Food and religion

(notes from Everyone Eats, by E. N. Anderson and I'm tempted to buy my own copy to slip doodles and recipes into)

Robertson Smitth's studies (1894) of food sharing as the classic, basic religious act among ancient and modern Near Eastern peoples were among the earliest works to discuss this in scientific detail. His work led, in part, to Emile Durkhiem's studies of religion as "collective representation" of the social group. Durkheim showed that - whatever truth, awe, reverence, or mystical experience individuals may find in religion - the real basis of religion is society. Religion was, for Durkheim, the way a society could hold itself together and "sell" its ethics and standards to the rising generation. To accomplish its goals, a social group embraces everyone in the powerfully emotional activities of ritual, ceremony, and celebration. Inevitably, such intense and all-involving action involves food. Food is a basic and universal human concern. It is central to religion - as symbol, as subject of prayers, as marker of sharing and unsharing, and as communion.

In the first important book that was explicitly about "anthropology", Immanuel Kant spoke of the principles of aggregation and differentiation. People when they classify the world, tend to treat "similar" things as if they were the same (aggregation) and to treat things perceived as even slightly different  as tho they were utterly separate (differentiation). Religion usually does this: one is a member of the Holy Faith aor one is not. Typically, aggregation and differentiation are stronger and more emotionally intense in religion than in other human activities (tho political ideology and ethnicity have sometimes taken pride ofplace in the last century or so). Food is almost always a marker. The sharers eat together at ritual meals. Often, they go farther, and define that their congregation by shared rules. The group that prays together stays together - especially if its members share religious feasts.

Taboos
Taboos are found in most societies. Technically, we distinguish taboo (a religious law) from simple avoidance. American Christians have no real taboos, except in some sects (such as Seventh Day Adventists) that observe Old Testament rules. Bur Americans have many avoidances, including insects, dogs, and horses.

This avoidance of horsemeat (Harris 1985) is, in fact, a religious taboo that has had its status lost by the people forgetting. The horse sacrifice was the greatest and most important sacrificial rite in ancient European religion, and recent converts tended to backslide, so Pope Gregory the Great explicitly banned horse eating by Catholics in the early Middle Ages. The modern eating of horses by the French is a new custom, arising from desperation during sieges of the 19th century.

Certain insects are explicitly said to be good food. Countless nutritionists have counseled eating them. They are an excellent, cheap source of nutrients, widely eaten around the world. Yet, most English-language books on food insects concentrate on the shock value rather than the nutritional value. Anthropologists hate this exoticism-as-shock books. They appear to ridicule behaviour that is actually more sensible anintelligent than that of the intended readership.

Taboos are often used as rules for sharing. Among the Inuit and many other hunters, adult women get one part of the game animal, girls get another part, the hunter gets yet another, other adult males get still another (see Boas 1888 and Rasmussen 1927). In Polynesia, chiefs impose sacred taboos to prevent overfishing (a fish species is tabooed until its population recovers from heavy fishing), protect fruit so that it may ripen, and save leaf crops from destructive overharvesting. In many places, scarce but well-liked food is "sacred" to the people who make the rules! Chickens and eggs go to the senior men in much of East Africa. Sometimes there is symbolism here: the top of a fish's head is sacred to the chief in some Pacific Northwest groups, and in southeast Asia the head of the sacrificial buffalo goes to the local headman. Sometimes purity is a factor. The highest, most sacred Hindu castes and Buddhist religious devotees must avoid all bloodshed, and thus all meat. Eating meat necessarily involves bloodshed, even if one does not do one's own butchering, and is thus contaminating and violent.

Most ink has been spilled on the pig taboo in Judaism, Isla, Hinduism, and several minor religions. It is known that the pig was not banned because it carries diseases, contrary to the myth still occasionally found in the popular press. A theory started by Carleton Coon and recently upheld by Marvin Harris maintains that the pig was banned because it is not a bad long-term economic risk in the Middle East. For one thing, it is not an "all-purpose animal"; it is not a source of milk, wool or traction power. It is also said that they are difficult to herd and do poorly in the region's conditions, but this is not true for wild pigs roamed the less desrt parts of the Middle East and keeping pigs was common amongst neighbouring religious groups and so successfully practised. A theory proposed by Paul Diener and Eugene Robkin was that the state wished to divert grain from pig feeding to state coffers, but this is unlikely as pigs were often fed acorns and garbage. Mary Douglas showed that the animals tabooed in Leviticus and Deuteronomy are mostly anomolous - in the case of pigs they are cloven hoofed but do not chew cud, and anomolous animals (that seem to violate category boundaries) tend to be upheld as either taboo or sacred in most religions. (UNFINISHED)