The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks

[Dave Monroe]

The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks
Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant


For the Greeks, the sharing of cooked meats was the fundamental
communal act, so that to become vegetarian was a way of refusing
society. It follows that the roasting or cooking of meat was a
political act, as the division of portions asserted a social order.
And the only proper manner of preparing meat for consumption,
according to the Greeks, was blood sacrifice.

The fundamental myth is that of Prometheus, who introduced sacrifice
and, in the process, both joined us to and separated us from the
gods—and ambiguous relation that recurs in marriage and in the growing
of grain. Thus we can understand why the ascetic man refuses both
women and meat, and why Greek women celebrated the festival of
grain-giving Demeter with instruments of butchery.

The ambiguity coded in the consumption of meat generated a mythology
of the "other"—werewolves, Scythians, Ethiopians, and other
"monsters." The study of the sacrificial consumption of meat thus
leads into exotic territory and to unexpected findings.

[...]

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3775014.html

http://books.google.com/books?id=dwMNIZXCKg0C