Chapter 6

Foodways

Finding, Making & Eating Food

Overview

• I clearly remember my Ph.D. chair requiring me to read in an area of study called the ”political

economy of health”.

• I understood the health piece, after all I was a student of medical anthropology.

• I was resistant to the political economy component! Why?

• It was a macro-level analysis of production, distribution and consumption of health care.

• I thought that reading about nation-states would be a waste of my time.

• Of course I was wrong, but my views did reflect those of many anthropologists (and still

does) in that we tend to focus on micro-level issues, what some call small-scale societies.

• Keep in mind:

• Economics takes place in real settings, that are not the same across all of humanity.

• As a consequence, each culture presented represents a different way of cultural adaptation.

• So, anthropologists apply a holistic perspective to the study of food, focusing on the complex

interactions of nutrition, ecology, beliefs, social institutions, and political–economic

processes.

• Classic themes in economics: Production, distribution, and consumption.

• Production: the creation and reproduction of goods, as well as the knowledge of how to make

and use these goods.

• Distribution: movement of goods and services through some form of exchange system

• Consumption: use of goods and services.

• Economic anthropology studies economics in a comparative perspective and is the focus of this

section of the AAA: The Society for Economic Anthropology.

Why No Universal Human Diet? 1

• Like other animal species, we need energy to survive and reproduce.

• Unlike other species, however, we think a lot about what we eat, why we eat it, how we prepare it,

who we eat it with, the social bonds that are forged over food, the rituals associated with

consumption, and so forth.

• Human dietary adaptability and constraints

• Humans are omnivores (in Latin, “to devour everything”).

• Our actual diets do not consist of “everything” but, rather, a limited range of plants and animals,

determined by what is available, biological restrictions, cultural taboos, and individual

preference.

• The human diet evolved to be extremely fluid and adaptable.

• Humans can and do eat a tremendous variety of things. Around 6 million years ago, our

ancestral primates were largely tree-dwelling fruit eaters (arboreal frugivores), with a diet

dominated by plant materials.

• A shift toward omnivory occurred 1.8 to 2 million years ago as some primates began to eat

animals.

• Eventually, our ancestors began to cooperatively hunt and consume meat more regularly and in

greater quantities.

• This dietary shift was supported by the use of fire for cooking, which breaks down tendons and

toxins in meat.

• The high-quality proteins of meat supported the evolution of our ever-larger, and increasingly

complex, brains.

• The human digestive system also became more flexible to sustain an omnivorous diet,

allowing us to live in remarkably diverse environments.

What a Big Bird!

Why No Universal Human Diet? 2

• Human dietary adaptability and constraints (continued)

• Culture and biology interact in complex ways to create human diets.

• Although humans are adaptive enough to eat virtually anything, the range of things we actually

do eat is narrower and follows predictable patterns.

• All cultural groups have food proscriptions (prohibitions) and food prescriptions (what you

should eat)

• As a result, in any particular society, resources are overlooked, technology is not developed,

and human reject items for ideological reasons.

• Most human groups eat both plants and animals.

• People typically form meals around a core–legume–fringe pattern: Core is a complex

carbohydrate, legume is beans and/little meat as a source of protein, and fringe are the

condiments/flavorings.

• This combination meets biological needs (balanced nutrition) and cultural needs (variety and

flavor).

• Cultural influences on human evolution: Digesting milk

• A very recent adaptation is lactase persistence.

• Lactase is an enzyme that allows some people (with dairying ancestors, which go back no more

than 10,000 years) to digest lactose, a sugar found in milk.

• In the United States we rarely talk about lactase persistence but rather “lactose intolerance”

(anthropologists prefer “lactase impersistent”).

• Cultural beliefs and practices, as well as social institutions, that support dairy production also

support the persistence of lactase production into adulthood in certain populations.

• Contrary to the advertising slogan, milk only does some bodies good.

Is That Food or Just Disgusting? 1

• Foodways and culture

• Which of the following things is food: cheese, rotten shark flesh, rat,

buffalo penis stew, caterpillars, oysters, spiders, porcupine, or

hamburger? Although we all have strong preferences, the correct answer

is “it depends.” These things are all regularly consumed somewhere.

• That one group of people finds some things disgusting that others

consider delicious illustrates how culture shapes our food preferences.

Ideas about what is or is not food are closely tied to processes of cultural

construction, symbolism, group identity, and cultural change.

• Application of the term “foodways” is a relatively recent development

in anthropology, but its holistic perspective toward food has a long

history.

• Nutritional anthropology

• Nutritional anthropology is both a subfield of cultural and of biological

anthropology. One focus is on foodways (the study of the broad

perspective about peoples’ food usage).

• The organization most liked to this anthropological specialty is called

the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN)

• Your instructor was trained as both a nutritional anthropologist and a

demographer.

• Studied the relationship between body image, food and exercise at an

Oregonian campus.

• Analyzed food and medicines among a Solomon Islands population.

Is That Food or Just Disgusting? 2

• Foodways are culturally constructed

• Foodways are permeated by cultural beliefs and governed by systematic rules and etiquette.

• Rules regulate what animals people hunt, what plants they grow, and how they share, prepare,

and eat food. These rules are all culturally constructed and differ from one society to the next.

• For example, people in supermarket economies view food as material goods, less often as

spiritually significant.

• In contrast, the Hua, who live in the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea, believe that

food has mystical properties.

• Eating food unites the consumer with the people who produced it and imbues them with

the essence of the organisms they are consuming.

• Owing to the spiritual power of food, the Hua have rules regarding its preparation,

sharing, and consumption.

• Foodways communicate symbolic meaning

• Food is a source of meaning and a way to convey social messages. Specific foods and meals

can unite people when they are together and symbolically connect them (“comfort food”)

when they are separated.

• However, food can also communicate division and unequal power relations. For example,

sumptuary laws restricted certain foods to preferred social classes.

• In Renaissance England, laws allowed gentlemen to eat two courses of meat and fish per

meal but limited servants to one meat course for the entire day.

• Servants ate meals consisting of milk, butter, and cheese the rest of the day (a restriction

that would certainly favor lactase persistence).

Is That Food or Just Disgusting? 3

• Foodways communicate symbolic meaning (continued)

• Mary Douglas suggested that food is comparable to language as a form of symbolic

communication.

• She observed that formal English dinners have a precise, sentence-like serving order.

• Douglas (1966) also concluded that food taboos, like Jewish dietary laws, are a means

through which people symbolically communicate religious piety.

• Claude Lévi-Strauss famously said that food is good to think and eat.

• He established structuralism: an anthropological theory that people make sense of their

worlds through binary oppositions like hot–cold, culture–nature, male–female, and

raw–cooked.

• This idea of dichotomy is often called ‘dualism’ and is also associated with both

Plato and René Descartes (body-mind dichotomy).

• These binary oppositions are expressed in social institutions and cultural practices.

• For example, Lévi-Strauss (1969) observed that all cultures distinguish between

raw and cooked food, marking a symbolic distinction between nature and culture.

• The act of cooking transforms nature into culture.

• As a symbol, food is polysemic: has more than one meaning at the same time

• Southern food can be seen as low status by one group and as part of one’s ethnicity

by another

• The meanings of foods shift with culture change (example sugar, apples)

Is That Food or Just Disgusting? 4

• Foodways mark social boundaries and identities

• Food preferences, etiquette, and taboos also mark social boundaries and identities.

• Eating practices may mark gender differences, ethnic or regional differences, and profession or

class status.

• In the US, we often measure one’s social status in the social and economic hierarchy called

one’s SES (socioeconomic status. Social status implies a set of rights and duties associated with

the person occupying a certain position within a cultural group.

• Occupation, education and/or income are the most often used social markers of one’s place in

America.

• Social status is delineated by gender and age in all societies.

• Social markers are closely related to differing notions of taste: a concept that refers to the sense

that gives humans the ability to detect flavors, as well as the social distinction associated with

certain foodstuffs.

• For example, Gerd Spittler (1999) observed that the Kel Ewey Tuareg in northern Mali, West

Africa, interpret a varied diet as a sign of poverty, people who are forced to eat anything

available.

• Americans value the diversity of their diet (think of our supermarkets.)

• Changes in food preferences are often linked to other social changes, such as increased

stratification, in a group.

• Food and gender as an example of social identity

• Food practices are linked to gender in that food tasks are divided up by gender

• Access to food can be determined by gender

• Types of foods seen as appropriate for men and women often differ. Watch this commercial.

Is That Food or Just Disgusting? 5

• Foodways are dynamic

• Food changes happen for a number of reasons, including:

• Environmental shifts (the global access to fishes is now threatened due to increased popularity

in industrialize societies.

• Food becomes linked to eating heathy: spinach, orange juice

• Food that was expensive become cheaper: white bread, sugar.

• My late father would not eat whole grain bread; he insisted on Wonder® bread and he used

the phrase, “Best thing since sliced bread”.

• Sidney Mintz calls sugar a drug food -- a food that is cheap, without nutrition, but deadens

hunger pangs and stimulates the user.

• Food choices are not strictly determined by environment (not deterministic), but certain social

and economic contexts do encourage some options over others.

• For example, uneven distribution of resources encourages exchange, as with the Aitape of

Papua New Guinea who trade mainland food resources for island resources—an exchange that

is mutually beneficial for both island and mainland people.

• In my childhood, most fruits were too expensive so fresh fruit was a luxury.

• Local foodways may be shaped by cross-border trade and globalization policies.

• For example, in Mexico, maize tortillas are a staple food.

• But the importation of American corn, increased ethanol production in the US, and subsequent

rises in corn prices have made this former staple food too costly for many Mexicans.

• You might want to read A history of the world in six drinks. In addition to looking at the invention

of beer, wine, spirits (from sugar), coffee, tea and cola, this book looks at the effects they had on

societies.

How Do Different Societies Get Food? 1

• Anthropologists call the social relationships and practices necessary for procuring, producing,

and distributing food modes of subsistence. There are four major modes:

• Foraging: obtaining food by searching for it, as opposed to growing or raising it.

• Pastoralism: mode of animal husbandry, which is the breeding, care, and use of domesticated

herding animals such as cattle, camels, goats, horses, llamas, reindeer, and yaks.

• Horticulture: the cultivation of gardens or small fields to meet the basic needs of a

household.

• Intensive agriculture: large-scale, often commercial, agriculture (also called industrialized

agriculture).

• Intensive agriculture has furnished most people with most of their food supplies for

several thousand years.

• Foraging, horticulture, and pastoralism were once far more common—especially foraging,

which was our only mode of subsistence for hundreds of thousands of years.

• All four modes, and combinations of different modes, persist in the contemporary world,

demonstrating the adaptability of human subsistence.

• There is a tendency to label cultural groups by their primary means of food production. This

causes problems:

• The first is that most groups use mixed production strategies (say foraging and trading for

goods).

• The second problem is that these terms create a gloss (covers too many different cultural

groups to have any real usefulness).

How Do Different Societies Get Food? 2

• Foraging

• This is the among the first of human strategies for gathering food (scavenging is the other).

• Foraging (hunting, fishing, and gathering) requires a relatively large amount of space and

high mobility.

• Since most foraged foods aren’t suitable for long-term storage or preservation, foragers

travel frequently in pursuit of food resources, rather than bringing the food to themselves.

• This is the among the first of human strategies for gathering food (scavenging is the

other).

• Misconception 1: A common misconception about foraging is that it is a brutal struggle for

existence. In general, foragers tend to work less to procure their subsistence than

horticulturalists and pastoralists.

• For example, Richard Lee (1969) observed !Kung San (also known as Ju/’hoansi) foragers

of the Kalahari Desert who spent fewer than twenty hours per week hunting and gathering

food.

• Other hunter–gatherer groups work more hours per week, but none routinely work the

equivalent of a forty-hour week like people in industrial agricultural societies.

• Marshall Sahlins (1972) called hunter–gatherers (foragers) the “original affluent society”

because their wealth is measured in valued leisure time.

• Foragers have few material possessions but do not perceive themselves as “impoverished.”

• Because they are typically nomadic and highly mobile, they do not want extra material

possessions that would need to be carried.

How Do Different Societies Get Food? 3

• Foraging (continued)

• Misconception 2: Foragers never use a mixed production strategy.

• Today, we define a group as foragers if >75% of resources are acquired this way.

• A survey of the ethnographic evidence shows that most contemporary foragers

integrate some farming or herding into their hunting–gathering strategies.

• Many also exchange foraged foods with food-producing communities, especially to

obtain carbohydrates.

• Misconception 3: Another misconception about foragers is that they hunt and gather

because they “have no other choice,” don’t understand farming, etc.

• Clearly, few people on earth have a better understanding of plant and animal life

cycles than the foragers who rely on them.

• They certainly don’t lack the knowledge to farm if they chose to do so.

• One of the major questions in anthropology -- as it relates to food -- is why some groups

shifted from foraging to other modes of production.

• Foragers most often change modes of subsistence only when forced to by external

factors. For example, increased population densities and environmental degradation

make hunting and gathering less productive and feasible as a way of life.

• Foragers are typically ethnic minorities and often treated in discriminatory or

exploitative ways by neighboring agricultural and herding peoples who view them as

social inferiors (e.g., “pygmy” hunter–gatherers in central Africa).

How Do Different Societies Get Food? 4

• Pastoralism

• Pastoralists subsist via animal husbandry: The breeding, care, and use of domesticated

herding animals.

• Not many wild mammal species were ever domesticated.

• According to Jared Diamond a set of criteria needed to be meet before an animal could be

domesticated (Listed in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel).

• Eat many foods and eat low on the food pyramid.

• Reach sexual maturity quickly.

• Be able to bred in captivity.

• Be less aggressive and not dangerous to humans.

• Not be too skittish as they are harder control (the zebra as an example).

• Be part of a social hierarchy into which humans can place themselves as the leaders.

• So what species have been domesticated?

• Near East: cattle, goats, horses, pigs, and sheep, cats; Mediterranean: rabbits.

• Mexico/Central America: turkey; South America: guinea pig, llama/alpaca, Muscovy

duck.

• Asia: chicken, water buffalo, Bactrian camel, yak; and Africa: donkey, dromedary

(camel), geese.

• Rather than raising animals for butchering as food, pastoralists use “renewable” animal

products. They rely on milk, blood, hair, wool, and fur—all of which regenerate throughout

an animal’s life. Pastoralists also use draught animals to pull or carry heavy loads.

How Do Different Societies Get Food? 5

• Pastoralism (continued)

• Some pastoralists are sedentary, others partially or completely nomadic

• One form of nomadic pastoralism is transhumance: Regular seasonal

movement from one ecological niche to another. The Maasai of

Kenya, for example, move their cattle to areas with permanent

waterholes, then, and during the rainy season, to normally dry grazing

lands.

• Other pastoralists use horizontal migration (also called pastoral

nomadism): The movement across a large area in search of whatever

grazing lands may be available. For example, Arabian Bedouins

move herds thousands of square miles within their arid environment,

finding any available vegetation and periodically congregating with

others at permanent water holes.

• Pastoralism requires high mobility because herds can do quick, even

irreparable, damage to vegetation in arid landscapes.

• In recent decades, drought, famine, livestock diseases, loss of land,

warfare, and government pressure have forced some nomadic pastoralists

to become sedentary.

• There is one exception: Decentralization, decollectivization and

increase of privatization and market economies in Mongolia, China

and Tibet changed the picture for the Kirgiz ethnic group in Xinjiang

Province, China.

• There pastoralism is on the increase.

The Maasai

The Kirgiz

Bedouins

How Do Different Societies Get Food? 6

• Farming (which includes horticulture and intensive agriculture)

• Somewhere around 15,000 years ago the first farmers began to appear in the

archaeological record.

• V. Gordon Childe called this change the Neolithic Revolution, with an impact as

important as the Industrial Revolution.

• Ester Boserup (1965) theorized that population growth spurred foragers to start

planting some crops, which led to them gradually becoming less mobile and more

sedentary.

• Anthropologists still debate the many details of this theory, although it has helped

explain circumstances that might promote a shift from foraging to horticulture.

• Farming is actually a broadly used term that covers many practices but can be evaluated

using these variables:

• Tools: range from digging sticks to plows to tractors

• Land tenure: ranges from constantly shifting fields to centuries-long occupations

• Alteration of the land: ranges from virtually none to ditching, terracing, and irrigation

canals

• Soil enrichment: ranges from minor (ashes from trash fires) through local fertilizers

(pig droppings) to high-tech imported insecticides and fertilizers

• Crops: range from mixed cropping to monoculture

• Purpose: ranging from minor dietary supplements to subsistence to cash cropping.

How Do Different Societies Get Food? 7

• Horticulture (continued)

• Horticulture (also called extensive agriculture)is the cultivation of gardens or small fields for

household provisioning and even small-scale trade but not investment. Horticulturists are

sedentary, living in one place to regularly tend to crops.

• The care of domesticated plants and animals takes time but increases the amount of

predictable or reliable food energy that humans can get out of a plot of land.

• This makes it a better option for densely populated areas not amenable to foraging.

• Horticulturalists use relatively simple technologies (hand tools like knives, axes, and digging

sticks) and a lot of human labor – as opposed to draught animals or mechanization. Many

horticulturalists combine these efforts with hunting and trading with foragers for wild foods.

• A common form of horticulture in the tropics is swidden agriculture: in which the farmer

slashes and burns a small area of forest to release plant nutrients into the soil.

• Slash-and-burn cultivation and shifting cultivation are alternative labels for this type

horticulture. Another common name used is swidden agriculture (or horticulture).

• This is the typical pattern in tropical, hilly forestland around the world.

• This is an ecologically sound practice.

• But in recent years this is not as accurate.

• With increased populations, the land is left in production too long in many areas.

• Usually these farmers are also engaged in various types of foraging to supplement the diet.

• As soil fertility declines, the farmer allows the plot to regenerate to forest. Slash-and-burn is

most effective with lower population densities, which allows fallow periods for the land to

regenerate.

How Do Different Societies Get Food? 8

• Intensive agriculture

• In contrast to horticulture and pastoralism, the goal of intensive

agriculture is not to feed a household but to generate food for a

larger community by intensification: the processes that increase

agricultural yields.

• Some varieties of intensification follow:

• Preparing the soil (weeding, mulching, mounding, fertilizing)

• Type of technology:

• Agriculture is farming using plows and tractors, permanent

occupation of the land, irrigation, fertilizers and insecticides,

and often the growing of single crops.

• Compare the two pictures to the right.

• A larger labor force (e.g., Asian rice farming)

• Water management (new forms of irrigation)

• The most intensive form of agriculture is industrial agriculture: The

application of industrial principles to farming. These principles

include the following:

• Increased specialization, often only a single crop

• Land, labor, seeds, and water obtained as commodities.

• Unequal distribution of resulting agricultural products.

• Increased mechanization and productivity (economies of scale).

How Do Different Societies Get Food? 9

• Intensive agriculture (continued)

• Most forms of intensification have long-term benefits and drawbacks.

• On the one hand, intensification has fed large populations and spurred the development and

spread of large-scale complex societies.

• On the other, ever-increasing populations require ever more intensive use of the landscape, with

negative environmental consequences.

• For example, in California’s Imperial Valley, decades of irrigation to produce vegetables for a

growing US market created salt concentrations (salination) in the soil, while depleting it of

necessary nutrients.

• In eastern Washington, irrigation is eroding soils.

• Industrialized agriculture is a response to colonialization.

• Food is now globally traded

• Even so, within industrial societies foraging and other forms of subsistence production continue

in the forms of gardening, hunting, gleaning (gathering a second harvest), and foraging (wild

mushroom hunting, etc.).

• The Green Revolution

• After World War II, scientific research was applied to increasing crop yields. Eventually, this

included chemical fertilizers and genetic engineering of crops.

• The resulting productivity “boom” has been called the Green Revolution: The transformation of

food production in the less industrialized countries into one based on industrialized agriculture.

• Today, biotechnology has increased crop production, created pest-resistant crops, and even

created crops that ripen on our “unnatural” schedule, are expensive, and often socially

disruptive.