swine will feed on garbage and even excrement, thus compromising a community’s hygiene standards, but did not mention parasites.  Historians have suggested that pigs were inappropriate and unsupportable in the nomadic pastoral lifestyle of the early Jews and, later, Arabic Muslims [4].

    In the Hebrew scripture the categorization of the animal is the critical point: the hog’s foot is divided in two, yet he does not chew the cud.  The structural rule – exclude the anomalous and exceptional – leads to the proscription  of rabbits, camels, horses, and rodents as well as pigs.  Carnivorous birds such as eagles and vultures are considered unclean as are sea animals that lack scales and fins such as oysters.  Insects are not allowed except for the four kinds specified in Leviticus 11:22.  Clearly the motive is cultural definition with an identity unlike that of neighboring peoples, roughly the same reason that the Satmar Hasidim who live ten miles up the road from my house wear payot as they take to be commanded in Leviticus 19:27. 

     The Muslim avoidance of pork surely imitated the Jewish rule, though most of the kashrut regulations were not adopted.  Condemned in the Koran [5], such meat had played only a small role in the diet of the Arabic-speaking people who first adopted Islam just as pork had been rarely consumed by the Jews.  Thus the rule aided cultural definition while at the same time associating the new cult with the prestige of the older religion without untoward economic consequences.

     The Hindu attitude toward cattle is, in a way, opposite.  While Jews and Muslims find hogs to be unclean, even disgusting beasts, Indians idealize cattle, worshipping Kamadhenu, the divine cow of whom every living animal is an incarnation.  Just as the early Arabic-speaking people did eat pork prior to Muhammed, ancient Indians ate beef.  In fact, beef was a prestigious meat in Vedic times, used for sacrifices and the reception of honored guests [6]. 

     Just as the myth of Abraham and Isaac marks the transition from human to animal sacrifice, the story of King Prithu signals the prohibition of beef while allowing the consumption of dairy products.  The Mahabharata [7] relates how this chakravarti, an idealized king as culture hero, succeeded to power at a time when sacrifices were neglected.  Pursuing the earth in the form of a heifer, he agrees to spare her life in exchange for her life-giving milk.

     Vegetables, too, are proscribed for some.  Certain Hindus avoid onions, garlic, and mushrooms, feeling that such foods are tamasic, that is, they induce inertia and are associated with ignorance [8], making the mind sluggish and retarding spiritual advancement.   

    Food taboos may be taken to elaborate extremes, some of which apply only to certain individuals or certain times.  For instance according to Frazer the Egyptian pharaohs ate no meat but goose and veal while Masai chiefs must restrict themselves to milk, honey and goat liver [9].  In Myanmar a popular poster warns against for apparently innocuous combinations such as jelly and coffee or pigeon and pumpkin which are thought to be dangerous, even lethal [10].      

     Cultural reasons alone explain the reluctance of most Europeans to eat insects or horse meat and of virtually all to eat dogs.  The primary significance of such taboos is always symbolic, though other factors may play a role.  Functions, distinguishing one’s group, health, natural pre-existing diet and economics may each play a role, but the fundamental important of food taboos is magical.  The fragility of such beliefs is suggested by the Hawaiian abandonment of taboos following the Battle of Kuamoʻo in 1819.  The indigenous people had already for several decades observed that foreigners who ignored their taboos suffered no ill effects, but many were still astonished when their royal family publicly flouted rules they had scrupulously observed for generations. 

      If food taboos may vanish rapidly, they have also considerable persistence.  Today, while many people continue to follow the traditional taboos they were taught by their parents, others have adopted new ones, which may be equally superstitious in spite of quasi-scientific justifications.  Those seeking to lose weight may seek to avoid fat, or sugar, or carbohydrates, when in fact what us required, according to most experts, is simply smaller quantities of an ordinary diet.  Salt is considered almost poisonous by some.  Avoidance of gluten is widespread as a glance at American supermarket shelves will confirm.  A genuine intolerance for gluten occurs with celiac disease which affects something like one percent of the population, yet a far greater share of Americans, some estimates suggest one-third [11], irrationally feel gluten is unhealthy. 

     Food taboos are generally symbolic in nature, yet they reinforce social realities like identity identification and differentiation whether one’s in-group is Orthodox Jews or New Age food faddists.  For believers they constitute a visible daily reminder of one’s faith while serving as a placebo to induce well-being.  More easily manageable than some human failings, dietary restrictions have proven satisfying and even therapeutic for many, though their efficacy, like all magic power, is entirely symbolic and psychological.   

 

 

 

 

1.  Pythagoras’ views are represented by Ovid in the Metamorphoses XV 60-142 while the Manichean attitude is contained in St. Augustine’s De Natura Boni. 

2.  See, for instance chapter 8 of the Lankavatara Sutra for a Buddhist source and verse 71 of Digambara Amritachandra’s Puruṣārthasiddhyupāya for a Jain authority.  Hindu reservations about meat are expressed in a number of texts, including the Shatapatha Brahmana and the Chāndogya Upaniṣad. 

3.  Repeated in Deuteronomy 14:8.

4.  See Marvin Harris, "6: The Abominable Pig" in The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig: Riddles of Food and Culture (1987). 

5.  See 2:173, 16:115, and 6:145.

6.  The Aitareya Brahmana, Book 7, for instance, provides details about such sacrifices. 

7.  In the Drona Parva (Book 7.69) and the Shanti Parva (29.132).  The story appears as well in the Vayu Purana and elsewhere.

8.  Manu 5.5

9. The Golden Bough, 177.

10.  Anders Sandberg and Len Fisher, “Never eat a Pigeon with a Pumpkin: a model for the emergence and fixation of unsupported beliefs,” presented at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023, reprinted in revised form as Chapter 30 in Food Rules and Rituals: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023, ed. Mark McWilliams, p. 294-306.

11.  “One-Third of Americans Are Trying to Avoid Gluten—But Is It the Villain We Think It Is?,” News and Views (summer 2015), NYU Langone Health.

Immortality

     At the age of ten, on a camping trip with my family, during a rainy night, I felt I glimpsed the abyss of eternity. The awe or dread or apprehension I felt then was in no way affected, as I recall, by the fact that I had been brought up in a Protestant Christian church and had heard about heaven and hell since infancy. The main line of Christian thought has always regarded the afterlife as the true life, succeeding the present “vale of tears.” It seemed to me, though, that people most commonly acted as though the Christian consolation were feeble indeed when confronted with loss. Centuries ago, Sir Thomas Browne noted the gap between Christians’ professed faith and their apparently more real convictions, observing that most, though “believing or knowing that truth, have lastingly denied it in their practice and conversation.” He notes that “were the happiness of the next world as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live.” [1]
     It is undeniably true, all the same, that, since palaeolithic times when bodies were often buried facing eastward and daubed with red ochre, people have generally sought to believe in life after death. Freed by the total lack of evidence for any such thing, people have constructed a belief in the survival of personality and, even more fanciful, in a realm in the heavens and another under the earth in every part of the globe throughout history. [2]
     People’s uneasiness about mortality is expressed in many oral cultures by practices regarding the dead with a combination of veneration, what is called “ancestor worship,” and of anxious fear, expressed in many ceremonies for insuring that the dead (including prey animals) do not harm the living. These attitudes do not address the mortality of the living, approaching the dead rather as objects made suddenly foreign, requiring the development of other customs, sometimes logically incompatible, that allow people to continue living while knowing they themselves will die.
     Grave goods indicate a belief in an afterlife similar to this world. In ancient China and Peru numerous retainers were sacrificed to accompany high-ranking deceased men. The extravagant, even neurotic, practices of Egypt indicate an anxious attempt to pursue the good life beyond the grave at least among those who could pay the bill.
     On the other hand, in a number of early societies, the afterlife offered fewer amenities. The sheol of Hebrew scripture is a place of darkness conceived as under the earth at the greatest distance from Jehovah. There the rephaim or shades dwell feeble and emptied of individuality, rather like the “impetuous impotent dead” in Pound’s rendering of Homer.
     A similar idea of the dead as etiolated spirits seems to have been current in early Germanic religion, though a differentiation eventually appears among Valhalla, Hel, and Niflhel.
     Some traditions -- including Hindus, most Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Pythagoreans, certain Arctic peoples, and, according to Caesar and Alexander Cornelius Polyhistor, the Celts, -- prefer to imagine merit-based metempsychosis. (In this view, it may be that the rapidly growing human population, a source of concern to some, can only be the result of spiritual improvement among the great apes.) The theory of the transmigration of souls is attractive also to those who fancy a prior career as an Egyptian queen or a Tibetan lama.
     The karmic rebirth system, of course, assures retributive justice, but, for those who expect only a single lifetime God’s justice is doled out in rewards and punishments in the legalistic afterlife of the Abrahamic religions, ancient Egypt, and Zoroastrianism. Some arbiter is imagined who rights all the wrongs that accumulate in life, rebalancing the books until they come out right like a moral accountant at the end of a karmic run.
     All of these wish fulfillment fantasies are rather poignant representations of the human’s passionate attachment to life. The sense of impending dread associated with mortality is the necessary concomitant of the natural human delight in springtime regreening, strawberries, cream, and caresses (whether from a lover’s hand or from a late springtime zephyr). For some images like these are themselves sufficient to maintain a point of delight. Still, banishing all the mind’s apprehension about dissolution is a tricky maneuver indeed. While it reportedly has been done, most authorities in Asia and in Europe seem to agree that losing joy in life is an inevitable concomitant to losing fear of death whether the serene state be called apatheia, ataraxia, or Buddhist non-attachment.
     Still, a number of thinkers have maintained that death must mean a total end from the point of view of the individual consciousness. One finds a positive assertion of the materialist view of death in Democritus whose words were remembered by Epictetus who simply declared that, “Why are ears of corn produced? Is it not that they may become dry? And do they not become dry that they may be reaped? . . . But this [would be] a curse upon ears of corn, never to be reaped. So we must know that in the case of men too it is a curse not to die, just the same as not to be ripened and not to be reaped. But since we must be reaped, and we also know that we are reaped, we are vexed at it; for we neither know what we are nor have we studied what belongs to man, as those who have studied horses know what belongs to horses.”
     The materialist approach of the Epicureans implied this view, and it is explicit in Diogenes Laertius’ [3] report of Epicurus’ Principal Doctrines: “Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved, is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.” According to Lucretius [4] “Divorced from the body, the soul cannot have either eyes or nose or hands or tongue or ears, and therefore cannot possess either sentience or life.” Also, “Nature rebukes those who complain about death. Hell and its torments exist only in our life.” Certainly true in logical terms, such conclusions meet potent resistance from the psyche desperate to cling to life as the partial survey of alternatives I have already provided provides ample evidence.
     The Stoics were less systematic in their beliefs about the afterlife but, To Epictetus, since death occurs independent of our will and we cannot influence it in any way, it is foolish to spend time considering it. To him it is absurd to wish to avoid death. [5] For Seneca the Younger [6] “No evil is great which is the last evil of all. Death arrives; it would be a thing to dread, if it could remain with you. But death must either not come at all, or else must come and pass away.”
    A number of philosophers profess a similarly reasonable agnosticism concerning the afterlife, finding sufficient challenge in conducting one’s affairs while alive. In the Analects [7] Confucius makes his priority clear: “How can one know about death before he knows clearly about life?” When asked if the dead are aware of the ceremonies performed for them, he pointedly replied, “There is no present urgency about the point. Hereafter you will know it for yourself.” And in this he was surely correct.
     In contrast to the focus and simplicity of that great “transmitter who invented nothing” but who supported all the traditional rituals, Zhuangzi is said to have banged on a pot and sang when his wife died saying, “It’s just like the procession of the four seasons” which, while doubtless true, would be insufficient solace for many. He displays, in fact, a more poignant sense of loss upon the passing of his disciple Huizi , lamenting that he no longer has one with whom to talk. One suspects an unsettled attitude even in the mind of this great sage, as he repeatedly faces death with questions: “How do I know that loving life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death I am not like a man who, having left home in his youth, has forgotten the way back?” “How do I know that the dead do not wonder why they ever longed for life?” Liezi asks a skull: Only you and I know that you have never died and you have never lived. Are you really unhappy? Am I really enjoying myself?” “Among the dead there are no rulers . . .subjects . . .chores. With nothing to do, our springs and autumns are as endless as heaven and earth. A king facing south on his throne could have no more happiness than this!” “The Great Clod burdens me with form, labors me with life, eases me in old age, and rests me in death.” [8]
     Contrary to many religious leaders, the Buddha always avoided pontificating on god and the afterlife, providing instead the most practical and pointed response to such interests. He asked whether, if one had been hit by a poisoned arrow, one would be wise to inquire into the arrow’s composition, dimensions, and design. His interlocutor replied, “Of course, I would have the arrow pulled out as quickly as possible.” And the Buddha concluded “That is wise, for the task before us is the solving of life's problems; until the problems are solved, these questions are of secondary importance.” [9] Though the Republic offers the myth of Er with an elaborate scenario leading to retributive justice and the Phaedo offers arguments for immortality, the Socrates of the Apology may be the wiser for claiming less: “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our own ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.” said no one knows if death ends the individual personality.
     No one surely, can be satisfied with such consolation as Whitman reincarnation in the grass or Shakespeare’s immortality through words. With children and the persistence of DNA codes there is a more significant biological immortality of sorts, but the ego remains in its final cul de sac.
     Unlikely though it seem, I find myself returning to the Christian apologist with whom I started. Sir Thomas Browne allowed himself sufficient latitude and honesty that he found himself attacked for heterodoxy and included in the Roman Catholics’ Index Librorum Prohibitorum, yet the same uncertainty may have been what gave him the sensitivity to offer even less credulous mortals a way out. His magnificent Hydrotaphia or Urne Buriall surveys burial customs and beliefs at length. Impressed by the ancients who could even choose death expecting mere dissolution, he concludes “Certainly such spirits as could contemn death, when they expected no better being after, would have scorned to live had they known any.” He goes on to conjure a spell of words: “What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling Questions, are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these Ossuaries entred the famous Nations of the dead, and slept with Princes and Counsellours, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above Antiquarianism. Not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except we consult the Provinciall Guardians, or tutelary Observators” [10] 

      It is difficult to leave off quoting, his lines are so liquid, but, though the personalities of those buried in urns are irrecoverable, the elegant meditations of the seventeenth century physician remain, and they bear directly on the facts of mortality as they show a sensitive intelligent consciousness exerted to its limit, fully human, fully alive in the face of approaching death, inquiring, composing, making aesthetic judgments just as though it really mattered, even as the clock ticks the sever-fewer seconds that remain. His energy and interest in the task of confronting the given terms of existence ignores the sensible remark of Lucretius: “We have nothing to fear in death, that one who no longer exists cannot become miserable, and that it makes not one speck of difference whether or not he has ever been born, once his mortal life has been snatched away...” Constrained to at least approximate Christian orthodoxy, with his style alone, Browne provides a workable model for many who find themselves constitutionally incapable of assenting to fairy tales, yet with a sense of beauty and wonder and of the exquisite potential of the mind intact though it last but only a day.


1. Chapter 4, Urne-Buriall.

2. David Lewis-Williams’ The Mind in the Cave does a good job of providing a materialist explanation.

3. Bk. 10.

4. Bk. 3. De rerum natura.

5. Bk. 2, Ch. 6 and Bk. 3, Ch. 6.

6. In Epistle IV.

7. XI, 11.

8. These are from Burton Watson’s readable version, on pages 113-117, 42-3 and 76. I have rewritten the names from Watson’s Wade-Giles.

9. This is found in the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta (The Shorter Instructions to Malunkya) which is part of the middle length discourses (Majjhima Nikaya), one of the five sections of the Sutta Pitaka.

10. Ch. 5