Food And Evolution: Toward a Theory of Human Food Habits

Introduction

THIS BOOK RESULTS FROM AN INTER_DISCIPLINARY EFFORT TO ADvance our understanding of why human beings in differing times and places eat what they do. It begins, at the most fundamental level, with the collective view of the editors and other contributors that knowledge and comprehension of human foodways, and the web of practices and beliefs associated with them, must depend upon our seeking general principles and recurrent processes beneath the immediate appearance of a worldwide confusion of seemingly capricious preferences, avoidances, and aversions. Once this decision is made, however, a complex set of explanatory strategies and options still remains to be explored and integrated, since the knowledge we have of human food customs and practices derives from data collection that has traditionally been dispersed among varied specialties and theoretical strategies. We cannot claim that all the relevant disciplines or all the salient levels of analysis and perspective are represented in the chapters that follow, nor do we presume that this work encompasses an adequate representation of those that are. But we hope at least to have helped to broaden the general scope of inquiry beyond the horizons of any single viewpoint, while still maintaining what we emphatically regard as a commitment to a nomothetic approach. The disciplinary perspectives of the contlibutors to this volume range over primatology (Hamilton, Milton), nutrition (Pellett, Lieberman), biological anthropology (Armelagos, Katz), archaeology (Yesner, Cohen, Roosevelt, D. Harris), psychology (Rozin), and agricultural economics (Nair). Although cultural anthropologists predominate numerically, they too offer a great diversity of insight and information based on their varying professional interests and, in particular, their wide spectrum of regional specializations: Bangladesh (Lindenbaum ), Amazonia (Johnson and Baksh, Good, Ross), Paraguay (Hawkes), Canadian sub-arctic (Winterhalder), Southeast Asia and Africa (Franke), Mexico (Pelto), Costa Rica (Edelman), Peru (Orlove), and Europe (Ross). In attempting to integrate the diversity of disciplinary viewpoints that these scholars represent, the editors chose an evolutionary framework as the only suitably broad yet coherent and unifying one available to us. In its biological dimensions, at least, it seemed self-evident that the core of human dietary practice, all subsequent embellishment aside, must be regarded in terms of the 1 Introduction emergence of the hominidae and the co-evolution of human diet and our physical potential for cultural behavior. It seems likely, for example, that hunting for vertebrates, increased meat consumption, and expanded tool use were implicated in the evolutionary processes that led to the expansion and reorganization of the australopithecine brain and to the development of Homo's unique capacities for consciousness and semantic universality. There is, at least, little doubt that, throughout most of the Pleistocene, the evolution of biological repertoires and the evolution of behavioral repertoires were closely intertwinedand that diet is one domain where the intersection was particularly noteworthy. With the appearance of Homo sapiens, if not earlier, however, a progressively greater independence-or lag-between biological and cultural selection reduced the rate and incidence of gene-culture co-evolution. Radically different modes of production, accompanied by massive changes in food habits, emerged in the later phases of human prehistory and throughout subsequent history without any discernible evidence of related changes in gene frequencies . Increasingly, behavior associated with the procurement, distribution, and consumption of food came, like the rest of human behavior, to be propagated through learning rather than genetic replication. And although selection based on consequences for reproductive success continued to operate, it was increasingly supplemented, if not displaced, by selection based on the more immediate consequences for the satisfaction of biopsychological needs and drives. Though the feedback between these two levels of selection became increasingly indirect and delayed, the biological level still cannot be excluded from our attempt to understand general as well as particular aspects of the evolution of foodways. Indeed, in a small number of cases such as that of fava bean (see Chapter 5) and milk consumption, specific preferences and avoidances continue to be associated with genetic polymorphisms found with varying frequencies among different populations. In evolutionary perspective, however, most of the great changes in human diet can be more readily associated with shifts in modes of production that are not in tum linked to such genetic variations. The transition from upper paleolithic to neolithic modes of production, for example, generally involved a shift from narrow reliance on animal foods to broad-spectrum regimens in which the consumption of domesticated tubers and grains gained ascendancy over meat and other animal foods (pastoral modes of production, of course, followed a divergent trajectory). The next...