You Are What You Eat?

Just a head's up, before you read the article make sure you already ate.

Here is a chance to test your ethnocentrism and ability to practice cultural relativity. You probably know that the French like to eat snails and that in some Asian cultures, chubby dogs and cats are considered a delicacy.

You might be able to see yourself eating frog legs, toasted ants, perhaps raw camel's liver, or even dogs and cats, but this custom may provide a better test of your ethnocentrism and cultural relativity.

Maxine Kingston (1975), an English professor whose parents grew up in China wrote:

"Do you know what people in [the Nantou region of] China eat when they have money?" my mother began. "They buy into a monkey feast. The seaters sit around a thick wood table with a hole in the middle. Boys bring in the monkey at the end of a pole. It's neck is in a collar at the end of the pole, and it is screaming. Its hand are tied behind it. They clamp the monkey into the table; the whole table fits like another collar around its neck. Using a surgeon's saw, the cook cut a clean line in circle at the top of its head. To loosen the bone, they tap with a tiny hammer and wedge here and there with a silver pick. Then an old woman reaches out her hand to the monkey's face and up to its scalp, where she tufts some hairs and lifts off the lid of the skull. The eaters spoon out the brains."

Source: Components of Symbolic Culture