I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.

Yes, a general principle that comes out of research behind Good to Eat is that there are no world religions that have acted to decrease the potential for the nutritional well-being of their followers.

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.

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.

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.

Ethnography literally means 'a portrait of a people.' An ethnography is a written description of a particular culture - the customs, beliefs, and behavior - based on information collected through fieldwork.