Life's Pleasures Quote by Marvin Harris

Harris is doing something slyly destabilizing here: he’s refusing the cozy modern assumption that religious food rules are irrational leftovers, then flipping it into an almost cold-blooded compliment. “No world religions” isn’t a devotional claim; it’s an anthropologist’s dare. He’s telling you that if a dietary taboo survived long enough to become sacred, odds are it didn’t systematically starve its own people. In Harris’s materialist universe, gods don’t drive menus; ecologies do, and belief comes later as the story we tell to police behavior.

The phrasing is carefully hedged. He says “decrease the potential,” not “increase nutrition,” which keeps him out of utopian territory. Religions can be restrictive, even harsh, but across populations and over time they don’t consistently sabotage survival. That’s the subtext: culture isn’t an enemy of biology, it’s one of its tools. The sacred functions like a regulatory system with better compliance than “best practices” ever get.

Context matters: Good to Eat sits inside Harris’s cultural materialism, the 1970s-80s push to explain symbols through infrastructure - calories, labor, risk, and local scarcity. His point is not that religions are scientifically correct, but that they’re rarely nutritionally suicidal. It’s also a shot at armchair critiques that treat faith as pure superstition divorced from consequences. The provocation is almost managerial: whatever else religion is, it’s been competent at keeping bodies fed enough to keep the religion going.