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LECTURE ONE
What is Food, anyways?

A discussion on the definition of food

The human relationship with food – the omnivore’s dilemma

How this relationship opens up various possibilities for interesting research on food and culture

Food is culturally determined. Humans are omnivores, meaning we have the biological capacity to
consume both plants and animals. Bing omnivorous conferred upon us a huge evolutionary advantage by
allowing us to meet our nutritional needs in a wide variety of environments. If we are unable to get one
type of food, we can normally survive quite successfully on another. This is extremely important because
not only does it mean that we can live in different environments, but we can also survive periods of
drought, famine, or other environmental disruptions. Without biology working this way, we would never
have been able to populate the whole planet.

Disadvantages –

Unlike animals who only eat plants or only eat meat and are instinctively programed to eat that one type
of food, omnivores have to make a decision about what they should or should not eat. We don’t have
any sort of biological mechanism that tells us that one type of food is healthy and another type of food is
poisonous.
Being an omnivore can be described as the balance between neophilia, or the desire to try new foods
and neophobia, the fear that new foods may be harmful. Being an omnivore does not meant that we are
indiscriminate about what we put into our mouths – for example, if you went to your refrigerator and
pulled out some left overs that had been in there for over a week, you may be hesitant to eat them due
to the fear of them making you sick.
This dilemma that we face – of what to eat or what not to eat, was coined “the omnivore’s dilemma” by
Dr. Paul Rozin in the 1970’s while he was conducting research on the psychology of food choices. Rozin
went on to explain that the solution to the omnivore’s dilemma as the interplay between three sources
of information or experience: first, biological heritage (including the individual genes such as the quality
of your taste buds or the quality of your sense of smell), second, unique individual experiences, such as a
lifelong disgust of shell fish due to eating a bad oyster or perhaps an experience of eating old left overs
that left you hugging the toilet for a day, and third, culture. Culture is any information hat we receive
from social learning from other people.
Of these three sources of information to get around the omnivore’s dilemma, culture has proven to be
human kinds most extraordinary adaptive capacity. Our ability to teach and learn from each other has
had profound impacts on the ways that we eat. After all to determine whether or not you SHOULD eat
those old leftovers, you probably will not rely on some innate instinct driven by your biology, an unless
you are averse to all left overs due to a bad experience you will probably rely on social and cultural rules.
The omnivore’s dilemma has led humans throughout history to classify different foods into “good to eat”
and “bad to eat” categories based on our ability to learn the appearance and taste of edible food and
then pass that knowledge onto our peers and offspring. These categories are not just about what food
will kill us and what food will not.
Food classifications and rules help to lesson the anxiety that we experience surrounding what we eat.
But exactly how we make these classifications and give them meaning varies from culture to culture.
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One of the oldest records set of food rules and classifications of good foods and bad foods can be seen in
the Jewish dietary law recorded in the book of Leviticus. This scripture divides different foods into clean
and unclean foods. Most people know that orthodox Jewish law prohibits eating pig because it is
considered an unclean food, but the scripture that his law come from also list various other animals such
as the camel and the horse as foods that are bad or unclean to eat.

Anthropologist like Mary Douglas and Marvin Harris have tried to understand exactly how these
classifications came about from a historical perspective – why is pig considered bad to eat according to
this tradition if it considered good to eat in many other cultural traditions? We have hunches and
theories, but the point is that our culture – that is what we learn from other peopled through social
interaction – has powerful impacts our diets.

This anxiety about what to eat and what not to eat over a fear of what may be poisonous is also not
something of the past. We still experience this anxiety every day, but in a different way. If you go to the
grocery store and try to decide what to make for dinner, you probably do not stand in the aisle and fret
over which items will leave you dead in the morning. However, you may be anxious about what will be
less or more healthy for you in the long run.

The barrage of nutritional information and health advice that we are surrounded with due to the media
has created what journalist and author Michael Pollans calls a new omnivore’s dilemma. We are just as
likely to try to turn to sets of rules that will tell us what is good to eat or bad to eat. An example shown
her is the popular paleo diet. Some people today say that if we eat more like our Paleolithic ancestors,
we will be healthier. This means shunning foods that humans only started to eat after the invention of
agriculture.

Whether or not this diet or set of food rules is the healthiest way for modern humans to eat is
debatable, but the point is that food classifications and rules still play a powerful role in our modern
society.

Hindu Wedding Feast / Jewish Passover Seder / American Thanksgiving / Ramadan feast

We can see from these examples of food classifications and rules that our reliance on culture to tell us
what to eat and what not to eat means that studying food is one of the most widespread and interesting
ways to learn about different cultures around the world. Food can lead to important insights about
different religious beliefs, rituals, and social structures. Food is the center of all four of the examples
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above. Food can also tell us about different people’s different individual and group level identities. Food
is often used as a tool for people to label themselves as part of one group of people vs. another group.

We traditionally think of different cuisines at the National levels, such as sushi in Japan, or corn beans
rice in Mexico, and hamburgers (and large portion sizes!) in the United States. But national level
identities and cuisines are actually quite recent. Before the invention of the boundaries that we now
know as national states, people identified more regional and local group levels.

We still use food today to identify with more local or micro level identities. Think about the type of food
that you eat and what this says about who you are. Vegan, or vegetarian? Or maybe you eat in a certain
way depending on your stage through the life course. College student vs. mature adult.

Finally, food is a business (or thousands of business) that serve as a major part of global economic
system. Few of us live off the land, so most of us go to the store and purchase food as commodity. The
fact that food is a commodity has profound impacts for the way that people work, make money, and
spend money. Something we will learn about, along with many other thematic approaches to studying
food in subsequent lectures.

Summary:

Food is important to study because it is

 Biologically vital to our health and well-being
 Our everyday creative and meaningful engagement with nature through our culture
 A way to define ourselves socially within various communities
 A commodity in massive economic and political systems
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LECTURE TWO

Intro to themes in anthropological research of food and culture

An anthropological approach

Anthropology = the study of humans

Traditionally, I’m broken into four different approaches

- Physical anthropology: the human body and how we have developed and evolved
over the course of pre-human and human history .
- Archaeology: human material culture (usually from the past). Usually means studying
what past societies have left behind such as ancient cities, different types of ceramics or
textiles, and different ancient artifacts. Often artifacts are all that we know about
ancient cultures because they existed before there was any sort of written record of
history.
- Linguistic anthropology: human language
- Social / Cultural or Sociocultural anthropology: human culture and human social
structure. Usually focused on present day people

As you can see, studying the human relationship with food can be done from any of these four
approaches – after all our bodies and diets have coevolved overtime and what we are physically
able to eat versus what we are NOT physically able to eat has great impact on our culture today.
We also studied diets of ancient civilizations by doing isotopes and chemical analysis of ancient
cooking vessels that archaeologists find. We also know how ancient people farmed based on
tools that we have found and analyzed, and some anthropologists even analyze fossilized
human feces in order to see what our ancestors diets consist of more precisely. Also think about
the variety of terms and expressions we use our language every day to describe food. Or think
of what we talk about around the dinner table and how we talk–often this differs quite a bit
from how we talk in our social situations. How are use language around food into describe food
also eliminates different aspects of how we approach our diets. And finally, food is rich with
endless different types of cultural and social meanings.

I’m in the majority of his class will be focusing on the sociocultural approach to understand
food, but you will see some hints of the other three approaches thrown into the course material
as well. The boundaries between these four approaches are not always neat and tidy.

An anthropological approach = both series and methods of inquiry

Eight theory is simply A way to explain what is going on in the world. Social scientist asked
research questions, like, “how does a ritual feast aid or detract from the social structure of the
particular society?” Andy a theory would simply be our best answer to that question based on
collecting evidence and data.
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Over generations of research, some theories that social scientist have a postulated are used
again and again – we keep finding that these theories are good explanations as to why things
happen any certain way. The sun leads us to ask more questions related to This theory, we can
begin to develop what is known as a theoretical approach.

The theoretical approach is simply a broad category of both explanation and inquiry that social
scientist are interested in. As an example, in the picture of the left you can see a modern-day
rendition of the famous philosopher thinker Karl Marx. Karl Marx was interested in of the way
that different types of economic systems affected at the social relationships of people. He
postulated several theories of human history and economic behavior that have gone on to
inspire new research questions and related approaches – so Marx’s original theories have
developed into what we call it political economy approach.

So, anthropologist and social scientist often based their research on different types of theories,
but we also need ways to go about and collect data in order to both develop and test our
theories. The ways that we collect and analyze our data is what we call research methods – or
just methods for short. The vast majority of cultural anthropologist collector data through a
process that we call ethnography, which is the close study of everyday behaviors in social
interaction of people. This means that we live amongst the people we are studying, and try to
become a member of the Community so that we can gain the perspective have a cultural insider
in order to understand what is going on. The interviews that we collect, and the notes that we
take of all the social and cultural experience that we witness become the data that we use for
our analysis.

Well social and cultural anthropologist of previous generations were primarily travel to faraway
places in the world to study groups of people that have vastly different social and cultural
customs, today anthropologist work in all parts of the world - from studying hunter
gatherer groups and the Amazon rain forest to studying stockbrokers on Wall Street. However,
no matter what culture we are studying cultural anthropologist to use a particular set of
methods to carefully collect and analyze cultural data. An anthropological approach to studying
food and culture encompasses both theory and methods of inquiry.

Anthropological theories and food

Anthropology takes many theoretical approaches to studying food and culture

Theoretical approaches explored in this course:

 Symbolic
 structural
 environmental
 evolutionary
 bio cultural
 globalization
 political economy
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Symbolic –began to enter academic discussions in the 1960s. Symbolic approaches seek to
understand the ways that cultural phenomena (like certain foods or food ways) providing
meaning for members of society. These can be very small for personal meanings, or they can be
very large levels of national or international meanings.
Think about the symbolic nature of food during the Mexican Day of the dead for the way that
Americans think about hot dogs and apple pie as a representation of their identity.
- Concerned with meaning
- how different foods food and and food waste represent meaning and identities
- founders of this tradition include Clifford Ceertz and Victor Turner

Structural- in social science dictate that the way that people organize themselves and organize
different social roles and reveal important insight about their cultures interventions. This is
particularly interesting when we consider the ways that people assign different roles to food
gatherings, hunting, shopping, cooking, and cleaning for the ways that we decide who gets to
eat first and who gets to eat last. CLASSIC KINSHIP CHART shows the social structure of a family.
Anthropology is often use charts like this to keep track of different social ties and roles.
- Focused on the way that people organize themselves
- Include it the way that different social roles are allocated to different people

Environmental –we obtain all of our food from the environment in one way or another. We
often think today about the ways that human impact of environment, but we also have to
remember that over the course of human history the environment has been possibly the most
important factor that shapes what we eat and how we eat.
- Environmental approaches focus on the way that humans interact with their
environments

Evolutionary and Biocultural- comes from physical anthropology and focus on the ways that
humans have biologically evolved over time this is important when studying soon because we
could not have survived without involving certain advantages that help us to obtain and eat
more food. Biocultural approaches provided interesting overlap between cultural anthropology
and physical anthropology by looking at the ways that are biology affects our culture, in the
ways that culture affects our biology.
- Evolutionary approaches come from physical anthropology and look at the ways that
humans have a biologically evolved over time
- Biocultural approaches focus on the interaction between our biology and our culture

Globalization – not only a phenomenon that refers to the rapid movement of people, ideas,
money, culture and across the world, but it also a theoretical approach that many social
scientists use to understand how these processes impact local populations. We can see this
clearly with the case of McDonald’s as you can now purchased a big Mac and almost any
country in the world. However, globalization can be seen in many more examples of food, diets,
and cuisine. Think of all the different types of ethnic foods that are available to you
on everyday basis, or the different fruits and vegetables that are available to you at any point
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during the year, regardless of the season because they are shipped in from other parts of the
world where they are in season.
- Globalization seeks to understand the impacts of global processes on local people

Political Economy –Karl Marx. Focuses on the ways that economic systems integrate with
power– usually at that level of the nation state. Social scientist are using a political economy
approach often try to understand how the systems of power to affect the lives of everyday
people around the world and the ways that people fit into these larger systems. This is
especially important when we’re talking about food because very few of us still know how to
grow, hunt, or raise our own food. Most of us purchase a food at a store and these foods are
part of massively large systems that span of the Globe and serve to make people a lot of money.
- Political economy approach seeks to understand the ways that economic systems
integrate with power– usually at the level of the national state
- Also seek to understand how systems of power and economics affect the lives of
everyday people, or how different people fit into these large systems.

Summary:

- An anthropological approach to food and culture encompasses both theory and

method
- Sociocultural anthropologist Study a wide variety of people around the world and the
ways that they interact with food
- The course focuses on seven different theoretical approaches to studying food and
culture.
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LECTURE THREE

Methods for research on food and culture

Ethnography is the term that most cultural anthropologist use to describe the research they
do. Ethnography means different things to different people– some researchers see it as a
method for scientific study of culture. Others see it as a descriptive or interpretive
methodology. At ASU, we see ethnography as a kind of methodological umbrella – and all of
the diverse and exciting methods we use fit underneath.
At the bottom of this is the study of culture. Ethnography is fundamentally about
understanding people’s cultures- the Ideas, symbols, knowledge, social structure, and
behaviors. And all cultural anthropologist- whatever their methodological approach –
Sharon interest an understanding culture.

-What makes a cultural anthropologist approach two methods special – and, often times, a
lot of fun.
-Different methods that fit under ethnographic umbrella.
-Remind you what makes ethnographic methods different from other approaches to
research

in the early days of anthropology over hundred years ago, anthropologists thought of
themselves as pioneers, adventures, explorers – and, of course scientist. They set off to live
in and learn the lifeways of faraway people and cultures. Because a language, culture, and
people they were studying we’re often completely new to than, anthropologist devised a
methodology that involved immersing themselves fully in the culture– As a newborn baby
would– In learning by imitation, trial and error, and often much embarrassment!

“The Romance of Fieldwork” (H.R Bernard) - the grand adventure of learning to be a

person in a whole new way. However romance can be taken too far when it leads us too
exoticize that are foreign to us. Early anthropologists thought of the cultures they were
studying as inferior to their own “savage” “uncivilized”.

“You just figure it out when you get there.”

The “walk a mile in their shoes” method
“You have to earn your stripes”

Historically, anthropological research was conducted in isolated areas with small-scale

societies. For instance, American anthropologist Margaret Mead studied sexuality and
coming of age of for adolescent girls in 1920s Samoa. The kind of work is isolated, small-
scale societies continues today and has important contributions to make to our
understanding of human universals and cross cultural differences across human populations.
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Since the early days, anthropologist have begun going to work in greater numbers in urban
settings and then subcultures of their own societies.

An important example is French-American anthropologist Phillipe Bourgois’ research on the

culture and economics of hard-core eat legal drugs in the US– He has conducted long-term
ethnographic research with crack dealers in New York City an with crack And heroin users in
San Francisco.

“Studying up” - research on the rich and powerful, like politicians and presidents of big
companies. For example anthropologist Gillian Tett was one of the first people to predict
the financial crisis 2008 based on her studies of the culture of Wall Street bankers and the
dynamic of international banking and derivatives market.

Australian anthropologist Genevieve Bell is currently the director of interaction and

experience research at Intel in Silicon Valley. She leads a team of over 30 researchers whose
job is to conduct research on the way that people interact with technology and computers.
Hoping to inform Intel’s product developers as to best design technology

Mead, Bourgois, Tett, and Bell’s approaches to ethnographic method all daily cultural
knowledge and lifestyles–and the very different contexts in rich our understanding of the
human experience.

Hallmarks of Ethnography
- “ before you impose your theories on the people you study, find out how those
people defined the world” – Spradley’’
- Learn from living daily life. Look for native concepts, folk theories, cultural schemas

Fundamentally as cultural anthropologists, we all share a commitment to learn from other

people, on the ground, as they lived their lives. This means that we immerse ourselves in the
language, lifeways, and the way of thinking of the people we study– trying to see the world
through their eyes before we impose on them are ideas of how the world works or how it
should work.
Doing a auger if he means trying to identify native concepts- the way that people name and
understand the world
For many anthropologists, this may me and learning to think about things as basic as colors,
time, or health and totally new ways.
It also helps us to look at folk theories and cultural schemas, as in the way that members of the
cultural construct reality and understand casuality. We also try to uncover Hidden or unspoken
meaning of a culture– What assumptions do they make about reality that are so obvious to
them that they go understated? We focus on speech, behavior, and artifacts to help us uncover.
As you can imagine, this kind of analysis take a lot of cultural expertise. It is essential to speak
the language of the people that we study fluently.
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Why is ethnography a particularly a good way to go about doing research on food and culture?

Although many other disciplines like nutrition and biology study food anthropologist are
primarily interested in the way that food informs our culture and the way that our culture
affects our diets and eating patterns. Culture is a very tricky set of phenomena to study because
people often do not know how to describe it.
How does your culture affect the way that you eat? Would you be able to answer?
You may be able to say a few things that come to mind, the often times our worldview is so
deeply influenced and shaped by our culture that we would never know how to articulate the
ways that culture shapes our decisions and actions on a quick survey questionnaire.

This is why anthropologists spend a long time Amherst any culture, taking notes and figuring
out what exactly is going on in food is something that is so basic and every day in our lives that
we often take for granted the vast in various ways that it is deeply embedded in our cultural
expressions, meaning, and actions.

How do we collect to data?

Specific ways that anthropologists collect the data about food and culture

The most basic method in an ethnographer’s toolkit– The one that we all start with–is
participate – observation.

As you already know this involves immersing yourself and a subculture, living among the
people you study, Learning the language or dialect people there speak, and paying close
attention to the local environment, the things people say and don’t say, behavior, and body
language. But it is not quite as easy as it sounds.

To do participate in observation, you have to adopt a role that fits you and the fields site- one
where people will accept you, be willing to teach you, and allow you to learn. Then, you must
establish rapport, build trust with people so that they are willing to share their insider
knowledge of their culture with you. It is important to tell people what you’re doing and make
sure that the community and individuals you work with consent to your research and your
publication plans. It is not ethical to use special access to people’s private lives to publicized
things they would not be comfortable sharing.

Throughout all of this, he must take notes– many notes, take pictures, make maps, models, and
document your emerging understanding of the phenomena you are studying. Later, you can
analyze these know in lots of different ways. In addition to notes and maps, some
anthropologist produce audio or video recordings of the people they study. To facilitate
linguistic and textural analysis they might also transcribe these recordings into written words.
Producing and using transcripts are research activities not just technical details. As any
anthropologist to studies performance will tell you even replacement of commas is an
interpretive act that affects your analysis and conclusions.
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When you want to know about peoples behaviors, there is no substitute for closely watching
what they do–a method called Direct observation.

One approach is called continuous monitoring, where you stay in a location and watch
everything happens there. Continuous monitoring gives you an in-depth understanding the
behavior as a process or as it is shaped by in environment.

A second approach to direct observation is called allocation studies. There you use spot
sampling to check in on people, and see what they’re up to right at that moment. Time
allocation studies allow us to estimate, for instance, how much time people any culture dedicate
to working, playing, eating, and sleeping.

One tricky thing about direct observation is that a can’t make people pretty jumpy, something
methodologies call reactivity, and this messes up our observations. Imagine you’re doing spots
sampling, in every observation you make is a someone saying hi two an anthropologist, your
findings would not be interesting or valid. Just kind of problem is more common than you would
think.

A way to get around this it’s by doing indirect observations– Or studying the traces of cultural
beliefs, behaviors, and lifeways that people leave behind. This is what archaeologists do, the
cultural anthropologist can do it too looking at artifacts like garbage, traffic patterns, art and
graffiti, for official archives. And Indirect observation has its own biases– Not everything gets
saved or recorded, and sometimes the most important thing get covered up. But it offers
another handy way to study peoples behavior.

Interviews and surveys

Types of interviewing- informal, unstructured, semi structured, structured service

At the beginning of a research project we use informal and unstructured approaches to

interviewing. As our knowledge of native concepts and language grows we can ask a more
specific and systematic questions using semi structured interviews and highly structured survey
questions.

It takes a long time to learn to be a good interviewer and draw information out of people but–
let’s participate observation – interviewing is the methodological tool that almost all cultural
anthropologist use.

Another method that can get at beliefs and meanings is the focus group. And a focus group the
facilitator guides a group of people through a discussion about topics of interest. In a group
interview. Now, some people think a focus group as a short cut of getting information we get
through one on one interviews, but this is not so! Imagine you’re being interviewed in a group –
would you say the same thing that you would say to interview alone? First of all you wouldn’t
get as much time to talk. Also, keep quiet because you’re afraid of offending someone Else. Or
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you might speak up more because someone else reminded you of something you might have
forgotten your own. In this way focus groups can NOT be used as a substitute for an individual
interview, but they can be quite good for exploiting your own initial ideas about a cultural
construct or native concept.

Focus Groups – best for exploratory research and supplemental research

How do we analyze data?

Specific ways that anthropologists analyze data about culture
This is important to understand because the fun and adventure of fieldwork is just the
beginning of answering the interesting questions that we ask about social and cultural
phenomena.

Grammars
Deal with linguistic concepts like phonology – to create records of unwritten languages and new
understandings a better understood languages. This obviously comes from the linguistic
tradition of anthropology that we have arty talked about. This example looks at African
influences in the Gullah dialect spoken in South Carolina.

From the early days anthropologist use charts to document kinship, one of the most important
parts of social structure in all cultures. Nowadays, kinship is changing rapidly. New ways of
making families like gay marriages and single parenthood are increasingly common. Kinship
charts remain important to understand transformations in social structure.

Anthropologist use institutional analysis to help us understand all kinds of social structure.
Institutions are the written rules in unwritten norms that govern every aspect of our lives, from
how we four families, to what is considered a crime, to who can own property.

Social network analysis is a method for understanding informal kinds of social influence, as
opposed to the more formal rules and norms we study and institutional analysis. This social
influence might be shaped by the people in our network or by the things that flow through
these networks; like sex, drugs, power.

So much of the data that we collect things like field notes and interview narratives, comes from
the form of text and images. Text analysis helps to identify things like the differences in and
women talk about depression, or how people in Fiji and Sweden view climate change. Cultural
anthropologist have an enormous toolkit for analyzing text and images to glean insights about
peoples way of talking, thinking, and acting.

Anthropologist are interested in learning how people and different cultures name, organize,
and understand how their world works. An example of how people from different cultures
perceive colors differently, the same is true for food, disease, Life after death, and many other
parts of human experience. Cultural domain analysis also helps us to understand how much
people within a culture agree or disagree about cultural knowledge and beliefs.
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Statistic Analysis are very handy in understanding the characteristics of populations, Setting
differences, and checking change over time.

Ethnographical methods: oldies but goodies

- Creating a grammar
- participant observation
- field notes
- in debth interviews
- unstructured interviews
- Direct observation
- kinship charts
- text and image analysis
Ethnographic methods are constantly evolving…
- ethnobiological and ethnomedical studies
- cultural domain analysis
- cultural consensus
- social networks
- Field experiments
- Biocultural research

One constant- our commitment to stay close to the people we work with, Learning and
experiencing reality as they do, and to infuse our analysis with these grounded understandings
of language, culture, and life ways. This commitment is what makes ethnographic methods truly
unique.

Omnivorousness – Defining Food

Learning objectives
Identify the cultural construction of edibility and how food conveys meaning and value.
Recognize how food classification and rules are embedded in the social order.
Identify the ideological underpinnings of public discourse surrounding food.
Discuss the evolutionary influence on human diet, eating practices, and cuisines.
Describe the changing nature of the omnivore’s dilemma.
Locate the shaping of individual responsibility in dietary choices.
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