THE TWO ESSAYS THAT FOLLOW SHARE AN EXPLICIT MATErialist strategy and are addressed specifically to the question of the general determinants of food preferences and avoidances. They range over a variety of pre-state and state-level foodways, highlighting food practices that have generally been regarded as beyond the pale of nomothetic approaches or whose cost-benefit significance is in dispute. The epistemological basis for distinguishing idealist from materialist approaches to foodways rests on the separation of data obtained through emic operations from those obtained through etic operations. Emic foodways data result from eliciting operations in which the participants’ sense of what people...

THE STUDY OF VARIATION AND CHANGE IN HUMAN DIETS—especially in that most enigmatic dimension of dietary custom, food preferences and avoidances—is important in several respects. In a general way, it compels us to confront and challenge the possibilities and limits of cultural explanation (see Ross 1980), while, more specifically, it enables us to begin to seek (and hopefully to formulate) generalizable and predictive principles in a domain of culture where we are routinely led to believe that such principles are unlikely to apply. For it is precisely in the matter of dietary customs that the concept of culture...

THE RECENT HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO food preferences and aversions is necessarily a history of divergent research strategies. Idealist approaches have emphasized the discovery and appreciation of foodways in which ernie, mental, and superstructural factors appear dominant. Materialist approaches have sought to relate foodways to biopsychological, etic, and behavioral variables. Eclectic approaches have sought a middle ground, acknowledging the general influence of material variables but allowing for a number—or even a majority—of exceptions.

In general, cultural idealists explain variations in food preferences and aversions as a consequence of “culture” (by which they mean the learned emic and...

LIKE MOST PRIMATES, HUMANS ARE OMNIVORES IN THE NARrow sense of consuming both plants and animals. This omnivorous capability is undoubtedly a phylogenetic characteristic—a ,part of “human nature.” Yet omnivory is a rather vague dietary concept. Non-human primates display considerable species-specific variation in the ratio of plants to animals in the diet. Primate foodways also differ in the ratio of particular kinds of plants or plant parts (e.g., roots, leaves, fruits, seeds) and in the kinds of animal materials consumed (e.g., insects, vertebrates). The question arises, therefore, as to whether human beings have a phylogenetic “legacy” that leads us...

THERE IS CURRENTLY STRONG INTEREST IN DEVELOPING A BETter understanding of the probable food habits and dietary niche of early humans (Isaac 1978; Peters and O’Brian 1981; Stahl 1984). Without such information, we are handicapped in our ability to interpret the significance of many features of human morphology and to construct viable models of early human ecology (Isaac 1978; Sussman 1978). Further, it is increasingly obvious that many of the major health problems faced today by more modern technological societies stem from factors related to diet. This strongly suggests that the average diet in such societies is not entirely suitable...

EVOLUTIONARY ANALYSIS OF CONTEMPORARY HUMAN DIETARY preferences is an aggregate science, consisting of several distinct approaches. These include: (1) analysis of early hominid diets; (2) the study of the diets of non-human primate species and possible regulating principles underlying them; and (3) theories concerned with patterns of foraging by animal species in general.

What is the relationship of our dietary past to present human dietary pre-dilections? Here I briefly evaluate some evidence concerning early hominid diets and the diets of certain contemporary ground-dwelling primates. The dietary habits of contemporary primates may help qualify our interpretation of evidence about past and...

OVER THE LAST 15 YEARS MY COLLEAGUES AND I HAVE BEEN investigating the interface between human nutritional needs and the traditional cultural food practices that satisfy the nutrient needs of the individual and the population as a whole (Katz and Foulks 1970). For example, we have studied the interrelations between human biology and culture in the traditional preparation and processing of maize into specific foods by American native populations (Katz, Hediger, and Valleroy 1974). In this work we have developed evidence that the traditional cultural practices encompassing the preparation and processing of maize significantly enhance its nutritional quality. Maize was...

THE ESSAYS OF PART III DEAL WITH GENETICALLY DETERmined biopsychological factors that affect foodways from the standpoint of nutritional adequacy and “taste.” From a materialist perspective, it is axiomatic that human foodways that lead to severe malnutrition will tend to be selected against during both biological and cultural evolution. But this leaves us with the question of how much of what kinds of nutrients in what proportions and at what stage of life for males and females (including pregnancy and lactation) with different somatotypes and under varying conditions of health will result in a severely malnourished population. As the essays...

MORE THAN 40 SEPARATE ELEMENTS OR COMPOUNDS HAVE NOW been identified as necessary for life, together with at least 40 grams per day of amino acids as protein and more than 200 grams per day of a mixture of carbohydrate, protein, and fat that can be metabolized for energy. Although all these materials are required for daily metabolism to proceed, it is not necessary that they all be provided daily in the diet. The ability of the body to draw on reserves or stores allows varying amounts of time to elapse before deficiencies may be recognized. Oxygen (if that be...

OUR WORK ON FOOD PREFERENCES AND AVOIDANCES COMES from a psychobiological perspective, but has been aided and enriched by information and perspectives from anthropology. I hope in this paper to show how a psychobiological approach can ask questions and provide information and points of view that can enrich the anthropological approach. I shall deal first with the biological roots of food choice in the human omnivore and then discuss the psychological dimensions of preference and avoidance. I will then describe what we know about how foods get to be liked or disliked and, in particular, how people come to like...

FROM BOTH A DIACHRONIC AND A SYNCRHONIC PERSPECTIVE, the preference for some type of animal protein and animal fat in human diets is a cultural imperative (Abrams 1979). Usually animal fat accompanies animal protein in foods (USDA 1975). Hence, when humans consume animal proteins, they also automatically consume some animal fats (although at certain seasons of the year non-domesticated animal species may be a poor source of fat).

The origin of the human preference for some type of animal protein and animal fat may be found in the evolutionary antecedents of the species. Although predominantly vegetarian, most contemporary primate species...

THIS CHAPTER DESCRIBES THE PHYSIOLOGICAL AND SOCIOcultural consequences of widely divergent diets based on either high animal or high plant intake. I examine variability in nutrient needs and nutrient sources and the benefits and liabilities of deriving nutrients from either animals or plants, using an evolutionary-adaptational framework to discuss population variability and the biochemical consequences of over- or under-consumption of protein, fats, and other nutrients.

The long-established broad classification of the functions of nutrients in the body is still valid. Nutrients function (1) to supply energy; (2) to promote the growth and repair of body tissues; and (3) to regulate...

GRANTED THAT THERE ARE INNATE BIOPSYCHOLOGICAL REstraints on human diets, we are still left with the problem of accounting for the enormous variability of foodways and their divergence and convergence during the course of cultural evolution. The essays in Part IV deal with these diachronic and synchronic variations in foodways among pre-state societies, from the perspective of archaeology (Cohen and Yesner), from the perspective of ethnohistory (D. Harris), and from the perspective of ethnography (Winterhalder, Hawkes, Johnson and Baksh, and Good). The archaeological issue addressed by Cohen is the transition from hunting-gathering to agricultural modes of production with the attendant...

HUMAN BEINGS INHERIT FROM THEIR PRIMATE ANCESTORS A common set of nutritive needs as well as a set of limited physiological capabilities for intake, absorption, storage, and excretion and a sensory apparatus that guides food choice. All appear in part anachronistically geared to the ancestral primate environment, with some modifications from the period of early hominid adaptation. We also inherit from our ancestors the capacity for flexible, widely ranging, omnivorous solutions to nutritive problems and a habit, already observable in other primates, of forming culturally determined food lists – that is, oflearningfood habits, which are determined as much...

IN EXAMINING THE BIOCULTURAL BASIS OF HUMAN FOOD PREFERences and aversions, it is important to document not only short-term idiosyncratic aspects of human foodways, but also longer-term historical trends underlying the acceptance and rejection of food types. Both the causes and the consequences of such major transformations in human foodways need to be assessed. It is in this spirit that this paper attempts to address the question of the causes and consequences of the relatively late adoption of seafood diets by human societies, using some current research being conducted in Maine and Alaska.

The historical fact that maritime resources were...

MY TITLE ALLUDES TO HUNTING. THE IMAGERY IS DELIBERATE: I intend a somewhat predatory engagement with the subject. How do ecological factors affect hunter-gatherer decisions about the harvest of non-produced food resources? What are the ecological strategies of the food quest? And, especially, how does one go about asking these questions? What is a productive or heuristically useful research procedure? I will suggest that the analytic process is a little like foraging itself. The inquiry is, in a sense, the quarry.

This paper has three parts: (1) a brief statement about the methodology of evolutionary ecology that focuses on assumptions...

AN INTERESTING EMPIRICAL PUZZLE IS POSED BY RECENT OBSERvations on foraging effort among hunter-gatherers. In the mid-1960s, the Dobe !Kung of Botswana reportedly spent no more than 20 hours per week collecting resources that yielded an average of 2,100 kilocalories per consumer day (Lee 1968, 1969). Many anthropologists take these figures to be typical of hunter-gatherers. They expect that work effort is set to meet some general and specifiable consumption need, so that when this need is easily met, foragers work little. When it takes more effort to reach the same goal, workloads increase. Yet, in contrast to Lee’s reports...

In this chapter an indigenous, non-Westernized dietary pattern is analyzed as a contribution to the understanding of human food procurement and nutrition in tropical rain-forest environments. The example is drawn from northern Queensland, specifically the southeastern Cape York Peninsula, where an Australian Aboriginal population of foragers, fishers, and hunters continued to exist, unaffected by European influences, until the second half of the 19th century. The descriptive data on which the analysis is based are derived partly from 19th-century historical sources and partly from ecological and ethnographic fieldwork (Harris 1975, 1978). There is as yet little archaeological evidence relating to the...

A MAJOR THEME ADDRESSED IN THIS VOLUME CONCERNS THE usefulness of competing or alternative explanatory frameworks in accounting for the observed patterns of food procurement and food consumption among different human populations. In this paper we compare and contrast dietary patterns in two subsistence-oriented Machiguenga communities of the Peruvian Amazon. We will argue that the similarities and differences we observed in their diets are largely to be explained as reflections of the cost of obtaining each food given the nutritional value of that food. By “cost” we refer to such etic constraints on food production as time and energy inputs,...

IN RECENT YEARS MUCH DEBATE HAS FOCUSED ON THE SIGNIFIcance of protein in the diet of tropical forest populations. On the one hand a number of authors have emphasized the limited supply of animal protein and the significance of this limitation on village size and inter-village relationships (Gross 1975; Harris 1977; J. Ross 1980, 1971). As a reaction to these assertions, several papers have appeared denying, in various degrees, the importance of proteins as a limiting factor in Amazonian subsistence (Beckerman 1979; Chagnon and Hames 1979; Lizot 1977). In this paper the issue will be addressed in light of data...

THE SIX ESSAYS IN THIS SECTION ADDRESS SOME OF THE MANY problems that arise in considering diet in state-level societies, with all the contradictory and countervailing forces and intersecting social relations that such systems encompass. They all suggest that, whatever else, the emergence of the state, and even the eventual global spread of the capitalist system with its trans-national character, did not wholly divorce individual human beings from local ecological pressures or dissociate their dietary patterns from immediate questions of risk, cost, and benefit. In his paper on changing diet in the Andes, for example, Orlove finds that although he...

INAN INTRODUCTION TO COLLOQUIAL BENGALI, PUBLISHED IN 1970, a farmer is asked, “What crops do you raise?” The hypothetical Bangladeshi villager replies, “I raise paddy, jute, chili and mustard,” to which the enquirer responds, “Don’t you raise com or wheat?” This elicits the reply: “No sir, corn or wheat can’t be raised in my farm” (R. Islam 1970:96).

Bangladesh is indeed a “land of paddy cultivation par excellence” (Ahmad 1976:63). The production of rice in Bangladesh exceeds the combined acreage of Thailand, Formosa, Java, and Madura (Ibid.:66). Rice is the “cultural superfood” (Jelliffe 1968) of the region, the dominant...

PEOPLE IN INDIA EAT A PREDOMINANTLY VEGETARIAN DIET. AT the same time, roughly 70 percent of the population is estimated to be nonvegetarian. For vegetarians milk is practically the only source of animal protein, but the non-vegetarians consume a variety of other flesh foods as well. Such preferences for animal protein are found among all the world’s societies (see Chapter 8). Despite the universal preference for animal protein, however, consumption of certain animal foods is a taboo in some societies. According to some scholars, such aversions are due to the influence of religious values; others attribute them to the human...

THE EFFECTS OF COLONIALISM AND NEOCOLONIALISM ON THE Gastronomic Patterns of the Third World can be summed up in one word: contradictory. On the one hand, the capitalist economic system—the primary motivator of modern colonialism—has unleased powerful production forces based on intensified world trade, improved communications, and scientific and technological development that have the potential to improve the diets of all people. On the other hand, the accumulation needs of the capitalist system have caused large-scale dislocations and misallocations of resources that have left much of the colonized world enslaved or disenfranchised, underpaid, and underfed.

The end of...

The diet of the highland Andean peasants reflects their complex history. The virtual isolation of South America before European conquest and the emergence of civilizations from pre-agricultural societies account in part for the strong presence in the diet of locally domesticated crops and animals capable of being produced in difficult environmental circumstances and of satisfying human nutritional needs. Some of those crops and animals are still found only in the Andes; others have spread through the world. With these unique elements and a long autonomous development, Andean dietary patterns have offered a satisfactory solution to many of the problems faced...

IN CONTEMPORARY MEXICO THERE ARE SHARP CONTRASTS BEtween the diets of the great masses of poor families and those of the (largely urban) middle and upper classes. The contrasts are demonstrable in data on “habitual diet,” “amounts spent weekly on food,” “degree of dependence on purchased foods,” “variety of foods consumed,” and “provenience of food items.” Less obvious, but highly important, are the contrasts in “per capita nutrients consumed.” Total energy costs, as well as other costs involved in the production and distribution of foods, also differ sharply when one compares the mass of low-income families with the more affluent...

SINCE THE MID-1950S, THE CENTRAL AMERICAN COUNTRIES HAVE experienced a new export boom based on the production of beef for the United States market. This paper first discusses the changes in U.S. beef production and consumption patterns that lie behind the expansion of export-oriented ranching in Central America. It then describes for one Central American country—Costa Rica—the roles played by international lending institutions, the national state, and the organized cattle lobby in bringing about this integration into the world beef market. Finally, it discusses the effects of export beef production on domestic beef consumption, land use, and Costa...

WHY IS FOOD IMPORTANT IN THE LARGER SCHEME OF THINGS? from the first efforts to explain human biological and cultural evolution, subsistence has been causally implicated. The very origin of the species is thought to have been related to changes in primate subsistence, and some of the major epochs of our cultural history are based on significant changes in food getting: from the hunting and gathering stage to the agricultural “revolution.” Many scholars feel that changes in subsistence changed the trajectory of our history, and it is certain at least that our history has changed our food patterns.

On an...

THE DETERMINATION OF FOOD CHOICE REMAINS ONE OF THE most perplexing anthropological problems. Traditional anthropological explanations have relied on cultural factors to interpret differences in food habits. Although some of the earlier functional explanations were framed in terms of the development of food procurement and preparation in response to a basic biological need—hunger—they tended to consider only the sociocultural aspects of the response. Recent attempts by physical anthropologists to explain dietary differences rely on an adaptive model that incorporates biological and cultural factors. The systematic application of this model has been called the “biocultural approach.” A basic tenet...