I don't know of any cases where as a result of religious precepts a population have found themselves enjoying less food than they would have if they didn't follow this particular religion.

Like most North Americans, I'd been raised on the notion that milk is the first food, and everybody must like it because it's so good and so important for growing up and for being healthy.

The commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' does not say it's O.K. to kill some people and not others.

When a woman gives birth to a child, the child needs to be able to digest the mother's milk; but when this child is old enough to begin to eat other foods, there is some switching off of this ability to consume milk.

There are very important and practical issues raised by following this alternative route which says, lets look to material conditions, to the systems of production, to the needs that human beings have, and to competing alternative solutions to the satisfaction of those needs.

Hindus and Westerners alike see in the meat-eating taboos of India a triumph of morals over appetite. This is a dangerous misrepresentation of cultural processes. Hindu vegetarianism was a victory not of spirit over matter but of reproductive over productive forces.

Pigs prefer to wallow in clean mud, but if nothing else is available, they will frequently wallow in their own urine, giving rise to the notion that they are dirty animals.