Diet taboos and ethnic groups

It has never been a nonsensical "stress" or "feudal superstition", but a dual carrier formed by a specific ethnic group under the combined influence of their living environment, cultural context, and historical memory - it is not only a survival strategy that has been repeatedly verified, but also a cultural symbol that distinguishes "our group" from "others". There is no absolute universal right or wrong, only the rationality that adapts to the specific historical context.

I was on a business trip to Ningxia a while ago, and I was having skewers at the night market with a local Hui friend. I raised my hand to order roasted pork rinds, but he held me down with a smile. It's not a big issue of "offend or not". He said that when he was a child, his grandmother always said that in the past, when there was a drought in the northwest, raising pigs required several times more food and water than raising sheep, and it was also easy to spread trichinellosis. Ancient myrrh doctors used to eat people who had killed people, which gradually became a prohibition. Later, it was bound to beliefs, but it became a small secret code for family members to recognize each other - when you go out to eat and meet someone who also doesn't order pork, if you ask a few questions, they are probably from the same hometown.

When I was running in the field earlier, I talked about this topic with teachers from the Institute of Anthropology. In fact, everyone’s opinions were not accurate. Some people follow the path of functionalism and feel that all food taboos that can be handed down are essentially "lessons exchanged for blood." For example, many Yao and Miao villages in the south are still not allowed to eat dog meat. The older generation said that the mountains used to be miasma, and dogs easily carried parasites when they ate rotten food. One meal could bring down half of the people in the village. After passing down the saying, "dogs are the benefactors of the village," was added to facilitate explanations to younger generations. ； Some people agree more with Douglas's statement in "Purity and Danger" and feel that the essence of taboos is to draw boundaries - what is "clean" food that belongs to our ethnic group, and what is "dirty" food from outsiders. If we set dietary rules, whether a group of people have a common memory can be known when they sit down to have a meal.

A few years ago, I spent half a month in Danmin Fishing Village in Xiapu, Fujian. The older people there are still not allowed to turn the fish over on the boat to eat. You tell him that nowadays they all have steel-hulled ships with thousands of horsepower and Beidou navigation, so turning over fish won’t delay things at all. He doesn’t argue with you, he just smiles and waves his hand and says, “It’s been passed down from our ancestors, so just go with it.” Do you think this is stupidity? In fact, no, half of the families in the fishing village have ancestors who have been in shipwrecks. Behind the action of turning over fish is the family's longing for safety at sea, and it has nothing to do with whether it is scientific or not.

Of course, not all ethnic groups’ dietary taboos are worthy of being fully preserved, and this is also the most controversial area on the Internet right now. For example, I saw it in a Dong village in southeastern Guizhou. In the past, the rule was that women could not eat the cattle heads used for sacrifices. Only village elders and male elders could touch them. What kind of survival strategy was this? It was a rule imposed by the patriarchal hierarchy in the past. Now when young people in the village give birth to babies and serve wine, the girls take the first piece when the cow's head is served, and no one says anything. There are also some taboos that have naturally disappeared as the living environment has changed. In the past, the Manchus had a rule not to shoot crows or eat crow meat. It is said that crows saved Nurhachi's life. Now in the city, crows dig into trash cans all day long and make people sleepless. No one says that you are offending the Manchus by driving away crows.

Speaking of which, I myself have stumbled upon this. A few years ago, the company team building team found a team building base in Inner Mongolia. The boss Tu Xin ordered a plate of air-dried horse sausage. There was a Mongolian intern who went with him. He sat in his seat during the whole process without using chopsticks and said nothing. Later, when we were leaving, he mentioned to me that their ancestors were horse tamers, and they were told from childhood that horses are members of the family and cannot be eaten. I felt very guilty at the time. In fact, if I had just asked "Do you have any taboos" in advance, it would have been a thing of the past.

In fact, to put it bluntly, when discussing ethnic dietary taboos, the most unnecessary thing to do is to use your own life standards to measure other people's rules. You grew up in the city, and you always buy meat from supermarkets. Naturally, you can’t understand why the older generation would stick to the rules for a lifetime just because of a mouthful of pork or a piece of horse meat. ； But on the other hand, there is no need to hold these rules as unattainable and treat them as red lines that cannot be touched. To put it bluntly, it is just a group of people who have been together for hundreds of years and have accumulated "scars that cannot be touched" and "thoughts that they do not want to forget." When we really encounter each other, asking more questions and giving in more is more useful than any argument.