topics:  | food | history | culture

Why are human food habits so diverse? Why do Americans recoil at the thought
of dog meat? Jews and Moslems, pork? Hindus, beef? Why do Asians abhor milk?
In Good to Eat, bestselling author Marvin Harris leads readers on an
informative detective adventure to solve the world's major food puzzles. He
explains the diversity of the world's gastronomic customs, demonstrating that
what appear at first glance to be irrational food tastes turn out really to
have been shaped by practical, or economic, or political necessity. [Also
deals with] why
there has been an explosion in fast food, why history indicates that it's
"bad" to eat people but "good" to kill them, and why children universally
reject spinach. ... demystifies the causes of myriad human cultural
differences.