Guest Post: How Did We Decide Which Animals It’s OK to Eat?

In which historian George Dillard dives into the complicated origins of food taboos

Occasionally, a story lands on my virtual desk that is too interesting and thought-provoking not to share.

That happened this week when historian

George Dillard

sent me this story to my Medium-based food publication Rooted. George kindly agreed to let me share his story with you all.

George writes about why we have chosen that some animals are OK to eat whilst others are off limits and how that changes within different cultures. It’s a fascinating ride through food culture, history, politics (think Trump’s “they’re eating the dogs” claim) and anthropology.

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Over to George.

If you listen to the political pundits, presidential debates are all about “moments.” When we think back to the memorable debates of the past, we don’t recall the candidates’ answers to the moderators’ policy questions. Instead, we focus on little things — the quips or gestures that reveal something about a candidate.

So, in 2000, it didn’t matter that Al Gore seemed to understand a lot more about the way the government worked than George W. Bush did; instead, viewers focused on the fact that he sighed a lot. Many viewers left the debate thinking that Gore was a pompous know-it-all.

And in 1992, nobody paid attention to George H.W. Bush’s answer to a voter’s question about the recession, but everybody noticed that he peeked at his watch while she was talking. The gesture made Bush appear to lack empathy with regular people, in contrast to Bill “I feel your pain” Clinton.

We all know which moment we’ll remember about the 2024 debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. It’s the portion when Trump was asked why he had tried to “kill” a bipartisan immigration bill.

Rather than answer the question, he chose to ramble about the size of the crowds at his rallies and then embarked on a divisive and dishonest rant about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. You probably know it by heart at this point:

In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.

Trump’s allegations about the Haitian-American community in Springfield were untrue and designed to inflame Trump’s base. Trump’s lies, and his refusal to back down from them after everyone from Springfield’s (Republican) mayor to Ohio’s (Republican) governor confirmed that they were untrue, led to bomb threats, school closures, and other disruptions for Springfield.

Many commentators have pointed out that when Donald Trump and JD Vance amplify these lies about Springfield, they’re echoing racist tropes from earlier periods of American history.

Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century, for example, were often falsely accused of eating dogs. This sort of thing was (and is) a way for nativists to make immigrants seem alien and dangerous.

The whole disgraceful episode made me wonder about another question, though: how did we decide which animals were OK to eat? Who declared that eating cows or chickens is a perfectly honorable activity (in fact, some Republicans argue that eating cows is almost a patriotic duty), while eating dogs, horses, or cats is suspect? And why do these rules vary from society to society?

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If I went into an American restaurant and ordered horse or dog, I’d get a very different reaction than if I asked for pig or cow, even though there’s no meaningful distinction between the four animals. All are reasonably intelligent, all are domesticated, and all of them are charismatic (that is, we think they’re cute and make them the protagonists of children’s shows).

So why do we slaughter and consume pigs and cows on an industrial scale but recoil at the thought of snacking on a dog or a horse?

Most societies have food taboos — that is, rules about which foods are good and proper to eat and which ones aren’t. Though there is an occasional prohibition against beans or mushrooms, anthropologists Daniel Fessler and Carlos Navarrette find that the vast majority of humans’ food taboos concern eating animals and animal products.

Why are humans much more likely to prohibit (or be disgusted by) the eating of dogs than the eating of, say, carrots?

First, it’s riskier to eat animals than it is to eat most common agricultural plants. Meat goes bad more quickly and is more likely to harbor bacteria and parasites that can make us sick, especially if we don’t prepare it carefully.

We’ve developed strong disgust responses to meat in a way that we haven’t for plants, even though there are a lot of plants that can kill us.

Fessler and Navarrette note that many species — not just humans — are likely to turn their noses up at meat of unknown origin. Our wariness about consuming animals that we’re not used to eating might save our lives.

Second, we have feelings about animals that we don’t have about plants. We see something of ourselves in them; scholars call this “zoocentric sympathy.” Our feelings toward animals don’t always stop us from killing and eating them, but they do impel us to do something about the guilt that we feel about doing so. In many societies, hunters are obligated to behave with restraint when hunting or express their respect for the animals they’ve killed.

Perhaps drawing lines about which animals we eat — I’ll eat this animal but not that one; I’m not a monster, after all — helps us feel like we’re behaving morally and rationally, even though we probably aren’t.

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So how do we choose which animals we’ll eat and which we won’t?

Again, the answer is complicated. It seems that several factors come into play.

The first is simple practicality. Some animals are easier to domesticate than others. Animals that grow to maturity quickly, eat plants, live in herd structures, are willing to breed in captivity, and won’t randomly attack us are actually pretty rare.

In agricultural societies (where hunting may be a recreational activity but not a major source of calories) we tend to normalize the consumption of the few animals that lend themselves to domestication and think it weird to eat the ones that aren’t as easy to raise on a farm.

But that doesn’t explain why dogs and horses, for example, are taboo in the United States, or why pigs are considered unclean in the Islamic world.

Marvin Harris has argued that there’s often a rational reason for taboos — usually connected to disease risk or resource competition. He says that Middle Eastern societies banned the eating of pigs, for example, because they competed with people for resources when turned loose in the forest and posed a disease risk when confined on farms near humans (it’s called swine flu for a reason). Animals that appear to pose a health risk to humans often find themselves on the don’t-eat list.

But our ideas about eating meat aren’t entirely functional. They often have more to do with our own psychology than rational fears of disease or resource shortages.

We like our food to belong to clear categories, and meat often doesn’t. Amphibians, for example, are sometimes taboo because they’re both water animals and land animals. Pigs are tricky because they have hooves, which makes them like other animals that are considered OK to eat, but aren’t purely herbivorous, which makes them different. So some societies avoid them altogether.

We also get closer to some animals than others. We draw a line between pets — which might, especially in modern societies, be thought of as members of the family — and livestock, which are there to do work and be eaten. We develop more sympathy for the animals with which we work and live most closely — we name them, we talk to them, and we develop relationships with them — and keep a moral distance between ourselves and the animals that we raise purely for meat.

In the modern food marketplace, we’ve further expanded the physical and psychic distance between us and our food. We almost always encounter the animals we choose to eat as shrink-wrapped chunks of protein, not as living, breathing creatures. That way we don’t have to think about how cute that cow was before we eat it.

Even among animals that we consider livestock, we establish rules that allow us to feel that we’re behaving with compassion, even if those rules don’t make a lot of logical sense. For example, most of us are fine with eating pigs raised in brutal conditions of confinement, for example, but (sometimes) draw the line at eating veal raised in similar conditions.

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Humans may be the only species that demonstrates concern about the welfare of other animals. This presents a moral conundrum for the majority of humans who eat meat: how can we eat an omnivorous diet and maintain a coherent moral outlook?

The contradiction between people’s desire to snuggle with their dog on the couch and then devour a pork chop for dinner creates what James Serpell calls “moral anxiety.”

In order to alleviate that anxiety, we draw firm lines between the animals whose welfare we want to prioritize and the animals whose welfare we’re indifferent about. These rules may not hold up under scrutiny, but most of us choose not to examine them very closely.

After all, we establish them to help us feel like we’re doing the right thing.

Donald Trump and his ilk know that, if they falsely accuse immigrants of eating cats and dogs, they’ll provoke strong emotions. Our taboos about food are powerful, fueled by strong emotions of disgust and influential concepts around purity.

But, like Trump’s allegations, in the end they don’t make a lot of logical sense.