Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Hotheads | 383thing they touch? It is a straightforward adaptation to a basic fact aboutthe living world: germs multiply. Microorganisms are fundamentallydifferent from chemical poisons such as those manufactured by plants.The danger of a chemical depends on its dose. Poisonous plants are bitter-tastingbecause both the plant and the plant-eater have an interest inthe plant-eater stopping after the first bite. But there is no safe dose for amicroorganism, because they reproduce exponentially. A single, invisible,untastable germ can multiply and quickly saturate a substance of anysize. Since germs are, of course, transmittable by contact, it is no surprisethat anything that touches a yucky substance is itself forever yucky,even if it looks and tastes the same. Disgust is intuitive microbiology.Why are insects and other small creatures like worms and toads—what Latin Americans call "animalitos"—so easy to revile? The anthropologistMarvin Harris has shown that cultures avoid animalitos whenlarger animals are available, and eat them when they are not. The explanationhas nothing to do with sanitation, since bugs are safer than meat.It comes from optimal foraging theory, the analysis of how animals oughtto—and usually do—allocate their time to maximize the rate of nutrientsthey consume. Animalitos are small and dispersed, and it takes a lot ofcatching and preparing to get a pound of protein. A large mammal ishundreds of pounds of meat on the hoof, available all at once. (In 1978 arumor circulated that McDonald's was extending the meat in Big Macswith earthworms. But if the corporation were as avaricious as the rumorwas meant to imply, the rumor could not be true: worm meat is far moreexpensive than beef.) In most environments it is not only more efficientto eat larger animals, but the small ones should be avoided altogether—the time to gather them would be better spent hunting for a bigger payoff.Animalitos are thus absent from the diets of cultures that have biggerfish to fry, and since, in the minds of eaters, whatever is not permitted isforbidden, those cultures find them disgusting.What about food taboos? Why, for example, are Hindus forbidden to eatbeef? Why are Jews forbidden to eat pork and shellfish and to mix meatwith milk? For thousands of years, rabbis have offered ingenious justificationsof the Jewish dietary laws. Here are a few listed in the EncyclopediaJudaica: