Food taboos are as universal as food. It stands to reason then that they have helped us through the years in our efforts to avoid killing ourselves. As it turns out, some of the most fascinating food taboos dovetail with another basic human desire–reproduction.

All around the world, there are all kinds of rules about what pregnant woman can and cannot eat. (As if it weren’t hard enough being pregnant without everyone offering their well-intended advice.) “Declaring certain foods taboo because they are thought to make a person sick is also the basis for the many food taboos affecting pregnant women,” according to ethnobiologist Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of Finland, who studies folk wisdom.

Some of these taboos are myths and some of them have a modicum of grounding in