Food And Evolution: Toward a Theory of Human Food Habits

Afterword

WITHOUT ATTEMPTING TO INDULGE IN TOO DETAILED OR COMprehensive a summary of all the varied themes and arguments contained in this volume, it is appropriate to pick out several of the larger questions that have been raised by its many papers. First, there is inevitably the question whether this has been simply another academic exercise. We think not. Although other circumstances might well warrant a more succinct and polemical work, there is nothing inherently extravagant about the hope that we have entertained of compiling a volume to help focus wider attention on the factors that shape the nature and quality of the food we eat. While many of the authors give considered attention to beliefs about food and the interactions between such beliefs and actual dietary behavior , none forgets that the study of diet is, above all, the study of a microcosm of the cultural, economic, and political forces that constitute the energizing features of the social system in which human beings live. They have tended, therefore, almost without exception, to view diet not as a static entity, but as a process where biological or nutritional requirements, rooted in our evolutionary background, intersect with the social nature of human production. It is this perspective that gives an underlying unity to this work, whether the immediate subject is primate diet, neolithic foraging, or Third World consumption . To that extent, we regard this book as a particularly productive whole, with the earlier papers helping to clarify the baseline of human metabolic needs and later ones describing the varied ways in which different kinds of social and economic formations have satisfied or denied them. This intellectual reciprocity has broadened the perspective normally brought to questions of diet in a number of ways, one of which is the realization by those whose research has been confined largely to contemporary populations that, despite facile arguments about human progress, millions of people today probably do not eat as well as their paleolithic ancestors. At the same time, work on early human physical and cultural development has been informed by current questions regarding the integration of social and biological processes in modem dietary patterns. Bringing such an interdisciplinary perspective to bear on the past and the present, we are impressed by the contribution that such efforts, integrated by a shared evolutionary vision, can potentially make to a better human future. 595 Afterword If nothing else, the papers in this volume have in common a conspicuous concern for the material realities of diet and a reluctance, despite an interest in foodway ideologies, to let belief systems obscure actual practice. In her summary essay, Roosevelt has properly emphasized one of the most important implications that emerged from this commitment-that unequal access to food resources has been a feature of human societies from early in our history, beginning with disparities between the sexes and age groups among foraging populations, and has extended perhaps even more dramatically into the present , where inequalities are based not only on age and gender, but on caste and class and the international division of labor. And as she has aptly observed, the constraints that underlie such disparities necessarily compromise the assumption that food practices are merely the outcome of some mechanical process of cultural optimization. In actual circumstances, social systems at any given point in time embody the intersecting and contradictory efforts of different individuals , categories of individuals, and social groups representing differing immediate interests; the outcomes are more likely to represent strategic compromises . Above all, there is not likely to be, or ever to have been, any resolution that is equitably apportioned among all sectors. It is recognition of this fact which places an important responsibility upon us to focus our attention on the variations in diet that reflect strategic differences in power and status within any given system, whether it be local, national, or international. It remains to be said that the papers assembled here do not seem to us to give encouragement to those who argue that diet-or any other aspect of human behavior-is either the reflection of mysteriously encoded mental designs or the result of events so varied and complex that their origins are similarly beyond any comprehension. Both of these viewpoints would suggest that the character of human foodways is more or less impervious to scientific inquiry , but such a conclusion, while it may comfort those who wish to avoid direct confrontation with disquieting realities, finds little justification in the papers presented here. If they demonstrate that...