Food Taboos of Religion

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For many people, new food taboos are just not religious. They're in the sense of coming from one of the traditional religions. The point i was making is that societies have all kinds of traditions that they maintain for reasons we don't always understand. We can do better than that. So discretion, rather than rules would be the order of the the day.

Traditions and norms can seem at best out-of-touch and at worst offensive to many a modern mind. But Israeli computer scientist and Talmud scholar Moshe Koppel argues that traditions and norms--if they evolve slowly--create trust, develop our capacity for deferred gratification, and even, in the case of how we prepare cassava, protect us from poisoning. Listen as the author of Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures talks with EconTalk Russ Roberts about tradition, religion, tribalism, resilience, and emergent order.