Two powerful concerns of humans of all historical ages are getting enough food and getting food that isn't poisonous. These are challenges that have showed up every day for thousands of generations, so there's a lot of brain hard-wiring that pays attention to these issues. But these are also issues where cleverness - learning - pays off handsomely too, so the brain is also well adapted to learning how to do these better. The result is an interesting mish-mash of thinking, and it supports a dramatic mish-mash of food-related activities and truisms.
What this section is about is trying to identify when the mish-mash is being effective, and when it is being wasteful but feels effective - goat sacrificing.
The purpose of eating is to provide the body with the chemicals and nutrients it needs to sustain life. Much of what is consumed is used to provide energy for the chemical reactions of life. This is food used as fuel. Beyond that food provides chemicals for the body's growth and repair. Some of the basic ones are carbohydrates, fats and proteins, some of the more elaborate ones are vitamins and minerals.
And then it gets complicated.
The complication arises depending on what is available to eat; especially in the Neolithic Village environment food supply changes constantly. It can change as quickly as from minute to minute. (Example: a flock of birds fly overhead, can one be caught?) Some candidates on the menu are more nutritious than others, some are poisonous but look nutritious, some can change their nutrition value depending on how they are prepared, and most of them change their value depending on when they are harvested (green, ripe, rotten).
And there are changes from person to person, from age to age within a person's life time, and depending on their circumstance: are they sick, pregnant, or suffering from a specific nutrition deficiency such as being thirsty on a hot afternoon or the wasting away caused by lack of fresh fruits and vegetables during the spring famine? (In civilized conditions we think of winter as the harsh time. But in Neolithic Age reality those sunny, warm days, just before the edible plants are ready to gather, are even worse.)
The combination of importance and complexity means that a lot of thinking is applied to this issue.
At every stage the civilizing process changes the food acquisition and preparation mix that a community uses, and it changes it differently for each culture. This is why we have old fashioned and ethnic foods. Food acquisition and preparation are situations where human cleverness makes a big difference.
And, just like primitive food candidates can be better or worse, invented food acquisition and preparation technologies can produce better or worse results. This means that even though civilization makes a big difference in what we eat, the worrying about food quality has not diminished. The question of who should worry, what to worry about, and how we should protect ourselves from poor quality foods is a chronic hot topic.
As a result of the worry, there is a constant swirl of food products and food advice that surround people living in civilized environments - some of it is good and some of it is silly. Either way, some people take the advice very seriously, and the people and companies who offer products and advice find it pays off to spend a lot of money influencing public discourse on the topic. Advertising, celebrity endorsements, TV chefs, nutrition experts in all sorts of media endorsing diets, nutritional supplements, and specific foods are all examples. People are interested in food and millions of people make lots of money off that interest.
Food topics have one of the most potent mixes of both instinctive thinking and learned thinking in the world of human activities. Both are powerful, which means this is an arena where good science and urban legend are equally powerful players – people pay attention to both. The goal of these next sections is to help distinguish good advice from waste. In this section, goats are being sacrificed... and some are being turned into tasty goat chops.