"If the moral attitudes of primitive man are hard for the Western mind to grasp and translate into familiar terms, there can hardly be one more so than the Maori notion of cooked food as the lowest thing, the furthest opposite to the sacred, in fact filthy.

For us to divest our minds of Christian notions of good and evil and substitute the concept of simple payment, harm for harm (or 'revenge', as we commonly call it with a misleading moral overtone), is simple enough - perhaps because every schoolchild has at some time known the latter in his horrid heart.

Even the Maori custom of weeping over friends when they arrive instead of when they depart has a certain logic that is not beyond our comprehension.

But to enter, against all conditioning, into the minds of a people for whom cooked food and the act of eating could carry the overtones of meaning that we in our greater wisdom attach to their physical opposites and to sex, is a good deal harder.

One has somehow to throw the mind into a state of being that is radically unlike ours. Yet if the trick can be done, a light comes on." 

(Maori Myths)