CHANGING FOOD PRACTICES
Changes in consumption2 and their effects, particularly on health,
have been an important theme in much recent writing on food. One
debate concerns the extent to which palatability coincides not only
with edibility, but also with desirability from a nutritional
viewpoint. Some nutritionists, such as Yudkin and McKenzie
(1964), have maintained that humans like to eat what is good for
them. More recently, some anthropologists, notably Marvin Harris
and Eric Ross, have also argued that humans tend to choose what is
good for them nutritionally on the grounds of evolutionary
selectivity and adaptation (Harris 1985, Harris and Ross 1987).
Others have demonstrated that such a link is tenuous and argued for
the importance of culture as a determining factor in taste. They
point to the huge range of potentially edible items which are
ignored in every culture. Leach (1964), for instance, notes that
Westerners do not eat animals which are either far away and out of
our control, nor animals which are very close because they are ‘like
us’; indeed, the British treat certain animals, such as dogs and
horses, as taboo. Sahlins, too, notes that ‘edibility is inversely
related to humanity’ (1976:175). This explains the strength of the
taboo on eating cat or dog meat, which is also discussed by Goody
in the light of his own experience as a prisoner of war (1982:83–5).