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Introduction
Eating habits are examples of the dynamics of ever-changing cultural processes. What a community eats, or when it eats, differentiates it from other communities, just like language, dress, rituals, and other cultural codes generate distinctions among groups. In The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss links five basic cultural codes to the five senses and he argues that “one of the codes occupies a privileged position; this is the one connected to eating habits, the gustatory code” by which “the human state can be defined with all its attributes.”1 Food, diet, and cuisine have also played a predominant role in the belief system of many groups. For example, the Popol Vuh contains the creation myth of the Post-Classic Chiché Kingdom of highland Guatemala. After several unsuccessful attempts, the creator, Heart of Sky, forms people from maize. Then again, in the