As mentioned in the review of the film Soul Food Junkies, food is about much more than what you put in your body for nutrition. Food is about comfort. Food is about race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender roles, family pride, and many other considerations. Many of us, if we are honest, would probably admit to looking askance at someone else's food choices at some point in our lives. Even though we were usually taught not to publicly deride someone else's diet there's no denying that cultural patterns are often difficult to reject, even if we wanted to break them. We all have taboos under which we live. Some of these taboos (incest, kin-slaying) seem to be almost universal across cultures. These are fundamental to human existence. Society can't exist without them. Other taboos, like those associated with food, may vary widely across or even within cultures. Although the people within a given culture or religion may think that a given taboo is natural and universal, people with different perspectives may find the taboo silly or pointless. As the culture matures or degrades, depending on your point of view, the taboo against certain foods may be relaxed, eliminated, ignored or forgotten. For example, in the West, dogs are usually companion animals for humans. They may be living tools or toys.They may even be cogs in horrific dog-fighting rings. But they are almost never food. Some other countries do not have this taboo against eating dogs. Similarly in the West most people do not look upon insects as a ready made inexpensive renewable protein source. Eating bugs is still considered to be something pretty nasty and disgusting by most people in the US or Europe. It's something that only poor sad sack people from the Third World would even consider doing. But in some non-Western cultures there is no sense of disgust at consumption of bugs. Food is food. Because meat production, storage and consumption are expensive for the producer and consumer and environment, we may be on the verge of relaxing our taboo on eating insects. There are going to be too many people in the world with tastes for steak and not enough cattle. Insect consumption might be a partial solution to this problem.
