This article examines the abandonment of an important food taboo – the prohibition of milk consumption by newly married women – in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. Offering a detailed exploration of this hlonipha custom in three rural communities, I start from the position that food always reflects the entanglements of its material and symbolic attributes. By tracing health and illness, shifting livelihoods, diets and an important social medicine intervention, this article reveals that in the 1950s milk was a symbolically and materially different food than it had been in the 1930s. I argue that this difference determined whether or not hlonipha would be abandoned. By centring on understandings of food, health and taboos as material and symbolic, this article draws on scholarship on livestock in Southern Africa and contributes to scholarship on food taboos and hlonipha customs, pushing for the incorporation of material aspects of those customs.

本文研究了1940年代和1950年代南非夸祖鲁-纳塔尔省农村的重要禁忌食物，即禁止已婚妇女食用牛奶。我在三个农村社区中对这种千层面的习俗进行了详细的探索，我从食物始终反映其物质和象征属性的纠结的立场开始。通过追踪健康和疾病，改变生计，饮食和重要的社会医学干预措施，这篇文章揭示了在1950年代，牛奶是与1930年代相比具有象征性和实质性差异的食物。我认为这种差异决定了甲胎蛋白是否将被遗弃。本文以对食物，健康和禁忌为实质和象征性的理解为中心，借鉴了南部非洲关于牲畜的奖学金，并为有关食物禁忌和沙棘习俗的奖学金做出了贡献，力求将这些习俗的实质内容纳入其中。