Tannaitic culinary and commensal regulations prescribe social practices that enact and maintain a distinct Jewish identity. Non-Jews are understood to eat different foods in a different manner, resulting in different bodies.

The Tannaim build their Jewish identity via three food practices. First, they understand the ingestion of certain foods to be symbolic, or metonymic, of Self/Other. Concomitantly, a person is embodied by the consumption of – or abstinence from – metonymic food items. As we shall see, this phenomenon is not unique to tannaitic Judaism. One recent example of embodiment through ingestion is the renaming of “French fries” as “freedom fries” in the U.S. House of Representatives' cafeteria from 2003 through 2006. In this instance, differing views on policy toward Iraq led to a desire among some U.S. Representatives to rename a food item, lest by ingesting “French” food, one would become, in some way, “French.” Tannaitic texts reflect this same notion, wherein consuming – or abstaining from – certain metonymic foodstuffs is understood to be an act of embodiment; it is a practice that creates an “Us” and a “Them.”