Today, in cultures which think of themselves as modern, most of the food
we speak of as raw comes elaborately prepared to the table. It is important to
specify “food we speak of as raw” because _46_ is a culturally constructed,
or at least culturally modified, concept. Though we commonly eat many fruits
and some vegetables with minimal preparation, we take their rawness for
granted because it is culturally _47_. No one speaks of raw apples or raw
lettuce. Only if the food in question is normally cooked, but _48_ raw, do we
specify raw carrots or raw onions or whatever. When meat and fish are served
raw in the west, their rawness is so exceptional that it takes on extra
connotations of _49_ and risk, of barbarism and primitivism. The Chinese
traditionally classified barbarian tribes into “raw” and “cooked”
according to the degree of _50_ they saw in them; and a similar mental
classification of the world comes easily in the west, where literary tradition
has long equated lust for raw flesh with savagery, blood-thirst and the rage of
gastric impatience.
【題組】48. (A) essential (B) incorrigible (C) accurate (D) acceptable