Malnourished children eating a fruit (lychee) without any previous meal could get poisoned and have a intense decrease in blood sugar levels.
That make me wonders on how many religious practices, superstitions, etc., still exists in modern cultures, transmitted mouth-to-mouth, due to some misunderstanding of the true mechanisms of some occurrence in the past?
I can easily see that a "children can't eat fruits without eating some cereal" could have come as religious belief, from a long past. And it would be effective for hundreds of children.
Kosher food could be a pre-modern public health campaign. Trichinosis is a dangerous parasite found in pork (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinosis) and shellfish have their own dangers.
PG wrote about how he considers many religions to have a culturally-evolutionarily useful bit ('don't eat tainted pork' over time will increase your economic growth) and a viral one, which perpetuates and reinforces the belief.
Historically both pigs and dogs were seen as unclean in the middle east because they roamed the streets eating whatever they could find, which included human waste. Cities used to be pretty dirty. Roman started ranching pigs and shipping them to cities, as the latin folk were really into pork. This solved a lot of the disease problem, as do sewer systems and the like. So if basic precautions are taken against disease, pork is not worse than any other meat.
I know there was an HN article about this, but I can't find it.
I don't know. But I don't think too many other omnivores were usually eaten: cows, chickens, sheep, even horses are all herbivores.
To a larger point, the imprecision of the rule would have been dictated both by customs and limitations in knowledge of the time: culture inasmuch as there would be no need to restrict eating omnivores that nobody ate anyway, and knowledge would dictate how precise you could be while still being safe: we now know that pork is ok to eat, but only because we have the tools to reliably determine whether pork is tainted, and build processes and supply chains that minimize that. For civilizations that didn't yet have that insight, much safer to avoid the whole thing.
Good point... I forgot they'll eat just about anything, including eggs. You don't want to feed them brunch scraps, otherwise they may start poking at unharvested eggs sitting around.
In some cases it's also plainly about animal ethics - "don't boil the calf in the mother's milk" - which tends to be a strong focus when you live with the animals you eat; cf. essentially all indigenous people (as well as Islam and Judaism) who have religious seremonies attached to slaughter, and believe this reduces animal suffering (also in Islam and Judaism).
The Chinese also have a superstition about never drinking anything 'cold'. They have to boil everything first, which was definitely good in ancient times and in places with bad water purification; but it has also led to strange things in the modern era such serving Coke hot.
Coke isn't served hot in China. It's served without refrigeration. Same as Europe.
I would also argue that boiling water still has its place in China. Not every country has the luxury of tap water that wouldn't kill you (except Flint...).
Even if the Chinese have a preference of cold vs warm water, they prefer warm.
It depends on the province, the city, and generation of people. Sure this doesn't happen in Shanghai or even Beijing, but China isn't just Shanghai and Beijing.
The article clearly states that these are "healthy" children who were "uninterested" in eating meals when they consume lychee. I don't see the word "malnourished" or "religious practices" mentioned anywhere in the article.
1 - malnourished: "The children's age and state of nourishment were also factors."
2 - religious practices: I don't say that this was said in the article. I'm conjecturing that "religious practices" could arise, in the past, when people could relate, for example, that children eating those fruits could fall ill, and then could create some religious practice about it.
actually it's exactly the opposite of what you think.
lychee is a relatively new fruit in this region/country, and there wasn't enough transmission over this short period to establish traditions/practices around it.
Hum, let me explain a bit. I understood that it's a new fruit in the region, and seems that even the local population wasn't considering relations between the fruit and the illness. And, exactly because of that, it made me think about how things were in the past.
In other words, given enough time without attention and information and so on, would a new belief arise in that population, one strong enough that would prevent kids from eating the fruit? And few of those who eat them anyway would perish, reinforcing the "tradition" that it was a cursed fruit (or something like that) ?
Of course, if you consider that the same constraints that were present 3,000 years ago still persists: lack of a good knowledge about chemicals and biology and how the human body behaves.
