Meat Is Good to Taboo ¤ Dietary Proscriptions as a Product of the Interaction of Psychological Mechanisms and Social Processes D ANIEL M.T. F ESSLER ¤¤ and C ARLOS D AVID N AVARRETE ¤¤ ABSTRACT Comparing food taboos across 78 cultures, this paper demonstrates that meat, though a prized food, is also the principal target of proscriptions. Reviewing existing explanations of taboos, we nd that both functionalist and symbolic approaches fail to account for meat’s cross-cultural centrality and do not reect experience-near aspects of food taboos, principal among which is disgust. Adopting an evolutionary approach to the mind, this paper presents an alternative to existing explanations of food taboos. Consistent with the attendant risk of pathogen transmission, meat has special salience as a stimulus for humans, as animal products are stronger elicitors of disgust and aversion than plant products. We identify three psychosocial processes, socially-mediated ingestive conditioning, egocentric empathy, and normative moralization, each of which likely plays a role in transforming individual disgust responses and conditioned food aversions into institutionalized food taboos. Introduction Cultural understandings concerning food, edibility, contamination, and re- lated topics exhibit enormous variation across groups (Barer-Stein 1999; Rozin 2000; Simoons 1994). However, despite such evident heterogeneity, investigators (e.g., Rozin 1987; Haidt et al. 1997; Simoons 1994; Tambiah 1969) have offhandedly suggested that animals and animal products seem especially likely to be the focus of food taboos. The possibility of uniformity ¤ Harriet Whitehead and Robert Aunger kindly supplied us with drafts of their respective works. Paul Arguello assisted with research. Francisco Gil-White, Roy D’Andrade, Robert Aunger, and Robert Sussman provided useful suggestions. We thank the many investigators who shared taboo data and references. ¤¤ Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture and Department of Anthropology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1553. c ° Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003 Journal of Cognition and Culture 3.1