Dog Skewers, Beef Burgers, and Other Weird Meats
Coconut-Cream Marinated Dog on Skewers (Saté bumbu dendeng)
This is a traditional Indonesian recipe.
Cut dog meat into pieces and marinate them in a mixture of coconut cream with a little soy sauce, pounded garlic and onions, ground coriander, ground cumin, salt, and pepper. Skewer, broil over charcoal, and serve with a pickled hot pepper sauce.
The Ituri Forest is an expanse of green springing from the fertile soils of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s a wild place, largely unexplored. The mysterious zebra-like okapi live here, as do groups of Mbuti and WaLese pygmies, hunter-gatherers of short stature (the average height of an adult is five feet, two inches). It was in the Ituri Forest, in 1981, that Richard Wrangham, the Harvard anthropologist who maintains that cooking made us human, got a lesson in the power of meat taboos.
Back in 1981, the Ituri Forest was not an easy place to live for a Western scientist. Wrangham, primatologist Elizabeth Ross (his wife), and their two colleagues sustained themselves for months on nothing but beans and rice. So when one day a Greek hunter passed by their camp and offered them two great blue turacos that he had shot, the scientists welcomed the chance to consume the kind of protein they’d been craving. But the WaLese people, among whom they lived, disagreed. Do not eat the turacos, they warned. It’s dangerous. It’s taboo. To the Westerners, the turaco was food, like chicken or turkey. And to their meat-starved taste buds, it was delicious. The next day, though, the two Western men developed diarrhea. “We truly suffered,” Wrangham recalls. When the WaLese blamed the disease on the broken taboo, Wrangham pointed to the fact that not everyone who ate the turacos got sick. After all, the women were fine. “Oh yes, of course,” the WaLese replied. “The taboo only applies to men.”
There is nothing in the meat of turacos, at least as far as we know, that can specifically hurt male humans. Besides, other East African tribes have similar taboos on chicken. Yet no matter how much Wrangham tried to argue with the WaLese that turaco meat is fine for men, the Africans weren’t convinced. That’s the thing about meat taboos: although evident to those who practice them, they appear irrational to people from other cultures.
Africa was also where I received my first and most disturbing lesson in different cultural approaches toward meat. While Wrangham and his colleagues were the ones bewildered by a taboo, and the ones who broke it, I found myself on the other side of the taboo divide. Like the WaLese, I felt how deeply distressing it is to have your meat beliefs challenged and shaken.
It happened over twelve years ago in Limbe, Cameroon, on a hot, sticky night. Wads of mist were rolling into town from the massive slopes of a nearby volcano, Mount Cameroon, and the humidity seemed to intensify all the smells around: wet jungle, dusty roads, and smoke, which wafted from the grills that popped up the moment the sun set. I was hungry—and the meat skewers prepared by the locals seemed delicious (I was an avid meat eater back then). I approached one of the grills and asked the vendor what was on offer. Chicken, he said. Beef. Some soy. I raised my brows in surprise. Soy? Here, in a small Cameroonian town? Curious, I ordered one skewer of the grilled soy. But the moment I took a bite, I knew it was not what I understood to be soy. It had bones. It was meat. I asked the vendor for an explanation. He didn’t understand what the problem was. After all, everyone knows that in the local language soya means “roasted meat,” and if it’s not chicken, goat, or cow, there is only one other thing it could be. Rat. I had just eaten grilled vermin! With some sauce and spices, but still. I was disgusted. If only I’d known, I would have never let this thing touch my lips.
If you are like me (and like most Westerners), you don’t eat rats. You also don’t eat horses, dogs, humans, or Egyptian fruit bats. You might, though, enjoy cows in the form of a steak and pigs in the form of bacon. You also probably wouldn’t mind turacos, in a pinch. Yet, there are people around the world who would find some of these dietary choices weird or even disgusting. And it’s not just the Hindus with their beef taboo or the pork-avoiding Jews and Muslims. To some Somali tribes, the idea of eating fish is revolting, while the Chuka of Mount Kenya would never dine on chicken and believe that if they did, they would turn as bald and pink as Europeans. Meanwhile in Asia, between thirteen and sixteen million dogs are cooked and consumed each year. Dogs, according to 83 percent of South Koreans, are meat.
The thing about meat taboos is that they tend to stir strong emotions. If you invite a dog-eating Korean and a dog-loving American to the dinner table and ask them to talk about their food preferences, the conversation will most likely be at least as heated as the one between a vegan and a carnivore. The question, it appears, is not just why we eat meat. It’s also why we eat certain types of meat and hate or dismiss others. Why is beef in America, dog meat in Korea, and horsemeat in Kazakhstan craved and eaten while these same meats arouse disgust or are taboo in other countries?
As I discovered in Cameroon, and as Richard Wrangham discovered in the Ituri Forest, determining which animals are OK to grill and which should never enter our stomachs is far from fixed or universal. What is universal is that almost all cultures have food taboos, and no food is more widely affected by prohibitions than meat. That, too, only serves to highlight how important animal flesh is to us.
However, meat taboos can change over time. The story of horsemeat is a perfect example and proof that we can get hooked on new meats and unhooked off them again. When early in 2013 some Europeans discovered that beef products sold in their supermarkets were, in fact, made of horses, many were utterly disgusted. The outcry of the Irish was among the loudest. Professor Alan Reilly, the chief executive of the Republic of Ireland’s food safety authority, asserted: “In Ireland, it is not in our culture to eat horsemeat.” Yet it hasn’t always been that way—the Iron Age Irish didn’t see anything wrong in roasting a cut of stallion. They left archaeologists evidence of their dietary habits under the lush hills of central Ireland: plentiful horse bones, indicating that horses had been butchered and cooked.
But it was not just the Irish who over the ages changed their position on eating horses. In prehistoric times, much of Europe happily cooked its way through the stables—until the Christian church put an end to it. According to the Bible, hippophagy (which is the scientific term for eating horses) is a big no-no: “Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcase shall ye not touch,” says the book of Leviticus. To make things worse, the heathens sacrificed horses to their gods: the Angles of England did it, the Slavs did it, the Germanic Teutons did it. When the Christians set out to convert the barbarians, they decided that the horse sacrifices and horsemeat feasts had to go. Some of the pagans resisted. The Icelanders in particular were so committed to their horseflesh that the issue became a significant obstacle on Iceland’s way to Christianity. In the end, rather than lose Icelanders, the church granted them an exemption. They still enjoy equine meat up there, especially in fondues. It gives the dish a desirable strong flavor, the Icelanders argue.
The rest of Europe gave up hippophagy with less resistance, and over the Middle Ages, eating horses was only done during times of famine. Even faced with lengthy sieges and hunger, people would rather eat grass and their own leather garments than horses. Those who tried the forbidden flesh in times of plenty were often severely punished. A ninth-century Irish handbook for confessors required that the eaters of horsemeat do penance for as long as three and a half years—longer than was prescribed for women who indulged in lesbian sex. Obviously, the roast-stallion feasts of the past were by then well forgotten, pushed into oblivion by Catholic guilt.
However, many modern European nations—the French, the Germans, and the Italians, for instance—feel little remorse over eating horsemeat. Attitudes changed in the nineteenth century. After the Industrial Revolution, the population of Europe doubled, and the price of meat shot up. While people were going hungry, thousands of horses were literally worked to death, collapsing from exertion while drawing carriages and trams, powering factories, and hauling coal from mines. Their carcasses would then be turned into glue, leather, and pet food. Across the continent, including Great Britain and France, the elites came up with a solution: let us convince people to eat horsemeat.
The arguments for consuming equine flesh were numerous: it’s cheap, tasty, and nutritious. Not eating it, the reasoning went, amounts to a horrendous waste. It’s more humanitarian to kill the old horses than drive them until they collapse. In the medical press, physicians recommended raw horsemeat and horse blood as a remedy for tuberculosis. Due to its relatively high levels of iron, the meat of horses was said to be of particular benefit to laborers, the anemic, and convalescents. Articles and books arguing the case piled up. In the end, the French hippophagistes succeeded in convincing their fellow countrymen to eat horses. The British failed. The reason? According to historians, several factors conspired to keep the British off horsemeat: lack of support from British butchers and restaurant owners; better access to international beef markets, lessening the need to eat horsemeat; and, unlike France, lack of support from the scientific elites in Britain, who didn’t join forces to lead a horsemeat-eating movement to the same extent.
One of the big fiascos turned out to be a posh banquet at London’s Langham Hotel in 1868, which was held to convince the British intelligentsia to eat horsemeat. The venue was magnificent: a truly palatial hotel that, according to contemporaries, had “no superior in Europe or America.” A table for 150 guests was set under the vaulted ceiling in the Salle à Manger, the most exquisite dining room of the hotel. Champagne was plentiful, the waiters attentive and discreet. The menu promised ten dishes. To start, le consommé du cheval—a horse soup, followed by boiled withers. Once the guests—MPs, leading journalists, writers, and scientists—were seated, the principal organizer, Algernon Sidney Bicknell, stood up to give a speech. He talked about the unnecessary waste of perfectly good meat that could feed the masses. Seventy-five thousand horses, he claimed, toiled to their deaths each year in London. Let us butcher them and sell them to the poor. The guests applauded and began to eat. Among the diners was Frank Buckland, a surgeon by training and an eccentric celebrity by practice. Buckland was known across England for his peculiar culinary tastes: calling himself a “zoöphagist,” he ate his way through the entire animal kingdom. He dined on Japanese sea slugs, boiled elephant trunks, stewed moles, toasted mice, panthers—you name it. If it moved and was made of protein, he had it cooked and served. Among the people gathered in Langham Hotel, Buckland was the person whose verdict on horsemeat would matter the most. The organizers had high expectations. Earlier, a similar “banquet hippophagique” in Paris proved an enormous success. Unfortunately, not so in London. Buckland was not pleased. A few days after the Langham dinner, he stated in a review: “The meat is nasty. I confess that I suffered tortures over which I will draw a veil.”
Soon, the Langham banquet became the subject of jokes. In 1879, the British Medical Journal suggested forgoing horsemeat “’till English cooks are more skilled in concealing their raw material.” In just a few years, the failed horsemeat revolution in Britain was turned into a cultural crusade against the French. The French, the reasoning went, ate horses because their culinary tastes were mercurial and indecent. The Brits, by contrast, felt superior. Today, equine meat is rarely found in the United Kingdom, and both Americans and Canadians picked up on the anti-French, antihorsemeat sentiment. As one historian said: “Not consuming horsemeat became a marker of Anglo-American dietary self-consciousness.”
Americans are at least as squeamish about the flesh of horses as the British are. Although horsemeat was briefly sold in the United States during World War II, today it is difficult to find. That’s hardly a surprise. After all, many Americans are descendants of the Irish, who were trained by the Catholic Church to find horsemeat disgusting, and of the British, whose apparently inept chefs helped root the horsemeat taboo even deeper.
Meanwhile, millions of people around the world feel no revulsion over eating horses. China is the most profligate, cooking almost half a million tons per year. Mexico comes in second, and Italy third. Denizens of the horse-riding nations of Central Asia—the Mongols, the Kazakhs, and the Kyrgyz—see equine flesh as the most prestigious of meats. According to the Kazakhs, it does not spoil as quickly as beef and will not give you a stomachache. It is also perfect for weaning babies.
It seems that whether you find eating horses disgusting or not has more to do with where and when you were born than with the qualities of the meat itself. And the case of dog meat is quite similar.
On Sulawesi, an Indonesian island shaped like a fat girl with a long ponytail, eating dogs is nothing unusual. With light or dark fur, grilled or cooked, dogs have been eaten here for centuries. Yet anthropologist Daniel Fessler of the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted research on meat taboos in Indonesia, could not stomach trying the local dog stew. Fessler, a slim, bearded man who looks like someone who has spent a lot of time working outdoors in exotic places, calls himself “largely vegetarian.” Although he has eaten many things in his life that are not considered food in the West, such as insects and songbirds, dogs are just out of the question for him. “I tactfully avoided situations in which I would be offered dog meat, as I have a high regard for dogs’ cognitive abilities and think they ought not be killed for food,” he told me.
Among Westerners, eating dogs tends to stir even more emotions than eating horses does. To most, just as to Fessler, dogs are pets—period. They are to be pampered, not cooked. However, humanity’s relationship with dogs and their flesh is not exactly straightforward. According to a theory put forward by Australian scientists, one of the reasons behind the domestication of wolves might well have been their meat. By the Bronze Age, dog eating was widespread in Europe. The ancient Greeks believed that dog meat helped with intestinal problems and itching. The flesh of a puppy eaten with wine and myrrh was said to cure epilepsy. Even the early North American settlers ate dog, and not just because they had no other food to put on their plates. Today, about sixteen million dogs are consumed each year in Asia alone. As long as it is properly cooked, dog meat is not bad for humans—or at least not any worse than chicken or beef. Its taste is often described as buttery, complex, or gamey. It contains about as much protein as pork but less fat. South Koreans, the biggest fans of dog meat on the planet, believe that it is good for the yang or the male, hot component of human nature. As such, many claim that eating dog meat helps the eater endure the heat and humidity of South Korean summers—you “fight fire with fire,” the local saying goes. That is why the bulk of dog meat is consumed in South Korea during the three days that are traditionally considered the hottest—known as chobok, jungbok, and malbok—which come in ten-day intervals. Also, because dog is yang, it’s mostly Korean men who eat it—92 percent of them report having tasted the flesh of a dog, compared to 68 percent of women. Meanwhile, South Korean women, if they so wish, can enjoy the supposedly healing properties of dog fat in several cosmetic products that have recently been released on Asian markets, from dog-oil cream to dog-oil essence and dog-oil emulsion. South Koreans also eat dog in the form of dog-meat kimchi, dog-meat-flavored mayonnaise, and dog-meat candy. South Koreans, it seems, like the taste of dog.
Many Westerners find it easy to condemn Koreans, Sulawesi, Thai, or Chinese for eating dog flesh. In the 1980s, French actress Brigitte Bardot launched a campaign against dog eating in South Korea. It didn’t work. One thing the campaign did change, though, was the name given to Korean dog soup. In the restaurants of Seoul it is now sometimes called “Bardot.”
Anthony Podberscek, anthrozoologist at the University of Sydney, has never eaten dog and wouldn’t want to try it. But he conducted extensive research on dog-meat taboos. “In South Korea, dog eating is considered a major part of the culture, just as kimchi,” he told me. “Calls from the West to ban the practice are viewed as an attack on the South Korean national identity. The lack of consistency in the behavior of Westerners toward cats and dogs leads to annoyance among South Koreans when they are criticized for consuming these animals.” If South Koreans were to pick which animals should not be eaten, only 24 percent would say dogs, and 33 percent would choose cows. However, you will not see South Korean media waging war against the West’s addiction to beef.
However, the real question at hand is about dynamics far more universal than nations’ clashing opinions about dogs: Why is it that cultures differ so widely in defining which flesh is OK to cook and which should never touch their lips? Why do Westerners find farming dogs for food revolting while eating pigs or cows is considered OK? Why are they as eager to condemn Koreans or Sulawesi for eating dogs as vegetarians are eager to condemn all carnivores?
Most societies do not eat all the species local nature offers them, even if they are easy to hunt and their meat is nutritious. In Poland, the country of my childhood, eating Helix pomatia, or Burgundy snails, is a no-no. I remember those snails. They were almost everywhere: in our gardens, in the forests, on the sidewalks. They would have made an easy-to-get and cheap addition to the Polish cuisine, especially during the meat hunger of Communist times, when the shelves of Polish butcher stores were literally empty. But it didn’t work out this way. Snails, according to the Poles, are slimy and disgusting. If the French want to eat escargots, good for them. And good for the Polish people too, since they can gather the snails and ship them to France in vast, profitable quantities—in total 230 tons per year. Bon appétit.
But it’s not just the Poles and their abundant snails. The !Kung bushmen of Botswana consider only ten out of the fifty-four local wild animal species edible—even though, in theory, they all are. According to Fessler, who has studied meat taboos across seventy-eight cultures, Europeans hold most of them. North Americans are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum—not too squeamish but not particularly adventurous either. In general, Fessler believes, people don’t give much thought to why they eat some species and religiously avoid others. “It’s disgusting!” they’ll usually just say, end of story. But to researchers like Fessler, Podberscek, and Wrangham, that isn’t a good-enough explanation. The reaction of disgust is just the outer layer of a meat taboo, a cover. They have to peel it away and dig deeper.
As of today, many scientists still disagree on why we form meat taboos. The theories are many, and likely each contains a bit of truth. If you go up to someone on an American or a British street and ask them why we don’t eat dogs, many will reply that it’s because they are man’s best friends. It seems plausible. Maybe sharing a couch with a dog or a cat makes us softhearted toward all the members of these species? Yet the case of the dog-eating, pet-keeping South Koreans proves this theory wrong. The majority of South Koreans don’t think of dogs only as food. Almost 10 percent of them—at least in major cities—also keep dogs as pets. The worth of the rapidly growing pet market in South Korea has been recently estimated at US $1.3 billion. Surprisingly, pet owners are not much more likely to disapprove of using dogs for food than those who do not share their homes with animal companions—58 percent compared with 53 percent, respectively. South Koreans, it seems, compartmentalize some dogs as food, and some as man’s best friends. Nureongi, midsized, yellow-furred dogs bred for their meat, belong in the first category, while Malteses, Shih Tzus, and Yorkshire terriers belong in the second. If you shop for dogs in South Korean markets, it is clear which canines are meant to be eaten and which to be cuddled. The clue is the color of the cage in which they are kept: pink is for pets, rust colored is for meat.
And it is not just the Koreans. The Oglala Sioux of South Dakota clearly separate which dogs are pets and which will be sacrificed to the gods and eaten. In Melanesia, pigs are treated like pets, sometimes even like human babies—women will breastfeed them, for example. And yet, they are still butchered and turned into pork.
If it’s not the status of a pet that keeps the meat of some species taboo, maybe, as a popular claim goes, we just don’t eat animals that are smarter than the rest—like dogs, cats, and horses. But that, too, does not seem to be the case. First, no matter how much their owners would like to believe it, cats and dogs are not exactly furry Einsteins. Although it’s not easy to compare the intelligence of different animal species, we do know that pigs are at least as smart as dogs, if not smarter. It is not just the circus-type stunts that swine are good at—jumping hoops, bowing, spinning, and rolling out rugs. They can be taught to operate thermostats in their pens and adjust the temperature to their liking. They can press buttons and switch levers to get food. They can even master simple computer games. At Pennsylvania State University, two pigs, Hamlet and Omelette, have been taught how to operate a joystick with their snouts. Using M&Ms as rewards, scientists trained the pigs to move a cursor across a computer screen and line it up with other items. Hamlet and Omelette mastered that skill as fast as chimpanzees did in similar experiments. It appears that Sir Winston Churchill might have been onto something when he said: “Cats look down on you; dogs look up to you; but pigs look you in the eye as equals.”
Cows may not qualify as computer-gaming pros, but they, too, can easily grasp how to operate the lever of a drinking fountain or press a button to get grain. Their social lives are surprisingly complex: they develop long-term friendships and may hold grudges against other cows. Even chickens are not exactly birdbrains. They make over thirty different types of sounds to communicate with one another. For example, they can inform the flock whether a predator is approaching by land or from the air. Plus, chickens know how to find and retrieve a hidden object—a test that quite a few dogs have failed.
We may believe that we choose to eat only the dumbest of animals, ones that cannot much comprehend what’s happening to them anyway, but that is simply not true. If there was anything to it, then we should be making bacon out of dogs, not pigs. As Brock Bastian’s experiments have shown, we may think swine and cows aren’t bright precisely because we eat them—to quiet our cognitive dissonance over consuming animal flesh.
If it is not the cuteness, pet worthiness, or smarts of animals that makes their meat taboo, maybe over the centuries we have learned to avoid eating meat that is bad for our health. A popular theory states that people shun certain meats if consuming them could be dangerous. It is true that animals are breeding grounds for bacteria and parasites: roundworm, tapeworm, Trichinella spiralis, Giardia duodenalis, Toxoplasma gondii, Escherichia coli, Salmonella enterica—the list goes on. Eating dog meat may cause brucellosis and anthrax. Handling monkey meat can cause Ebola. Staying clear of dog and monkey is simply safer.
The Hebrew pork taboo is often explained as a means of avoiding trichinosis—a parasitic disease caused by the larvae of Trichinella spiralis. Once the larvae are ingested with undercooked meat, they can migrate in the human body. Fever, muscle weakness, or even stroke may follow. One problem with the health explanation for the Jewish and Islamic pork taboo is that trichinosis takes a long time to develop—too long for people without access to modern medicine to link the disease with its cause. It was only in 1859 that scientists made the connection between eating undercooked pork and trichinosis. And if the Jews and Muslims of the past didn’t know pork causes trichinosis, why would they ban it? Besides, if eating pork was indeed so risky, why is it so widely consumed all over the world: in cold and hot climates, on the savannas, and in deserts and jungles? There is nothing extraordinary about the dangers of pork. Undercooked beef is dangerous too (it can contain tapeworm), and so is sheep meat, which can give you bacterial brucellosis or anthrax, a disease that often ends in death—unlike the usually mild trichinosis. Anthropologist Marvin Harris may have been right when he wrote: “If the taboo on pork was a divinely inspired health ordinance, it is the oldest recorded case of medical malpractice. A simple advisory against undercooking pork would have sufficed.”
So why do we eat some meats and not others? Marvin Harris claimed that it all boils down to economics: meat taboos improve resource availability and help societies survive. That’s why Hindus do not eat cows, and Jews and Muslims eschew pork. If the Jews and Muslims did keep pigs to eat them, Harris argued, the animals would compete with humans for grain and water—resources that are in short supply in the Middle East. At the beginning of the Neolithic period, swine were better suited for the climate of the Arabian Peninsula. Back then, the region was covered in dense oak and beech forests, which provided pigs with mud to wallow in and acorns and beechnuts to eat. However, when the population increased, the forests were chopped down. The shade, mud, and acorns soon became a distant memory. To keep pigs, you had to feed them grain and provide them with a lot of water to cool down their bodies. Since cows, sheep, and goats can thrive in a hot climate on little more than straw and bushes—things humans do not eat anyway—they proved a better choice as livestock. Pigs not only competed with people for the same resources but also could not be milked. They became costly, so they had to go.
A similar theory helps explain why cows are sacred to Hindus—butchering them would be just uneconomical. Four thousand years ago Hindus not only killed cows but also ate them. The earliest Vedas (holy texts) did not forbid the slaughter of cattle; only around 1000 CE did cows become sacred, similar to the way they are now. Today, India is overrun with cows. There are cows in the markets, wandering between the stalls, sleeping across the tracks on railway stations, grazing on trash in front of restaurants. I once saw a cow lounging on the steps of the swanky offices of Ernst & Young in New Delhi. What changed over the centuries so that cows ceased being meat and achieved a holy status? According to Harris, the answer is again rooted in economics. It started with a population explosion, which precipitated the clearing of woods for fields. As the previously forested Ganges Valley turned into barren land, drought became common and agriculture difficult. “The farmers who decided not to eat their cows, who saved them for procreation to produce oxen, were the ones who survived the natural disasters,” explains Harris. Oxen pull the plow, cows give milk, and both produce dung, which fertilizes the fields of India and fires its stoves. It’s been calculated that in modern India, the dung used as fuel for cooking is equivalent to forty-three million tons of coal (that’s much more than Canada exports each year). And so, as Harris writes: “Those who ate beef lost the tools with which to farm. Over a period of centuries, more and more farmers probably avoided beef until an unwritten taboo came into existence.” Similar reasons strengthened the church-imposed horsemeat taboo in medieval Europe. Horses, as opposed to chickens, are not good at converting food into muscle. They are simply not efficient meat machines, but they are quite useful when alive: for transportation and for plowing fields and fertilizing them with manure.
Although the sustainability theory solves some of the riddles of meat taboos, it doesn’t solve them all. Can it be that we do not eat dogs in the West just because it’s uneconomical? Not really. After all, eating all the strays would make perfect economical sense. And what about the aversion of some Somali tribes toward consuming fish, a taboo that can’t be explained with economical or environmental reasons? Some such tribes live by lakes or rivers brimming with fish, and yet they fail to profit from this protein abundance, believing that consuming fish would cause their teeth to fall out. And what about the turaco taboo among the pygmies of the Ituri Forest? Wrangham believes that such taboos make people feel they belong. When he worked in East Africa, he tells me, he encountered food taboos at many levels of social organization: “They had different taboos for different subclans, and for different clans, and for different tribes. These taboos acted as markers of identity, and that is why they often applied to men and not to women, because the clans were based on male kinship, whereas women moved around.” Other scientists agree with Wrangham and emphasize the role of taboos as a marker of cultural distinction: observing meat taboos can help people feel that they are part of a group. If you don’t eat dogs, you can shake your head with other fellow Americans at those brutal Sulawesi and South Koreans. If you don’t eat turacos, you are tied with other WaLese men. One of the explanations behind India’s cow taboo is the rise of Islam and the need of Hindus to separate themselves from the Muslims. In a similar pattern, the pork taboo in the Middle East helped differentiate Muslims and Jews from the Christians. And in more recent times, the horsemeat taboo gives the Britons and Americans another weapon against those weird French. By forbidding a food that is so highly nutritious and desirable as meat, a group of people can set themselves apart from their neighbors and feel united. If you were starting a new religion, for example, prohibiting a popular meat could give you an edge, something like a brand. In a similar way, not eating any meat whatsoever can also help people experience the pleasure of belonging: they are a tribe of vegetarians, set apart from the tribe of turkey-eating, burger-grilling carnivores. It goes the other way, too, of course. If you are committed to eating animals, you can roll your eyes with your buddies (over a steak or a turaco wing) at all those silly tree-hugging vegetarians. You know which tribe you belong to.
For the time being, almost all human cultures embrace consuming at least a few species of animals. Some—like Asians—eat more types of meats; others—like Americans and Europeans—a few less. But cultures change. They evolve. As the example of meat taboos shows, our meat-eating habits adjust to the realities of our economies and the state of the environment in which we live. For the Hindus of India, eating cows became too damaging, so they made it taboo. For the Jews of the Middle East, raising pigs became contrary to their best interests—and so they banned it. That’s not the whole story, of course, but an important part of it nevertheless. As our planet’s climate undergoes fast and negative changes, will our meat taboos evolve, too? Will we start eating insects and stop eating cows? Or will we, like the vegetarians of today, make all meats taboo? For now, in some parts of the world at least, the trend is disturbingly reversed: longtime vegetarians are getting hooked on meat again, giving up plant-based diets and consuming more and more flesh, no matter the health and environmental consequences.