Food

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Food

Food is a biological necessity. Like sex, it has implications for the perpetuation of the species, but unlike sex, it also has implications for the survival of each individual. Social anthropologists point out that food is further implicated in the social and cultural survival of human groups. Acquiring and eating food is thus extended into the realms of the economic, political, and psychological.

Human beings are omnivorous, capable of safely eating a particularly wide variety of plant and animal sources of nutrients—a characteristic that has enabled the worldwide distribution of the species. Major, very broad transitions in human modes of living can be traced. Some 10,000 years ago the protracted shift began from foraging—continually on the move, hunting and gathering—to farming—settling, domesticating plants, and tending livestock. Then there is the comparatively recent 500-year increase in the movement of both people and foodstuffs around the globe: for example, new people to the Americas, turkeys to Europe. Most recently is the approximately 200 years’ industrialization of both food production—agriculture, preservation, and processing—and food consumption—wholesale and “ready-made” retail distribution—that has been coupled with and supported by the increasingly intense application of physical, chemical, and biological sciences. The role of food in this long history of human groups is shrewdly summarized by Raymond Firth, who observed that in industrial society, getting food occurs in breaks between work, whereas in nonindustrial society, getting food is the day’s work (1973).

The contemporary supply and distribution of food worldwide is notoriously unequal and inequitable. Particular attention has been devoted to international policies for the relief of severe and devastating food shortages. A major theme of this work is to note serious disjunctions that have profound consequences for those whose plight is meant to be alleviated. On the one hand are the media images of famine conjured in more-developed countries, typically of children in profound distress—images that then get dovetailed with assumptions embedded in international agencies’ debates on world food security as to the relief required. On the other hand are what Johan Pottier describes as the everyday realities food-insecure people face (1999). In The Anthropology of Food he includes a simple, but compelling example. Official agricultural programs had no space in their information-gathering exercises in Kenya for the testimony of an elderly woman farmer, reputed in her community to be the most knowledgeable about growing yams. The program was, “top down,” informed by research scientists’ knowledge, not local expertise.

Even desperately hungry people need “their own” food, because, despite being omnivores, people do not eat everything available that is nontoxic and nutritious. This observation is only partly explainable in biological terms. Human groups the world over are observed to be selective in what, culturally speaking, counts as food. Such social definitions of food vary from society to society and they change over time. Familiarly, horse meat is food in Belgium but not in the United States; dog is a delicacy in parts of China but not in France. And on their first introduction to England, tomatoes were regarded as attractive but poisonous, whereas potatoes were initially grown in Sweden only as a garden ornament.

The social definition of food extends to encompass whole cuisines—distinctive combinations of ingredients and modes of their transformation into dishes—and what has been called culinary culture, a shorthand term for the ensemble of attitudes and tastes (both literal and metaphorical) members of a social group bring to cooking and eating food they have selected. Certain cuisines and culinary cultures have a long and persistent history. The beginnings of a Japanese rice-based cuisine, for instance, can be dated from the introduction of wet-rice agriculture over 2,000 years ago. Rice features strongly in eighth-century myths seeking to establish a national identity distinguishing Japan from its neighbors. These stories entailed notions of abundance, a land of good rice harvests. Divine power was incorporated into every grain of rice, symbolizing not only the relation between deities and people, but also of those among human beings themselves. Thus rice became central to commensality, the act of eating together, and thereby cemented and symbolized social relationships—and a meal without rice could not count as a meal.

The case of rice illustrates the manner in which some have stressed the prime significance of symbols in understanding culinary cultures. By contrast, others have argued that emphasizing the material and practical rather than the symbolic offers superior intellectual interpretations of the variability in social definitions of food. But in a study of the global reach of sugar over four centuries, Sidney Mintz presented a powerful case for a combined approach that recognizes the symbolic significance of a foodstuff while arguing that meaning thus attributed is a consequence of practical human activity (1985). That the meaning of sugar could change from medicine in late-medieval Europe to luxury (like a spice, available only to the exceptionally wealthy) in the early modern period, then to a commonplace necessity to the laboring classes of nineteenth-century Britain, occurred, Mintz argues, as a result of usage—and of supplier-induced demand.

The case of rice also introduces the idea of a proper meal—one that is culturally appropriately composed, prepared, and served on socially prescribed occasions—a version of which appears to be found in most human groups. A British version—the caricatured “meat and two vegetables”—continues to be readily detectable not only in Britain, but also in its erstwhile colonies in North America, southern Africa, and Australia. Scholars specializing in the study of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century consumption have claimed, however, that allegiance to such “traditional” modes of eating are disappearing, as part of broader changes of postindustrial society. One element of such changes, they argue, is the proposal that social differentiation is diminishing: No longer are education, income, gender, or age systematically evident in preferred dishes, locales for eating (e.g., expensive restaurants or fast-food diners), or the household division of food-preparation tasks. Another is that the predominant mode of food provision in both household and public settings has become commercial rather than domestic: Coupled with an increase in the rate of eating away from home in cafés, restaurants, and diners is the use at home of ready-made complete meals rather than dishes prepared from raw ingredients. And a third element—finding frequent expression in popular and journalistic commentaries claiming that families no longer gather round the table to share a meal—is that institutional rhythms are subject to erosion. Substantiating these claims adequately is difficult, however, and determining the extent to which they apply remains incomplete.

What is clear, though, is that the twenty-first-century food supply is global, providing populations in more developed countries with year-round fresh produce from less developed countries and an apparently ever widening range of products on supermarket shelves, with consumer choice as a watchword. Critics point to the environmental as well as social costs, for example in the diversion of comparatively limited local supplies of water to agricultural production for export markets, or the additional carbon emissions of air freight. Trends such as this are paralleled by a strikingly rapid increase in rates of obesity in a growing number of countries. Some commentators are even predicting that a generation of children will suffer fatal diseases associated with obesity—for example, diabetes and heart disease—to such an extent that they may even predecease their parents. This kind of public concern looks set to supplant the food-safety scares that dominated the last two decades of the twentieth century, the most dramatic and most costly example of which was bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly called mad cow disease, responsible for an invariably fatal disease if eaten by human beings. Public health policies, especially those geared to limiting the rates of obesity, are not readily aligned with economic policies supporting industrialized food production and the associated provision of employment. This essential, but in its current incarnation highly contested, sphere of human existence represents a considerable intellectual challenge to the still comparatively small number of social scientists seeking to understand its myriad facets.

SEE ALSO Food Crisis; Malnutrition