Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat

by Hal Herzog

  But that does not explain why his wife, Pam, won’t touch the stuff. She doesn’t even like to look at raw meat. “Pam,” I asked, “you have served a couple of hundred pounds of pork a day for the last ten years, but you don’t eat meat?”

  “Well, I eat fish.”

  She says, “I never liked the taste of meat. Even when I was a child, my mother would put it in my mouth, but I wouldn’t swallow it. It was not so much the flavor; I didn’t like the texture. Now they make a vegetarian hotdog so I am in hog heaven.”

  “How do you like the barbecue here?”

  “I have never tasted it.”

  DEALING WITH THE DANGERS OF DEVOURING FLESH

  Pam is unusual in her aversion to animal flesh. Most people are like her husband. Given the evolutionary history of our species, it makes sense that humans would naturally be attracted to meat. Biologically, you get a lot of nutritional bang for the buck. But the flip side is that meat is the most dangerous of the foods we eat. When ABC News surveyed Americans about the kinds of foods they were most afraid of getting sick from, 85% of people listed some form of meat, compared to 1% who mentioned a vegetable product.

  Our fear of animal flesh is well founded. The problem is that we, too, are made of meat. And thus we are susceptible to the various bacteria, viruses, protozoans, amoebas, and parasitic worms that inhabit the creatures we eat. Fish carry at least fifty kinds of transmittable parasites. The flesh of cows, pigs, goats, and sheep potentially carry the bacteria E. coli, which causes 400,000 human deaths worldwide each year. Some researchers believe that the AIDS virus was first transmitted to our species through the practice of eating apes. Then there are insidious little prions—tiny pieces of protein that have the remarkable ability to reproduce in your cells even though they contain no genetic material. They are responsible for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (or “mad cow disease”), which slowly turns the brain into Swiss cheese. Prions also cause kuru, a neurological disease found among the Fore people of New Guinea that is transmitted by the consumption of the brain tissue of deceased relatives during funeral rites.

  But, you ask, why don’t lions and wolves get sick from eating raw meat? Harvard’s Richard Wrangham chalks it up to cooking. He argues that the invention of cooking by Homo erectus 2 million years ago was the breakthrough that made the big brain possible by opening up a wider range of edible foods. In addition to adding flavor to their impala tenderloins, cooking also destroyed many of the pathogens that could make our ancestors ill. As a result, humans did not need to evolve the biological defense mechanisms that enable true carnivores to resist the toxins produced by bacteria that live in meat.

  The addition of spices to the human diet also made meat less dangerous. Paul Sherman, a biologist at Cornell University, wondered why humans are unique among animals in spicing foods, particularly with inherently aversive substances like red-hot chilies, which can burn at both ends. Sherman and his students hypothesized that humans developed the taste for spicy foods because spices contain chemicals that retard the growth of harmful microbes. To test this idea, they analyzed thousands of traditional recipes from all over the world. In every country, meat dishes were spicier than vegetable dishes. Further, people living in hot and humid areas that are conducive to the growth of bacteria use more spices on their foods than people who live in cooler climates. In India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Thailand, every meat dish is heavily spiced. (By the way, the most potent antibacterial spices are garlic, onion, allspice, and oregano.)

  While cooking and spicing makes meat safer, eating flesh is still risky, particularly for pregnant women. Meat-borne pathogens such as Toxoplasma gondii, Listeria monocyogenes, E. coli, Shilella dysenteriae, and Leptospira can cause spontaneous abortion, stillbirth, and prematurity. But evolution has come up with defenses against foods that might harm a developing embryo—nausea and food aversions. Most women experience nausea and vomiting sometime during the first three months of pregnancy when their developing embryo is most susceptible to the harmful effects of toxins. Paul Sherman reasoned that because meats are the most dangerous of foods and fruits the safest, meat aversions should be more common during pregnancy than fruit aversions. His analysis of the food preferences of 12,000 pregnant women showed that this was true. Pregnant women are ten times more likely to develop aversions to meat than to fruits.

  WHY SHEEP BRAINS ARE DELIGHTFUL IN

  BEIRUT AND REPULSIVE IN BOSTON

  Pregnant women are not the only people with meat aversions. We all have them. My favorite treatise on meat is a slim volume published by a Dane named Peter Lund Simmons in 1859, The Curiosities of Food or the Dainties and Delicacies of Different Nations Obtained from the Animal Kingdom. Simmons chronicles the extraordinary range of animal flesh that humans eat, most of which I would not touch. He describes the joys of elephant’s toes (pickle them in strong vinegar and cayenne pepper) and the gustatory delights offered by creatures such as porpoises, wombats, coffee rats, toads, bees, centipedes, spiders, sea slugs, and flamingos (the tongues of which are “extremely rich, much like that of the wild goat”).

  As an adventurous eater, I would rate myself a 7 on a 10-point scale. I have enjoyed the delights of sheep brain (which I ate regularly when I was a student in Beirut—fried is better than boiled), pig intestines, jellyfish, snapping turtle, sheep stomach stuffed with offal, grasshopper, thymus glands, black bear rump roast, alligator, and sun-dried iguana eggs. However, I find yogurt disgusting and sushi bland. I could not bring myself to eat cat, rat, bat, or chimpanzee. Neither would I eat balut—the Filipino delicacy that consists of a warm half-fledged duck embryo sipped from the shell. Nor could I gulp down, as did New York celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, the beating heart of a cobra. But despite my failures as a gourmand, all of these foods are regarded as delicacies in some part of the world.

  Why is the list of edible animals so long, yet, by comparison, the number of creatures whose flesh we regularly eat so short? One reason is availability. Jared Diamond points out in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, that while most animals are edible, few are good prospects for large-scale agricultural production. For example, only fourteen of the world’s 148 large terrestrial mammals have been domesticated. Your options in meat also depend on where you live. The meat counter at the supermarket where I shop only carries the standards—beef, pork, and chicken, with a few packages of lamb and a couple of kinds of fish thrown in. For the brave, there is liver. But, if you are reading this in Barcelona, you can trot over to la Boqueria, the cavernous central market on La Rambla. About halfway down the aisle on the right, you will find the viscera monger’s stall. Get there early and it will be piled with shimmering internal organs—stomachs, brains, tongues, intestines, lungs, hearts, kidneys, even a couple of freshly skinned sheep heads.

  Lack of availability, however, is only one reason why people avoid eating certain types of meat. Personal experience also comes into play. Like rats, humans have evolved a special ability to associate the taste of a food with nausea and vomiting. This was discovered by the psychologist Martin Seligman who developed an aversion to one of his favorite foods, steak with béarnaise sauce, after eating it on his birthday and then coming down with a virus and throwing up all night. Not surprisingly, learned aversions to meat are three times more common than aversions to vegetables and six times more common than fruit aversions.

  The most important influence on whether we find a food delicious or disgusting, however, is culture. Daniel Fessler, an evolutionary anthropologist at UCLA, has studied food taboos across human societies. Because it is dangerous, Fessler reasoned that meat should be more frequently tabooed than plant-based foods. He and graduate student Carlos Navarrete collected information on forbidden foods in seventy-eight cultures. They found that perfectly edible meats were six times more likely to be forbidden than vegetables, fruits, or grains.

  Why should it be easier to taboo meat than plant foods? Anthropologists love questions like this. As is often the case, th
ere is a lot of speculation and little hard data. Some food anthropologists are functionalists who believe that taboos are adaptive. Pork, for example, is forbidden for both Muslims and Jews. Some of the functionalists believe that the taboo on pork serves to protect humans from trichinosis. Another functionalist view is that the prohibition on eating pigs was adaptive because swine competed with humans for the same types of foods. Similarly, the anthropologist Marvin Harris argues that the veneration of cattle among Hindus in India developed because cattle are more useful for plowing fields and producing milk and fuel (dried dung) than as a source of protein.

  In recent years, functionalist explanations of meat prohibitions have not fared well. They do not, for instance, explain the geographic distribution of meat taboos. Why, for example, are cattle eaten in Pakistan where, as in India, they till soil and produce milk and fuel? Nor do they explain ecologically paradoxical taboos such as the prohibition against eating fish among desert dwellers such as the Navajo Indians of the American Southwest or the pastoral Masai in Africa. An alternative to the theory that meat taboos are adaptive is the idea that they result from the quirks of human psychology. I suspect that most meat taboos are simply the result of arbitrary cultural traditions and have no explanation other than the human tendency to copy one another.

  If I am correct, under the right circumstances, our feelings about edibility of animals should sometimes change quickly, just as popular baby names do. This was indeed the case with a taboo against eating buffalo among the Tharu people of Nepal. The anthropologist Christian McDonaugh lived in a Tharu village between 1979 and 1981. During this time, McDonaugh regularly ate pigs, goat, fish, chicken, and even rats with the villagers—but never buffalo. Buffalo and other animals were slaughtered as part of religious rituals. But unlike the carcasses of chicken, pigs, and goats that were eaten after the rituals, the dead buffalo were dragged off and discarded. Twelve years later, McDonaugh returned to the village. He was shocked when he was offered a snack of buffalo meat toward the end of a long afternoon of beer drinking. The Tharu, it seems, had changed their attitudes. McDonaugh attributes the rapid decline of the buffalo taboo to several factors. First, the price of other meats had gone up, making buffalo a bargain. Second, the caste system was eroding. The population of the valley was becoming more diverse and the Tharu were exposed to people who did eat buffalo meat. Finally, the region was becoming more democratic and the Tharu were freer to express their political opinions and aspirations. For the first time, they felt they could eat whatever they wanted to.

  DOGMEAT COOKIES, DOGMEAT STEW:

  A CASE STUDY OF A DIETARY TABOO

  When a culture taboos a type of meat, even the idea of eating it becomes revolting. For most Americans, the idea of consuming dogmeat is particularly repulsive. The archaeological evidence, however, indicates that humans have been eating dogs for thousands of years. In many parts of the world, people have historically treated dogs as walking larders to be filled up during flush times by feeding them excess food and then harvesting them when protein was in short supply. The Aztecs developed a hairless breed expressly for eating, and dogmeat was a staple among many North American Indian tribes. Though its consumption was outlawed in 1998, dog is still on the menu in parts of the Philippines, and in Africa dogs are sometimes castrated and fattened before slaughter to encourage plumpness. You would not want to be a dog in the Congo Basin where dogs are slowly beaten to death in order to tenderize their flesh.

  Dogmeat is particularly popular in Asia where approximately 16 million dogs and 4 million cats are consumed each year. The Cambridge University anthrozoologist Anthony Podberscek has studied the Asian trade in dog products. The Chinese eat more dogs than anyone else. Puppy hams are the preferred cut. Dogmeat is about as expensive as beef. The retail price for a pound of fresh dogmeat in 2004 was $2.00. Organs are a bargain: Dog brains go for about a dollar each and a penis for $1.45. Historically, the meat dog of choice in China has been the chow chow. In the 1990s, however, dog farmers (or should they be called ranchers?) decided to produce a faster-growing animal with better meat. After experimenting with Great Danes, Newfoundlands, and Tibetan mastiffs, they chose Saint Bernards as the best breed stock because of their good temperament and ability to pump out large litters of fast-growing puppies. But because Saint Bernard flesh tends to be bland, they are usually crossed with local breeds to produce tastier meat. Meat-dog puppies are harvested at six months of age when they are still tender.

  South Koreans also have a long tradition of eating dog. In Korea, as in China, dog flesh is believed to have medicinal properties. Unlike China, where dogmeat is usually eaten in the winter, Koreans consider dog summertime fare. In spite of its status as a traditional food, dogmeat has become controversial in South Korea. The per capita consumption of dogmeat in South Korea is only about eight ounces a year, but with a population of 50 million, the numbers add up. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, South Koreans ate about 12,000 tons of dogmeat in 1997. In 2002, the National Dog Meat Restaurant Association was organized to promote the consumption of dogmeat and related products. These include dogmeat bread, dogmeat cookies, dogmeat mayonnaise, dogmeat ketchup, dogmeat vinegar, and dogmeat hamburger. You can also buy packs of “digested dogmeat.” (I am not sure what this is.) A medicinal tonic called gaesoju that is said to be good for rheumatism is also produced from dogs. You don’t want to know how it is made.

  While South Koreans eat about a million dogs a year, more South Koreans are bringing dogs into their homes as pets. The cute little breeds—Maltese, shi tzus, and Yorkshire terriers—are particularly popular. As a result, South Koreans are increasingly ambivalent about eating dogs, and a recent poll found that 55% of adults disapproved of eating canine flesh. That said, the same survey reported that fewer than 25% of South Koreans favor a ban on dogmeat.

  Taboos on eating dogs stem from two opposing facets of the human-animal relationship: Humans don’t eat animals they despise and they don’t eat animals they dote on. The never-eat-despicable-animals principle explains why dog eating is uncommon in India and most of the Middle East. In classical Hinduism, dogs were the outcasts of the animal world. They were despised because they were said to have sex with their own family members and eat vomit, feces, and corpses. Dogs were likened to the people on the lowest rung of the caste system, and Brahmins thought that a dog could pollute food just by looking at it. Most interpretations of Islamic law also regard dogs as unclean. Muslims, for example, are not supposed to pray immediately after being touched by a dog. Hindus and Muslims don’t eat dog for the same reasons that Americans don’t eat rats—they are vermin.

  Americans and Europeans, however, don’t consume dog flesh for exactly the opposite reason. Dogs in American households are not animals—they are family members. And because family members are people, eating a dog is tantamount to cannibalism.

  What about cultures in which dogs can be either family or food? These societies usually have mechanisms that resolve the potential conflation of categories. The preferred breed of eating dog in South Korea is the nureongi, midsized dogs with yellow fur. Nureongi are not pets, and in markets in which both pet dogs and nureongi are sold, the pets are physically separated from the meat dogs and housed in different colored cages. The Oglala Indians of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota eat dog stew as part of religious rituals, and they also keep pet dogs in their homes. The fate of each puppy in a litter is decided soon after it is born. The pets are named; their stew-meat siblings are not.

  MEAT IS DEAD AND DISGUSTING

  Another factor that clouds the human-meat relationship is the guilt that comes from taking the life of another creature. Ceremonies in which hunters atone for killing animals are nearly universal in tribal societies. Most Americans repress any meat-related guilt they might experience simply by not thinking about where their dinner comes from. I successfully avoided the moral consequences of my diet until, at the age of thirty-six, I found myself, skinning knife in hand, hack
ing away at the steaming body of a 1,300-pound steer.

  At the time, we were living on the campus of Warren Wilson College near Asheville. The college maintained a farm that included a herd of beef cattle, about thirty of which were slaughtered each year. These animals led an idyllic pastoral life and had the painless death that even animal liberation philosopher Peter Singer might have few objections to. They were never crowded into feedlots or jammed into tractor-trailers or subjected to the trauma of an industrial slaughterhouse. No, Warren Wilson cows were doted on from birth to death by the earnest back-to-the-land students who worked on the college farm crew. And, on the morning it was slaughtered, each steer was persuaded with a handful of sweet grass to walk into a small abattoir where it was shot in the head before it could say moo.

  Some of the students on the farm crew knew that I studied the psychology of human-animal interactions, and one afternoon they suggested that I help them slaughter cattle the next day. After hemming and hawing a bit, I reluctantly agreed. I didn’t sleep much that night. I showed up at the abattoir at seven the next morning, and an hour later I was up to my elbows in entrails. I spent the next two days helping convert big animals into packages of chilled meat.

  Here’s how the first steer went down. Sandy McGee, one of the students, led the animal into the kill room and tied its halter to a ring on the floor. Ernst Laursen, the farm manager, walked into the room, shot the steer with a .22, and the crew went to work. They knew exactly what to do. One of them slit the steer’s throat, bleeding out the carcass, while another sawed off the animal’s head and hooves. They attached a chain to the steer’s legs and hoisted its carcass toward the ceiling. Out of nowhere, a wheelbarrow appeared—I did not have a clue what for. Then, using a six-inch skinning knife, Sandy made a quick vertical incision, opening the animal from rib cage to anus. Gallons of viscera plopped overflowing into the wheelbarrow. The USDA inspector examined the heart, liver, and kidneys, and stamped the carcass fit to eat.