What Is a Food Taboo? Rules About Eating That Do More Than Regulate Diet

Prohibitions take recognisable forms across cultures. Whole species are forbidden, permanently and to everyone within the group. Particular parts are forbidden while the rest is permitted, including blood, fat and specific organs. Preparation determines permissibility, so the same animal is acceptable or not depending on how it was killed and handled. Combinations are forbidden, with certain foods permitted separately and not together. Timing matters, with foods prohibited during particular seasons, days or life stages. And the rules apply differently to different people, with restrictions on pregnant women, on children, on those in mourning and on people of particular status being extremely common. The variety of forms is itself informative, since it indicates that whatever these rules are doing is not simply a matter of which animals are healthy to eat.

Several accounts have been proposed and each explains some cases and not others:

• •Health and hygiene, which is the folk explanation and which fits a small number of cases and fails for most
• •Ecological and economic, holding that prohibitions protect animals more valuable alive or costly to raise
• •Symbolic and classificatory, holding that forbidden animals are those that fall between a culture's categories and are therefore anomalous
• •Group boundary marking, where the rules identify members and make sharing meals with outsiders difficult
• •Historical accident, where a prohibition arose for a reason long lost and persisted because it was inherited
• •Disgust, which is a real psychological response and is itself substantially learned rather than explaining anything

The most influential anthropological account holds that forbidden animals are those that do not fit the classification scheme a culture uses. On that reading, a system dividing animals by how they move and what they have produces anomalies, creatures that have some features of one category and some of another, and those anomalies are treated as impure because they threaten the order of the scheme rather than because they are harmful. Mary Douglas argued this at length using the dietary rules in Leviticus, showing that the prohibited animals are largely those failing to fit the categories the text itself establishes. The account is elegant and has been criticised for being applied selectively and for not predicting which anomalies are prohibited in cultures where it has been tested, and it remains the most cited framework in the area.

Prohibitions are frequently described as fixed and in practice they move, which is worth documenting. New foods arriving through trade have to be classified, and the arguments about where they fit are recorded in legal and religious literature across many traditions, with disputes about particular animals, about newly introduced crops and more recently about manufactured ingredients whose origins are unclear. Migration puts communities into settings where the customary foods are unavailable and substitutes must be assessed. Industrial processing raises questions no earlier rule anticipated, which has produced entire certification industries. Individual observance varies enormously within any community, with people keeping some rules and not others and with observance strengthening or weakening across generations in patterns that sociologists have measured. The rules are living arrangements rather than fossils.

Whatever the origin of a particular prohibition, the social effects are consistent and substantial. Rules about food are performed constantly, since everyone eats several times a day, which makes them the most frequently practised of any observance and the most visible marker of adherence. They constrain who can share a meal, which limits social mixing and intermarriage powerfully, since a household keeping rules another does not cannot easily host or be hosted. They are easily transmitted to children by practice rather than by instruction. They persist through migration and through loss of other observance, with dietary practice frequently outlasting belief in communities that have otherwise assimilated. And they are costly enough to function as a genuine signal of commitment, which connects them to the wider logic of expensive signals.

Prohibitions cover whole species, particular parts, preparation methods, combinations, timing and particular people, and that variety indicates they are not simply about which foods are safe. The most influential account treats forbidden animals as those failing to fit a culture's own classification scheme. Whatever the origin, the rules are practised several times daily and constrain who can eat together.