The Story of Food in the Human Past: How What We Ate Made Us Who We Are

By Robyn E. Cutright

A sweeping overview of how and what humans have eaten in their long history as a species
 
The Story of Food in the Human Past: How What We Ate Made Us Who We Are uses case studies from recent archaeological research to tell the story of food in human prehistory. Beginning with the earliest members of our genus, Robyn E. Cutright investigates the role of food in shaping who we are as humans during the emergence of modern Homo sapiens and through major transitions in human prehistory such as the development of agriculture and the emergence of complex societies.

This fascinating study begins with a discussion of how food shaped humans in evolutionary terms by examining what makes human eating unique, the use of fire to cook, and the origins of cuisine as culture and adaptation through the example of Neandertals. The second part of the book describes how cuisine was reshaped when humans domesticated plants and animals and examines how food expressed ancient social structures and identities such as gender, class, and ethnicity. Cutright shows how food took on special meaning in feasts and religious rituals and also pays attention to the daily preparation and consumption of food as central to human society.

Cutright synthesizes recent paleoanthropological and archaeological research on ancient diet and cuisine and complements her research on daily diet, culinary practice, and special-purpose mortuary and celebratory meals in the Andes with comparative case studies from around the world to offer readers a holistic view of what humans ate in the past and what that reveals about who we are.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jan 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9780817393380

Book preview

The Story of Food in the Human Past

ARCHAEOLOGY OF FOOD

Series Editors

Mary C. Beaudry

Karen Bescherer Metheny

Editorial Board

Umberto Albarella

Tamara Bray

Yannis Hamilakis

Christine Hastorf

Frances M. Hayashida

Katheryn Twiss

Amber VanDerwarker

Marike van der Veen

Joanita Vroom

Richard Wilk

Anne Yentsch

The Story of Food in the Human Past

How What We Ate Made Us Who We Are

ROBYN E. CUTRIGHT

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Minion Pro

Cover design: Lori Lynch

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2082-9 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-0-8173-5985-0 (paper)

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9338-0

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction: Food for Thought

PART I. How Did Food Shape Us as Humans? Food in Human Evolution

1. Hunters and Scavengers: The True Caveman Diet

2. Little House on the Savanna: Fire, Grandmothers, and Homo erectus

3. Big Game and Small Houses in the Upper Paleolithic

PART II. What Role Did Food Play in Past Human Societies? The Prehistory of Food

4. Domesticating Humans: The Origins of the Agricultural Lifestyle

5. Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood: Feasts and Fancy Meals in the Past

6. The Taste of Power: Cuisine, Class, and Conquest

7. Foods of the Gods and Sacred Meals

8. Daily Bread: Everyday Meals, Gender, and Identity in the Past

Conclusion: We Are What We Ate

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

I.1. Lévi-Strauss’s culinary triangle

I.2. Excavated plant parts being sorted and analyzed

I.3. Timeline of some key events and periods

1.1. Map showing locations of key sites from chapter 1

1.2. Skulls of a gracile australopith (Australopithecus afarensis), a robust australopith (Paranthropus boisei), and early Homo (Homo habilis)

1.3. Activities that might contribute to artifact clusters at Koobi Fora

1.4. Earliest stone tools

2.1. Map showing locations of key sites from chapter 2

2.2. Homo erectus skull and comparison between body size and shape in gracile australopiths, Homo erectus, and modern humans

2.3. Acheulean hand ax, a type of bifacially chipped stone tool associated with Homo erectus

2.4. Cooking over an open fire, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru

2.5. Hadza women cook tubers

3.1. Map showing locations of key sites from chapter 3

3.2. Artist’s visualization of an encounter between a Neandertal and a human

3.3. Expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa

3.4. Upper Paleolithic tools made from stone, bone, and antler

4.1. Map showing locations of key sites from chapter 4

4.2. Caral

4.3. Some independent centers of early domestication around the world, showing selected plants and animals domesticated in each

4.4. Comparison of teosinte and corn stalks and ears

4.5. Maize, beans, and squash have complementary needs and are often grown together

5.1. Map showing locations of key sites from chapter 5

5.2. Preparing pib, corn dough pies filled with meat and cooked in an earth oven, at a Maya family feast for the Day of the Dead in the Yucatán

5.3. Dried corn, sprouted corn, and two kinds of chicha in the Sacred Valley of the Incas

5.4. Lapis lazuli cylinder seal showing a banquet presided over by Queen Pu-abi

5.5. Making chicha in the Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, with Andrés Bazán

6.1. Map showing locations of key sites from chapter 6

6.2. Haute cuisine features highly transformed and rare or expensive ingredients and a focus on artistry and presentation, as seen in this octopus dish from the restaurant Maras in Lima, Peru

6.3. The Columbian Exchange

6.4. Key food resources in Pedregal households, before and after Chimú conquest

7.1. Map showing locations of key sites from chapter 7

7.2. Anthropomorphic Chavín deity holding a hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus

7.3. Funerary food from Lambayeque burials at Farfán

7.4. Burnt corn offering at Pedregal

8.1. Map showing locations of key sites from chapter 8

8.2. Three kitchens: Pay Pay, Peru, in 2007; Ventanillas, Peru, sometime between AD 1200 and 1400; and Danville, Kentucky, United States, in 2019

8.3. Contemporary Maya example of collaborative kitchen work and a culinary station that includes a metate, or grinding stone, and a griddle that holds tortillas and tomatoes, at a community display for the Day of the Dead near Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico, 2013

8.4. Middle valley painted bowls and a coastal cooking pot from Ventanillas

C.1. Inca agricultural landscape near Pisac, Peru

C.2. World population from 10,000 years ago until present

PREFACE

In my first year of graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, I took a course called Paleokitchen taught by my advisor, Marc Bermann. The course inspired me to analyze food remains from a set of ceramic pots placed in the burials that I excavated under the watchful eye of my mentor Carol Mackey in Peru the next summer. I wrote a master’s thesis on this analysis, but I still wanted to learn more about ancient foodways. My doctoral thesis took a culinary approach to understanding imperial conquest, and I later taught several iterations of my own version of the Paleokitchen course as a professor at Centre College.

Over the past few decades, archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and cultural anthropologists have become intensely interested in studying food. While food has always played a central role in big questions about human evolution and the origins of agriculture, recent studies have considered food in the context of everything from political feasts that shored up imperial power to daily kitchen tasks in rural villages. Cutting-edge scientific methods have allowed archaeologists to use highly technical lines of evidence such as bone chemistry and microscopic pollen embedded in ancient lake cores to ask and answer new questions. New findings and key theories are published and debated in countless scholarly monographs, edited volumes, and journal articles.

This book synthesizes the extensive archaeological and paleoanthropological literature on food. It explores how the quest for food has shaped us as humans, and how human biology and culture have in turn shaped what we eat. As when I teach the Paleokitchen course to undergraduate students, my goal in this book is to communicate some of the most interesting anthropological approaches to food in the human past and to summarize some of the key findings of this work for readers new to archaeology, or those who are curious about what people ate in the past.

I discuss my own archaeological research in Peru in this book, but I also rely on global case studies drawn from the research of many colleagues. The case studies I choose to highlight do not constitute an exhaustive look at food in the past. It would be impossible to provide full coverage of all the fascinating and high-quality anthropological research on food in one book. My goal is to give readers a sense of what we know about food in the human past and how we know it. I am indebted to my colleagues who produced the wide-ranging research discussed in this book, and I apologize for any errors in reporting or interpreting their work.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many colleagues offered specific advice, support, and resources during this project. Michael Twitty shared his bibliography on United States food history. Jerry Moore wrote a book (The Prehistory of Home) that inspired the approach I take here and encouraged me to write books connected to what I teach. Many colleagues, including Anna Guengerich and Lauren Herckis, shared resources, ideas from their specific areas, and feedback based on their own similar courses. My editor at the University of Alabama Press, Wendi Schnaufer, and the anonymous reviewers contributed important critiques, suggestions, and comments that strengthened the final product immensely.

I am grateful for the support of Centre College during the writing process. Various parts of this process were funded by sabbatical support, the Faculty Development Committee, the Charles T. Hazelrigg Chair enabling funds, and other Centre College funds. Especially important was support from my colleagues in the Anthropology and Sociology and Latin American Studies programs. Three Centre students provided special assistance. Jimmy Robinson served as a research assistant during initial stages of writing. Jessica Hale wrote a paper that contributed useful sources on Viking funerary feasts in chapter 7. Kate Himick’s detail-oriented copyediting was essential during a later stage of manuscript development. Former Centre student and artist Isabelle Ballard drew several figures.

I am honored to be part of a group of scholars at Centre who encouraged and supported me as I proposed, researched, wrote, and edited this book. Core members of what started as a writing accountability group and has become a group of close friends and mentors include Eva Cadavid, Mary Daniels, Sara Egge, Jennifer Goetz, Danielle La Londe, Stacey Peebles, Shayna Sheinfeld, KatieAnn Skogsberg, and Kaelyn Wiles.

My love of food has been nourished by Annie Krieg, Kate Redmond, Laurel Cutright, and the many other friends and family members who have participated in endless conversations about food; cohosted Anthropology Family Thanksgivings, potlucks, and dinners; and shared recipes, starters, homebrews, and cultures. My husband Drew Meadows has listened to me rehearse this material for four separate classes (so far) and one book and still asks interesting and helpful questions.

This book is dedicated to my father, Dr. Noel Cutright. As a conservationist, ecologist, and birder, he taught people about the natural world around them and inspired them to protect it. He tirelessly communicated science to the public and shared his passion for birds with local clubs, public radio audiences, state officials, business owners, utility industry executives, the ornithological community, his family, and basically anyone who would listen. He is my role model and the inspiration for this book.

INTRODUCTION

Food for Thought

A group of Neandertals sits around a fire under a rock overhang as evening falls. It is 46,000 years ago at Shanidar Cave, Iraq. All day, the group has foraged through the rugged landscape of the Zagros Mountains, and now they gather in the warmth and relative safety of shelter to cook and eat. The menu includes a porridge of wild barley, legumes, dates, and wild goat cooked using hot stones from the fire. Starch grains from this meal, and a lifetime of others like it, leave a residue on one individual’s teeth. Millennia later, scientists will scrape off this hardened residue and identify the fossilized remains of the meal.¹

Not far away in northeastern Jordan, 30,000 years later, Natufian villagers gather at a basalt hearth in the center of a solidly built house. Despite living in permanent homes, the villagers do not tend farms. Instead, they gather wild cereals, plants, and tubers and hunt gazelles and hares in the surrounding landscape. Using grinding stones, a cook has carefully ground and sifted wild wheat into flour, added the roots of a wild sedge plant, and formed the resulting dough into flat baked loaves. As household members eat and talk, crumbs of bread fall into the fire. Much later these charred crumbs will be found during an archaeological excavation and identified by archaeobotanists as the world’s oldest bread.²

Workers at Amarna village in the New Kingdom period of ancient Egypt are involved in an ambitious royal project. After Akhenaten became pharaoh in the fourteenth century BC, he changed the state religion and moved the capital. In addition to laborers, the construction of a new capital city requires engineers, masonry experts, and other craftsmen, who live in the Amarna village. After a day working on buildings destined to be abandoned after Akhenaten’s death, the workers come home to a tightly packed village to cool off on the roofs of their homes and catch up with their neighbors. In exchange for their work, the state provides them with grain rations—farmed grain from fields, now, not the wild grains of the previous scenes. Grain is transformed to bread at the grinding stones and shared ovens of the village. Archaeologists will use the locations of ovens and grinding stones to reconstruct social organization in the village.³

Members of the Maynard extended family sit down for a dinner of pork chops and fresh garden tomatoes at the mahogany table in the side room of their Annapolis, Maryland, home. As an African American family in the mid-eighteenth century, the Maynards have to find their way in a society in which discrimination and violence are common and their freedom is contingent and tenuous. The family prefers pork enough to brave the discomfort of dealing with white shopkeepers to obtain it. At the same time, they grow food in their backyard and fish in local waterways to maintain a certain amount of autonomy within white-dominated food systems. Archaeologists will recover evidence of sixty years of meals like this one from their yard and root cellar. They will interpret the menu as a reflection of the Maynards’ participation in and resistance to dominant society, a way to stake out their own community and individual identities.⁴

A group of dusty archaeologists gathers on the side of a mountain in northern Peru to take a break. We have been digging through the remains of eight-hundred-year-old houses for hours: scraping and brushing away the sand, sifting it through screens to recover pieces of pottery, seeds, bones of guinea pigs and dogs, copper needles, and other household detritus, labeling plastic bags to preserve the context of each artifact, and recording the work with notes, photos, and measurements. As my colleagues and I lean against the mountainside or relax on piles of sifted dirt, I pass around a bag of store-bought bread rolls and mandarin oranges. William, a member of the local community, passes around a bag of Andean gooseberries his cousin brought home from a weekend trip, and we gossip and joke until it is time to start working again.

Each of these meals took place in a different part of the world, at a different historical moment over thousands of years. Each was the product of very different social structures, relationships with the environment, economies, and food preparation technologies. The individuals who ate these meals led dramatically different lives and understood their worlds in very different ways. Yet these very different meals also share a few essential characteristics.

First, all these meals sat at the interface of biology and culture. They consisted of the plants and animals available in their specific environments, and they responded to the nutritional needs and physical structure of the human body. Each meal was also a product of culture, a term that refers to the behaviors, beliefs, worldviews, and objects shared by a group of people, learned through enculturation into that group. Each meal reflected the technologies, from fire to refrigeration, developed and sustained by that particular society. Ingredients were shared, exchanged, or purchased according to each society’s economic system, and meals were prepared according to each society’s division of labor. The combinations and flavors of each meal revealed cultural ideas of what an appropriate meal looked like and how it should be eaten. These meals were one way that individuals and communities made meaning of their worlds and, in a small way, expressed what it meant to be human. Thus, the meals described here provide a powerful window onto all these diverse dimensions of life.

We humans are incredibly flexible in what we eat, within the constraints imposed by our bodies, environments, and cultures. Culture might help us adapt to our surroundings, our particular ecological and economic conditions, but our surroundings do not exist outside culture. Rather, our surroundings are a product of culture. For instance, when Europeans arrived in eastern North America, the untouched forests they saw had been carefully shaped by intentional fires and other methods by Native Americans for millennia.⁵

Culture is more than an adaptive mechanism. It is a system of beliefs, values, and ideals about how things work, what things mean, and how we should behave. Culture shapes how we understand ourselves, our connection to the world and others, and our experience. What it means to be a woman or man, what a traditional family looks like, how humans relate to the natural and the supernatural, and what foods are appropriate in which context are all shaped by culture rather than fixed by instinct. What we eat is implicated in our individual identities but also in how we navigate larger structures of power and meaning. This book is about how food has shaped us as humans, how we have shaped and reshaped cuisine through our long history as a species, and how this history has made us who we are.

A second shared characteristic of these meals is that they are visible to us through archaeological research into past societies. Archaeologists use material remains—buildings, hearths, pots, seeds, burials—to study past human societies and cultures. This book is as much a story about archaeologists as it is a story about the past.

Many archaeologists use food as a line of evidence to reconstruct other aspects of ancient social organization, economy, politics, gender relations, and so on. In this sense, figuring out what people ate helps us answer big social questions about the past. Other archaeologists study food itself. What did preparing and eating certain meals mean in specific cultural contexts? How was food used to maintain structures of power or to resist, to make meaning of the world and of individual experiences, or to express identity? Each set of archaeologists is interested in knowing something different about the past, but they use similar methods and data to draw their conclusions.

Archaeological techniques for recovering and analyzing evidence have improved, allowing us to better answer old questions and generate new kinds of data. New theoretical approaches have also asked new questions and reevaluated earlier models. By looking at archaeological research on food, we can see the process of scientific inquiry at work, asking questions, laying out hypotheses, gathering data, and then either rejecting or refining those hypotheses. As with any science, archaeologists’ own societies and identities shape the kinds of questions they ask and the kinds of explanations they prefer.

This book synthesizes how research on food has contributed to key debates and new questions about the human past. These questions include the role of particular resources in human evolution, the time depth of some fundamental human social behaviors like gendered divisions of labor and domesticity, the causes and effects of a worldwide transition to agriculture, and the emergence of hierarchical forms of social organization. Specialists in archaeology, paleoanthropology, and related fields have debated these questions for decades in highly technical journal articles and conference presentations, aimed at an audience of other specialists. In this book, I draw on the work of these specialists along with my own archaeological research to speak to a more general audience. My goal is to tell the story of what humans ate in the past, and how archaeologists have used food to understand what it meant to be human in different times, places, and social positions.

HUMANS: OMNIVORES WITH CULTURE

Humans eat at the complex intersection of biology and culture; we eat to survive, but we also eat as cultural beings. Anthropologists who study food distinguish diet and cuisine. Diet refers to the food we eat on a daily basis. Diets should, but do not always, provide the macronutrients (proteins, carbohydrates, and fats) that fuel our bodies as well as micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals that keep us healthy. Like our close relatives, chimpanzees, humans are omnivores. Our teeth and digestive system are equipped to process a wide variety of plant and animal products. We are not specialists like the koala, which eats only eucalyptus, or the lynx, which eats mostly snowshoe hare. Lynxes and koalas never wonder what to eat or figure out whether a particular food will be healthy or poisonous. Natural selection has done this work for them, leaving them to figure out simply where the next leaf or hare will come from.

For humans, and other omnivores like pigs, bears, raccoons, and rats, the question is more complicated. If we can eat a wide range of foods, what should we eat? Food writer Michael Pollan has notably written about this so-called omnivore’s dilemma.⁶ Not all potential foods are equally nutritious, available, or safe to eat, but instinct alone does not tell us omnivores which to choose. Omnivores need to balance experimentation with caution; we need to be curious about new foods but also wary of the unknown. We need to be able to connect feeling bad now with foods we tried earlier, to avoid making the same mistake again. Rats very easily learn to avoid foods that make them sick, and humans too become averse to foods that have negative effects. However, humans have another tool to solve the omnivore’s dilemma—culture.

If diet is the food we actually consume, cuisine is the set of cultural rules, ideals, and behaviors that shape what is appropriate to eat, when, with whom, and in what preparations. Our cuisine helps us, as omnivores, decide what is appropriate to eat, and how we should eat it. Different cuisines have different rules for what to eat, how, and when. Peanuts are part of the diet in the United States, Senegal, and Vietnam, but they are incorporated into different dishes (peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, spicy stews, or green papaya salad, for instance). Each of these different peanut dishes occupies a different place in its specific society and cuisine.

Culture and cuisine also define what is food and what is not food, from within the broad range of substances humans might safely eat. No human society regularly eats everything edible in its environment, because culture does not distinguish food from not-food solely based on toxicity. Insects like grasshoppers and ant larvae are considered food in cuisines of Mexico but not Spain; the French ate horse but the British did not; guinea pigs are party food in Ecuador and Peru but pets in the United States, and so on.

Is there any consistency across cultures in what is considered food and what is not? There might seem to be a simple biological answer to this question: some plants and animals are simply poisonous or inedible to humans. Even so, people in some societies have found ways to process and transform products into food, through cuisine. Bitter manioc or cassava, a starchy root that grows in the Amazon, can cause cyanide poisoning unless it is peeled, grated, soaked, fermented, and thoroughly cooked, but it is regularly eaten.⁷ Even sweet varieties of cassava must be cooked to neutralize their lower quantities of cyanide, yet these varieties are commonly consumed around the world in dishes like fried yuca, mofongo, or tapioca. Another example of a culinary transformation of an inedible food is dairy. The ability to digest milk as an adult is rare in many human populations, but cuisine has responded by using fermentation to digest problematic milk sugars and make products like cheese, yogurt, and kefir.⁸ These examples show that biology alone cannot completely answer the question of why we eat what we do.

Psychobiologist Paul Rozin suggests that there are some universal human behaviors when it comes to food choice.⁹ Sensory effects in the mouth, appearance, anticipated consequences of consumption, ideational factors, and the nature or origin of the substance itself all affect whether we reject or accept particular foods. Rozin suggests that association with nausea is especially powerful in shaping food aversions, which makes good sense considering that paying attention to foods that make us feel sick would have helped us avoid toxic or dangerous food in the past. Another powerful and fairly universal reaction to food is disgust, when we connect a substance with feces, insects, or rot. Yet in some societies mealworms, fermented kimchi, or mold-covered blue cheese are considered entirely appropriate for consumption and are even highly desired, so even deeply seated aversions and reactions are conditioned by culture.

Food preferences in humans are shaped by a few genetic predispositions, such as a preference for sweet flavors, an avoidance of bitter tastes, and an interest in but fear of new foods. However, these evolved preferences cannot fully explain our choices, according to Rozin. We consume, and even crave, a lot of natural irritants and bitter substances. Coffee, tea, and dark chocolate are all bitter, while alcohol, tobacco, and some spices are all irritants. These substances are highly desired by many people, and even occasional negative reactions like nausea do not necessarily keep us from consuming them.

Rozin studied how people come to enjoy eating spicy chili peppers through a complex cultural, physiological, and psychological process. Children who grow up with a cultural preference for spicy foods, such as the Mexican children Rozin studied, learn to like spicy chilies as they observe adults enjoying them and perceive that they are valued. Exposure tends to increase liking, so over time emulation becomes enjoyment. In addition to social factors, psychobiological factors may help explain why people come to like spice. It may be that pain associated with a spicy chili pepper becomes pleasant as people realize the pain is not really harmful. Eating chilies might be seen as a way to engage in controlled risk-taking. The pain might also cause the body to produce opiates, spurring a pleasant and addictive aftereffect to a hot meal.

Chilies and other spices might also help us add unfamiliar foods to our diets by providing a familiar flavor profile. Flavorings do not contribute much to diet in terms of calories, but they are essential to cuisine. You are probably already familiar with some common flavor profiles that make different cuisines distinctive: chilies and lime in Mexican cuisine; soy sauce, ginger, and rice wine in Chinese cuisine; Indian curries made with coriander, fenugreek, cumin, and chilies; and so on. Rozin believes that these distinctive flavorings reduce fear about new foods by making them taste familiar, in the same way that putting ketchup on a new food might make a picky American five-year-old eat it. From this perspective, cuisine might be adaptive in that it helps us incorporate new foods into our diets.

If there are some psychological regularities in the way humans react to food and incorporate it into cuisine, then the human diet must be, at least to some extent, the product of evolution. Many scholars have considered whether there might be a specific diet to which humans are evolutionarily suited. Chapters 1 and 2 explore this question in more detail, but in general an evolutionary perspective shows humans are generalists in the sense that we thrive within a wide range of diets, systems of social organization, family structures, climates, and so on. Much of our behavior as a species is so flexible that the ability to live and eat in variable ways must have proved successful for our ancestors.

While all people must consume enough calories and certain vitamins and minerals to avoid starvation and deficiency-based illness, these parameters are wide. A brief survey of the diets of modern human societies emphasizes this incredible variation.¹⁰ The traditional Inuit diet consists mostly of fatty marine meat and fish, while the traditional diet of central Mexico emphasizes vegetable cornerstones of corn, beans, squash, chilies, and greens plus eggs, insects, and meat. Diets in the Andes are starch-heavy, based on potatoes, quinoa, fava beans, and other high-altitude tubers and grains, while forager diets in Tanzania rely heavily on nuts and honey in addition to game and tubers.¹¹ While scarcity and malnutrition occasionally occur in all these settings, these diets have stood the test of time and thus must be able to support relatively healthy human populations.

WHY DO WE EAT WHAT WE DO?

For humans, then, eating involves choosing a set of foods to eat out of a range of possibly edible foods. Nutritional requirements and other aspects of human biology shape those decisions, and probably push humans toward a broad generalist diet. The environment shapes the foods that are available, but humans reshape our environments as we grow or forage food. Cultural understandings of the world also influence our decisions, by defining what is food in the first place, how these foods should be prepared, and what is appropriate to eat in particular contexts.

Every cuisine has its own shape, and its own answer to what and how we should eat. But what is cuisine? Is it an adaptive mechanism that helps societies live within the basic parameters of their ecosystems? A cognitive and symbolic system that responds to universal cultural structures, or specific cultural contexts? A set of preferences and behaviors shaped by power, politics, and social identity? All these answers have been proposed by anthropologists and social theorists working from different theoretical standpoints. A quick review of some of the most influential approaches reveals widely divergent views on why we eat what we do.

The Meal as Unconscious Structure

One answer to the question of why do we eat the way we do, views cuisine as just one arena of human society that betrays the deep structures of culture. The most famous proponent of this structuralist approach is anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss has suggested that we choose to eat certain species not because they are good to eat but because they are good to think.¹² He wrote, the cooking of a society is a language in which it unconsciously translates its structure—or else resigns itself, still unconsciously, to revealing its contradictions.¹³ In other words, food choices are one of the ways we as humans think about and structure our world. The goal of the anthropologist in studying food is to uncover that structure.

For Lévi-Strauss, everything was defined in opposition to something else. I am a woman because I am not a man. My pug is a dog because she is not a cat, or a horse. Culture draws a line around every concept by opposing it to other concepts. By looking at how sets of oppositions are structured and used to define the world, we can understand the cultural mind. Lévi-Strauss’s most famous discussion of food focuses on what he called the culinary triangle (figure I.1).¹⁴

The triangle starts with the opposed categories of raw and cooked. Double oppositions form a triangle, in which each term is both linked and opposed to the others. In the case of food, the three points of the triangle are the raw, the cooked, and the rotten. Raw food is unmarked, untransformed, conceptually linked to nature. Both rotten and cooked foods are transformed, but rotten food is transformed by nature and cooked food by culture. There are really two oppositions at work, nature/culture and transformed/untransformed.

FIGURE I.1. Lévi-Strauss’s culinary triangle. (Redrawn from Lévi-Strass, The Culinary Triangle, p. 34, Robyn Cutright)

This triangle plays out through different modes of cooking too. According to Lévi-Strauss, many cuisines make a central contrast between roasted and boiled food. Both are cooked, but roasted food is directly exposed to fire, while boiled food is mediated by first covering it in water and then heating in a pot. This distinction comes down, again, to the opposition between nature and culture, where roasted food is closer to nature, raw (or at least not always uniformly cooked, and often bloody), and unmediated. By contrast boiled food is mediated and transformed. Boiled food matches up with the category of the rotten because it is mediated and transformed, because of its consistency, and because many languages connect the two (for instance, the term potpourri actually refers to rotten food). Boiled food is what Lévi-Strauss called an endo-cuisine, prepared for home use by a small group, while roasted food is exo-cuisine, offered to guests outside the family group. The opposed categories of female/male can be mapped onto boiled/roasted, since men are