🎓 On feasts, cilantro, and cultural norms around food

I'll never retire to Costa Rica, even tho cilantro isn't as weird as crab.

Back in 2021, a biblical scholar named Joel Baden tweeted about the dietary laws from Leviticus 11. I had recently written about pork taboos in Ancient Israel when I was researching pigs for an old edition of this very newsletter, and was excited to see some of my intuitions confirmed. I couldn’t help but think of that experience when I opened up my newsfeed and saw a bunch of post-debate controversy about cats and dogs and food culture in America — but don’t worry; this won’t be an incendiary piece about immigration.

I just think food and culture is a fascinating topic, so forgive me if I take the chance to get a little nerdy.

Laws about pigs

One of my in-laws grew up on a farm; they kept pigs, and why not? Pigs are one of the most efficient ways to turn muck into useful stuff. Historically there were two main types of pigs; those raised for their meat (bacon) and those bred for their fat (lard). Lard used to be very popular as a mechanical lubricant, but as people switched more to olive oil, butter, and petroleum, lard pigs were reduced to heritage status. Some pigs even grow wool, but that’s even more niche and they were still mostly used for their meat.

Although they are a livestock animal, pigs are considered one of the more difficult animals to domesticate. They revert to feral status remarkably quickly — those of you who are very online may remember the 30-50 feral hogs meme from awhile back. In the ninth century, boar hunts were so important to political legitimacy that rulers blocked off their forests from even their own children in order to avoid usurpation. For most of the Middle Ages, wild boar was considered to be the premier big-game animal for hunters.

Egyptians, by contrast, treated pork as the food of the poor — not outright banned for most people, but looked down on. Pharaohs donated pigs to temples, probably as charity. Eating pork was thought of as something that foreigners did — it wound up having pretty barbaric connotations.

I agree with Joel that the religious taboo against pork probably has more to do with culture than medicine, given how ill-suited pigs are for life in the Middle East compared to there being any real health concerns. Sure, pork is known for trichinosis — but lots of undercooked meats are just as dangerous. Yet unlike ruminants like cows or goats, pigs do poorly in dry climates, where most of the fodder is too high in cellulose for them to process efficiently.

Habits around chickens

The cheapest meat I can get my hands on is generally chicken, which from a historical perspective is kind of wild when you think about it. We have evidence of chickens dating all the way back to Egypt, but they were mostly kept egg-layers, when they were kept for food at all. For example, Roman-era Britons kept chickens mostly for use in cock-fights; Caesar said ‘the Britons regard it as unlawful to eat the cock but they breed them for amusement and pleasure.’

Prior to the Benedictine reforms, most Europeans ate pheasant and geese. Then came the prohibition on eating four-legged animals during fasting periods. Since fish, eggs, and two-legged animals were considered okay, chickens got more popular. They went from making up about 5% of midden heaps to 15%, and the gene for chicken “plumpness” started to become widespread as people bred for more delicious chickens. I’m not sure why geese and pheasant didn’t take off too — probably some kind of genetic quirk, although it wasn’t until the 1900s that breeding for really good chickens became a thing, as part of a national contest hosted by an American agriculture company.

Chicken and watermelon have connotations in American society, though, and I suspect it’s a result of the price point.

People are weird about watermelon

Years ago, back when I still had a subscription to The Atlantic, I read this fascinating article about how watermelons have sort of always been considered a poor, uncivilized food. To early modern Europeans, “the typical watermelon-eater was an Italian or Arab peasant” because “the fruit symbolized many of the same qualities as it would in post-emancipation America: uncleanliness, because eating watermelon is so messy. Laziness, because growing watermelons is so easy, and because it’s hard to eat watermelon and keep working—it’s a fruit you have to sit down and eat. Childishness, because watermelons are sweet, colorful, and devoid of much nutritional value. And unwanted public presence, because it’s hard to eat a watermelon by yourself.”

It stuck with me for a variety of reasons, not least of which because I’ve never particularly liked watermelon; it’s edible, but to me it’s mostly mushy sugar-water with bits I need to pick out. It’s difficult to cut, hard to clean up after, and takes up a lot of space. But it’s a popular summer party food, where I’m from — and now whenever I see them, I think of community, thanks to that article.

Modern refrigeration and food preservation techniques have made it relatively easy to go to the grocery store and buy a package of pre-sliced watermelon. You stick it in the fridge and can eat cubes of it whenever you want, if that’s your thing. You don’t need to have five friends to eat it with you as soon as you cut it up, it’ll stay good. But that wasn’t always the case.

In a very real way, the watermelon of the American South is a part of feast culture, which dates back thousands of years and is foundational to early social economies and probably like, agriculture in general. In the Bronze and Iron Ages, feasting served the role of social glue, and a way for elites to demonstrate (and increase) their status.

Cows as currency

Exotic foods serve ritual purposes. In the early days of the cattle-keeping economy, people mostly ate wild game and fish, which are obvious much smaller than a whole cow. Agriculture was mostly a part-time pursuit; an insurance policy, or maybe just a tasty way to show off. It wasn't a replacement for foraging.

But as more and more people living on the Eurasian steppes picked up herding, powerful members of their societies started keeping lots of ostentatious ornaments. Sheep, goats, cattle and horses were sacrificed at funerals; they were only ever really eaten as part of social rituals, especially in the east. They were almost a sort of ritual currency, a way for the powerful to trade favors and track prestige during periodic sacred meals and funeral feasts.

Weird food in feasts

I’m from Maryland, where bull roasts and crab feasts are a pretty common bonding activity. My husband’s family is from the American Midwest, and he seems to think of crabs as largely as an expensive waste of time — although he enjoys the sorts of parties where we get a bushel of crabs and hang out eating crab and corn and watermelon. It’s a very social thing, but fundamentally crabs are kind of creepy looking. Except for certain culturally quirky seafoods like crabs and crawfish, most people reading this will be used to meat that has already been butchered, for the same reason I don’t know how to change the oil in my car; job specialization and convenience. So what happens when someone is presented with a crab then ends up being a cultural signifier; if you know what to do with it, you’re “one of us,” and if you need to be taught, well — we still like you just fine, but in a meaningful way, you’re an outsider until you learn which bits are inedible guts and lungs, and which parts are delicious (the “mustardy” hepatopancreas), and which parts are actually meat.

I once wrote a short story about a pastoral people known for making “spider cheese” — the protagonist, a visitor from a neighboring culture, found it disgusting. I’m not sure I could bring myself to buy cricket flour, even if it’s apparently delightfully nutty. Certainly when the convenience store by my house growing up sold lollipops with grasshoppers and worms in them, I never had the nerve to eat one. But locusts have historically been an important food resource for various groups, and those groups were certainly more resilient to plagues of locusts than the squeamish.

Food aversions are often legitimate

But I suspect there’s often more to it than squeamishness. For example, Lactose tolerance is relatively new, historically speaking, and not present in all human populations — which may explain why cheese is less popular in Asia than America.

As best I've been able to piece together, early northern European farmers weren't themselves lactose tolerant, but kept milk producers around to feed their children fresh milk since kids were until around age ten. This meant they could wean earlier and have kids more closely together, since breastfeeding reduces fertility. Then eventually (about 500 years later) they started producing cheese and yogurt, which reduced the lactose content of the dairy products enough to be usable as nutrition for adults.

That said, although the genes for producing lactase (which lets people digest milk sugar) beyond childhood are really only common in Europeans, the Han Chinese relationship with cheese is pretty complex. Fermented mares milk was associated with the Mongols, which may have been one reason they avoided it, but recent scholarship argues that elites in China did consume dairy, just mostly in processed forms like butter, yogurt, clotted cream, and cheese.

I myself can’t stand the taste of cilantro, and for that reason really struggled to find food I liked on my honeymoon to Costa Rica — we ate a somewhat embarrassing amount of Italian and Chinese food while we were there. It’s not just cultural, though — I really do seem to have different taste buds than my husband, from a genetic perspective.

Cannibalism is an extreme example

We tend to think of cannibalism as beyond the pale, but there does seem to be ethnographic evidence for cannibalism in various human societies. From what I can tell, in most animals, cannibalism generally only happens when food is scarce — evidenced by this study about cannibalism in guppies and stories about locusts turning to cannibalism, and spiders even eating their own young.

There seem to be exceptions — from what I can tell the Aztecs certainly ate human meat, mostly leg and arm flesh. But when I hear cannibalism I always think about brains, mostly because of a project I did during college biology studying prion diseases.

Stone Age Herbalist

had an article back in February discussing a prion disease outbreak in Papa New Guinea related to cannibalism. Apparently “protein shortage drove the consumption of the dead, and Fore men tended to view cannibalism as part of the domestic-reproductive-childish milieu from which a boy is supposed to grow out of and leave behind him.”

The foods we eat, as individuals and as groups, are a type of social signaling, much like fashion. If we’re eating lots of fish that’s easy to catch solo, it says something different than if we’re eating megafauna that requires huge amounts of cooperation to bring down. The way we eat them matters too — before I had kids, I tended to let people “serve themselves” from the pot at the stove. Now, everything is family style, and the table is set well before my husband gets home, because I’ve reinvented the wheel of ‘what makes mealtimes easier with two kids’ from first principles.

The fresh milk I drink in the morning is an enormous luxury — not only from a technological perspective, but a biological one, as well. And contrawise, it really sucks that I don’t enjoy Chipotle. But I’m glad I’m not stuck eating people.

Further Reading

• For a more in-depth look into food as currency, check out my article detailing the origins of agriculture and money, or about how domestication impacted early pastoral economies.

• I’ve also written more about the relationship between food storage & complex government, and why and how famines happen — namely poor governance, war, and weather.