The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig: Riddles of Food and Culture

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Página 79This leaves the camel as the only bona fide cud-chewer that the Israelites couldn'
t eat. Every vertebrate land animal that is not a ruminant was forbidden flesh. And
only one vertebrate land animal that is a ruminant, the camel, was forbidden.

Página 80against sandstorms, camels were the most important possession of the Middle
Eastern desert nomads. (The camel's hump concentrates fat — not water. It acts
as an energy reserve. By concentrating the fat in the hump, the rest of the skin ...

Página 81camel meat made it impossible to use cud-chewing as the sole taxonomic
principle for identifying land vertebrates that were good to eat. They needed
another criterion to exclude camels. And this was how "split hooves" got into the
picture.

Good to eat: riddles of food and culture

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Why are the world's food habits or "foodways,'' as Harris refers to them, so diverse? In this scholarly yet fast-paced and very readable work, anthropologist Harris argues that "major differences in ...Leer comentario completo

Acerca del autor (1987)

Marvin Harris is an American anthropologist who was educated at Columbia University, where he spent much of his professional career. Beginning with studies on race relations, he became the leading proponent of cultural materialism, a scientific approach that seeks the causes of human behavior and culture change in survival requirements. His explanations often reduce to factors such as population growth, resource depletion, and protein availability. A controversial figure, Harris is accused of slighting the role of human consciousness and of underestimating the symbolic worlds that humans create. He writes in a style that is accessible to students and the general public, however, and his books have been used widely as college texts.