Douglas vs Levi-Strauss

Deciphering a Meal

Mary Douglas discusses the explantations of Hebrew dietary laws in the article "Deciphering a Meal." She talks about the differences of Thailand, New Guinea and Karam studies on the relationships and the "strong analongy between bed and board lies unmistakably beneath the system of classigying animals" and furthermore going into detail about the similarities between eating and sex. Douglas feels this is a important discussion within her article and goes further into detail through the meaning that she asks the question "why should the Israelites have had a similar concern to associate sex with food?" This then leads her to question other religions concerning their meal choices. As you read futher into Douglas' article, you notice that throughout the article she has interesting diagrams. She discribes the first diagram as the "Degrees of holiness", "Denizens of the water", "Denizens of the air" and "Denizens of the land." These diagrams portrayed different things such as certain types of animals would fit into certain places within the diagram.

In addition, Douglas has a few rules such as "meat of the table must be drained of its blood." What Douglas means is that "no man eats with flesh on it, blood belongs to God alone, for life is in the blood." She says this within the article because it is an importance that meat has to contain no blood at all according to her rules with meat. Another rule that Douglas has is that "the seperation of meat and milk, it honors the procreative functions." These rules obviously brought an importance to Douglas during this article such as tieing back to following these important rules throughout the religions from earlier discussed.

The Culinary Triangle

Claude Levi-Strauss compares cooking to relating vowels and consonants in a triangle. Levi-Strauss believes that cooking is deeply a language universal as human activity and "if there is no society without a language, nor is there any which does not cook in some manner at least some of its food." This means that if there was no language within a society means the same as if one does not cook, then there is no food. This is a trianlge within itself and goes hand in hand with one another. The triangle that Levi-Strauss is discussing involves the categories of raw, cooked, and rotted foods. Furthermore, Levi-Strauss goes into detail about which foods are in which categories such as Italian cuisine is considered "rawer" than traditional French cooking which considers it a category of raw.

As Levi-Strauss discusses further into the article, he discusses terms that are related to the three categories of the Culinary Triangle. "Raw, cooked, and rotted are inscribed two terms which are situated: one, the roasted, in the vicinity of the raw; the other, the boiled, near the rotted," the dilema being that there is no term that goes hand in hand with showing a category of cooked. Levi-Strauss thinks that the category would be roasting or boiling, but those terms may not be the best suited.

Comparisons

The two articles are more different them similar because I would say that "Deciphering a Meal" is more grusome and religion bases than Claude Levi-Strauss' "The Culinary Triangle". I say this because during "Deciphering a Meal" it talked more about blood and the different religions that went along with each type of food and "The Culinary Triangle" discussed more about foods that are related and tied together through the three categories of raw, cooked, and rotted.