Food and How It Gets That Way

What does our culture tell us about food, and what does food tell us about ourselves and the cultures we live in?  Tune in each Tuesday as I pull out my Ph.D. and write on the anthropology of food in a weekly feature, Food and How it Gets That Way.

Food, like sex, is a common currency and language of our diversified world and few things in life bring humans as much pleasure, revulsion and confusion as both.  But unlike sex, food sustains us from birth to death, and like sex, if it’s good we want even more of it, damned the costs.  Public health officials warn us of FTD’s (Food Transmitted Diseases) by telling us to wash, boil, or otherwise disinfect what we put in our mouths, social scientists lecture us about the different roles men and women play in producing, reproducing and serving up food, and agronomists tell us how to maximize production while minimizing input – in other words, how to get lots of it with the least amount of effort.   

But like all human universals, food not only reflects what all cultures have in common (the need to figure out a way to get it, distribute it, and preserve it), but what makes us unique (just precisely how different cultures get it, distribute it, and preserve it).  Society is something many species have – like ants organizing to build an elaborate matrix of tunnels to transport and stash stolen crumbs or chimps organizing to bash each other over the head with big sticks – but culture is something only humans have – the ability to give meaning to the things, relationships and activities in our lives, whether they be stolen crumbs or primal warfare.  

How humans organize to produce food, to distribute it and to prepare it, reflects the physical environment in which we live, the technology that is available to us, the social rules for who is the most, and the least, important among us, and what it is that tastes good and tastes bad and what is totally forbidden and to whom.  Imagine offering a cigar to a young woman or a Shirley Temple to a man in a suit and you start to see that even when we don’t have taboos, we have taboos.  We learn to like or not like certain things depending on who we are and where we are and when we are. 

Some species are able to survive on only one food, like Koalas who eat only eucalyptus leaves or whales that eat only fish, but humans have been blessed with the need to eat a diversified diet to obtain the nutrients our bodies need.   And so each culture has developed complex ways to obtain these different foods.  But certain human universals appear to be innate – infants innately reject bitter, sour, salty and spicy foods – which is a good thing from an evolutionary perspective because most poisons are bitter, sour, salty or spicy.  But cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris pointed out that as humans grow, this innate abhorrence turns to acceptance as cultures incorporate these very tastes in their cuisines – such as the spicy foods of sub-equatorial societies (which hide the taste of rotting meat in hot climates), the sour foods of northern European countries (where dairy and vegetables could be preserved through the development of sour milk, sauerkraut, sour dough and pickled fish).  And the universal taste for sweets is born, not made, so that babies will guzzle the calorie and nutrient-rich mothers’ milk.

Technology has allowed us to obtain more and more diverse foods, from extracting sugars so that we can obtain our sugar fix not just from local fresh fruits, but from syrups, candies and beverages.  Sweetened condensed milk now flavors bitter coffee and tea for hard-working farmers in remote rainforests who need a quick burst of energy, just as a sugary cola provides a culturally-acceptable way to fuel the afternoon drudgery of the office worker. 

Food and culture tell us a lot about what it means to be human, what it means to share and unite with other people, and what it means to interact with our environments.  We often grow so accustomed to our relationships with food that we lose sight of the ways in which this relationship has developed across the course of human time.  But there is such a richness of knowledge in the study of food that reflecting on how we came to eat what we eat, like what we like, and share what we share, tells us not only something about our food, but something about ourselves and about each other. 

Next time you prepare and share your food, think on these things: what bonds are you creating and sustaining through food, what technologies are changing what you eat and how you eat it, and what rules are you following – or breaking as you do so?  And next time you reach for something sweet and feel that twinge of guilt, just remember, you’re only human.