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Anthropological concepts
PREVENTIVE
MEDICINE
8,
600-607 (1979)
Anthropological
Concepts’
LIONEL
TIGER
The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, 17 West 9th Street, New York, New York 10011 Our attitudes to and ideas surrounding the use of food are ours by nature, formed over the course of our development as a distinct species and not essentially changed from those of the hunting-gathering phase of our species’ evolution. The taste for animal fat that has precipitated the current medical crisis in incidents of coronary heart disease is firmly a part of our identity as a species, as is the complex connection of the food we eat and serve to others with ideas of status, affection, festivity, courtship, and our feelings of well being. Tastes that gave us some evolutionary advantage in the past have been rendered dangerous to us by technical innovations such as cooking with tire and the process of refining sugar, creating health problems with which our primitive ancestors did not have to cope. That we have such a complex array of feelings about food suggests that the choice of changing our eating habits in order to eat well-in medical terms-is not likely to be made easily by the individual without the support of society as a whole.
Obviously, an anthropologist doesn’t have a direct interest in the medical issues surrounding food values, disease patterns, and somatic traumas. Nevertheless, as I will suggest, food is such a critical feature of human social interaction that attention to nutrition must perforce include the network of social interactions, expectations, prejudices, and uncertainties which constitute a social system. Therefore, while my remarks will be of restricted value to medical procedures, they will nevertheless address themselves to the context of food use, its function as a unit of social transaction, and how contemporary ways of feeding may reflect food-gathering enthusiasms and aesthetic preferences appropriate to the hunting-gathering phase of our species’ evolution. Two critical points must be put first: We are hunter-gatherers. We have been so nearly all our formal evolution as a particular species. The estimates of our splitting off from the other primates vary from between 2.5 to in some cases 14 million years, but the critical issue is that throughout the period of Homo sapiens’ development as a distinct species, we have been getting our food by hunting it and gathering it, unlike the other primates, who principally only gather it. Agricultural and pastoral ways of getting food are relatively recent, perhaps 13,000 years old at most. The industrial system which encapsulates the agricultural and pastoral systems is only 250 years old, barely a dozen generations. These agricultural and pastoral schemes are very unlikely to have had any appreciable structural genetic effect on the physiological mechanism, the body, which receives and uses food or on people’s aesthetic, appetitive relationship to what and how they eat. Such essentially emotional responses are presumably, at least in part, governed by the rela’ Presented at the American Health Foundation Conference on the Health Effects of Blood Lipids: Optimal Distributions for Populations, New York, N.Y., April 12, 1979. 600 0091-7435/79/050600-08$02.00/O Copyright @ 1979 by Academic Press, Inc. All tights of reproduction in any form reserved.
CONFERENCE:
HEALTH
EFFECTS
OF
BLOOD
LIPIDS
601
tively primitive response patterns of what Paul MacLean early on described as the limbic system and which have since come to occupy a central place in the puzzle about the relationship between emotion, understanding, and action (8). (See also Holden (5) for a discussion of MacLean’s work.) This is, of course, essentially a direct, modern version of Darwin’s scientific concerns which he most carefully explained in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” The second critical point is that we are mammals, by definition an animal which receives its first food through a social relationship with a conspecitic. Thus, the density and complexity of our concern about food is hardly surprising, particularly in view of the fact that we are, in a certain important sense, the super mammal since we have the longest period of connection between the dependent young and the caretaking adults, as far as food is concerned. One needn’t be an acolyte of Sigmund Freud’s to appreciate the importance to both infant and mother of the feeding transaction. The persistence of the importance of the feeding transaction follows logically and biologically from its early importance in the organism’s life. As Nicholas Blurton-Jones, the ethologist, has suggested, we are a species designed to “carry” not “cache,” or store, our young (l), and by that token, animals designed to feed frequently when young. In his explication of BlurtonJones’s position, Konner notes, “Most important are that the “cachers” feed their young at widely spaced intervals, have high protein and fat content in their milk, and have high sucking rates, whereas “carriers,” including followers, feed more or less continuously, have milk with low protein and fat content, and have low sucking rates. Humans, along with all other primates studied, have the milk composition and sucking characteristics of continuous proximity, or “carrier” species” (6). It is clear that we are equipped, both as food givers and food takers, for an intense relationship surrounding food. Two other features of this feeding system are also important, if somewhat less global in their importance throughout the life cycle. The first is, that we are a food-sharing species, unlike nearly all the other primates nearly all the rest of the time. It has been estimated by Sherwood Washburn of the University of California at Berkeley that the total sum of meat protein hunted by other primates is less than one ungulate. Hunting is not an important dietary activity for the other primates, though there is some evidence that those that do hunt find it an exciting pursuit and one which directs their attention in a strong way. (See, for example, Teleki, Ref. (9).) If primates are occasionally enthusiastic about hunting, it appears to have been critical for humans. One of the important issues that arises from this enthusiasm for the hunting mode of life is a dire connection to animal fat. Thus we see a logical transition from the social and medical problem we face in a discussion of the effect of ingestion on coronary heart disease and the kind of evolutionary adaptation we made. Alone among the primates, we moved to a hunting-gathering system which now inescapably draws us, in an almost tragic way, to the dietary consequences under review here (3). Not only do we share food, but we also share its acquisition, unlike the other primates who, typically, once they are no longer suckling, get their own food. They rarely share. But we are exquisitely designed to share food, and a good deal of our evolutionary advantage over other primates, our ability to withstand the
602
LIONEL
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perturbations of ice ages, climatic changes and so on, undoubtedly had to do with the rapid development of means of cooperating in the acquisition of food. There are various side issues here which remain controversial. For example, the question of the relationship between the need for protein and travel or other warfare, which has been the subject of a spirited dialogue between for example, Chagnon and Hames (2) and Harris (4). In this particular controversy, the argument revolves about whether or not warfare among simpler societies is related to a need for protein, as Harris argues, or whether it is an expression of other forces relating to generalized resource control, access to reproductive females, etc. The data of Chagnon and Hames suggests strongly that the existence of warfare is hardly explicable as a function of protein intake; for example, the Yanomamo Indians of the Venezuela-Brazil border country who are uncommonly bellicose, have “protein intake comparable to that found in highly developed industrialized nations and as much as 200% more than the nutritional authorities recommend as daily allowances. Recent data on other Amazonian tribes likewise fail to indicate a correlation between protein intake and intensity of warfare patterns.” (2, pp. 9-10). In any event the exaggeration of preparation for warfare among the richest cultures in the world, the industrial ones, suggests again a disconnection between protein search and aggressive behavior. That people will struggle over access to resources is clear, but whether or not protein specifically, is the central stimulus, with its implications for enthusiasm for animal meat, remains highly questionable. Furthermore, though they posit biological bases for their view, the proponents of the protein-warfare linkage do not identify what would be an adequately potent mechanism for translating physiological need into cognitive and social patterns. The hypothesis is fatally fragile, if on this ground alone. My second subsidiary point is that people everywhere attach enormous symbolic and aesthetic importance to food, as Levi-Strauss among others has so extensively described. It is a widely used marker of social status and social commitment. Sharing food with people is an important index of the boundaries of social groups in general, and there are societies in which invitation to the domestic board constitutes a serious statement about durable social connection. Furthermore, food is a marker used by people who wish to announce their own status and sophistication through the kind and cost of the food they eat. When they distribute this food to others, they are claiming or affirming particular status in their social communities. One aspect of the sharing of food is that it confers status on the donor, and in any culture highly elaborate rituals of reciprocity surround the exchange of food. Even in relatively sophisticated industrial societies, in the middle-class dinner party pattern, for example, there are very clear-cut if also tacit rules governing the return of hospitality and the appropriate reply in one’s own dwelling to the enjoyment of luxurious food in the home of another. The calibration may be quite exquisite and, of course, the ritual surroundings-the dinnerware, silverware, the general decor surrounding the use of ritual foods-re again highly articulated. One subform of this function of food in reifying or dramatizing the social strutture involves its relationship to courtship and hence to the reproductive system. In cultures where marriages are arranged, marriage is usually marked by an immense
CONFERENCE:
HEALTH
EFFECTS
OF
BLOOD
LIPIDS
603
distribution of food, feasts which may require saving for extensive periods of time. For example, an Indian family may be obligated to husband resources for several years in order to provide an adequate wedding feast at a marriage ceremony. And while the economics of the matter are perhaps less dramatic in the North American case, even here where weddings are not necessarily the result of arrangements between the adults, they may nonetheless be marked by very costly distributions of food and associated luxurious goods and services, such as alcoholic beverages and music. What the North American and, for example, Indian patterns share is extensive exchange of unduly rich, unduly expensive, and clearly unnecessary amounts of food. There is an additional and extensive connection between food and courtship in cultures such as this one in which marriage is not arranged and in which there is a relatively free choice sociosexual economy. For example in her study at Rutgers University, Heather Fowler records a quite remarkable emphasis by females on the quality of food purchased for them by suitors. She is studying female mate selection and interviews women about the manner in which they selected their present or past mates. Some of her interview protocols indicate how vividly her respondents recall food details. She has had even complete menus of important courtship meals described to her more than a dozen years after the event. Should food possess such volatile meaning for courtship, particularly foods regarded as rich, expensive, and hence not usually useful or desirable in health terms, then it becomes clearer why social constraints or inducements conspire with patterns of taste and culinary skills to drive people to eat foods they are fully aware are either actively bad for them, or at least unnecessarily rich and ample. For the moment, it is appropriate to note that implicit in my remarks so far is the obvious assumption that food has not only a nutritional value but a social one, and that some concept of “social calorie” may be appropriate to define the value of food for specific people in specific circumstances. An implication of this in turn, is that food may make a temporary positive contribution to people’s parental, reproductive, social, and even economic lives -for example the three martini lunch of legend, the politician’s rubber chicken and so on. Food is clearly a feature of the means of social transaction in any kind of social system, including, of course, our own. While all this is obvious, perhaps the magnitude of the problem is not. Perhaps the discontinuity is far greater than we think between the quantity and constituence of food available in contemporary society and the evolved tastes and needs of a very old hunter-gatherer primate. I’d like to dwell for a moment on the aesthetic issue. Humans are omnivorous and are designed to be able to eat a wide variety of foods. We like a wide variety of foods. We have an excellent receptor system, which was presumably useful at some point in our evolution in permitting us to take advantage of shifting circumstances and a wide array of possible nutrients. Obviously, the crisis that we face in medical terms now is partly aesthetic. We appear to like the wrong things, given the ease with which we may acquire them and the tastiness with which they are presented to us. If we were prepared to enjoy animal products, we may well have been unprepared for some quite critical evolutionary stages (not biological evolutionary stages, but technical ones) which geared up our ability to produce a
604
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lively array of unexpected foods. Fire, is an example. Fire is of relatively recent origin, having first appeared some 500,000 years ago and probably not becoming a widespread social resource until about 50,000 years ago. With fire, a major shift became possible. Some of these changes in health terms were desirable ones, such as being able to eat certain kinds of pulses which would be poisonous unless cooked (7). Another effect of fire was to permit the cooking of fatty meats, which ended up tasting attractive. The most notable example perhaps is bacon, a food of little nutritional value considering its relative cost and effect on the population. However it is an attractive food-crisply cooked fatty meat generally appears to be attractive. Consistent with this hypothesis, as is advertising legend, the sizzle is sold as well as the steak. The desirability of eating animal meat was enhanced by the attractiveness of eating such meat cooked with hot fire which heightened the tastiness of the fat content, and the more recent combination of cooking very fatty corn-fed beef appears to exert a strong influence in the process of food choice. The existence of fire also permitted the frying of carbohydrates, which could also be mixed with sugar or baked in the form of pastry. The heating of carbohydrates in oil constitutes a staple procedure of the fast food industry, because the process is relatively inexpensive and easy for unskilled laborers and/or machines to monitor. The discovery of sugar was another surprising and unexpected historical event. When sugar was available neat, it could be put into beverages, desserts, etc. This constituted, again, a radical shift in the sense of human gastronomic possibility. No longer would people have to seek sugar in foods which contained it, such as fruit and some vegetables, but they could enjoy a highly attractive taste relatively unencumbered by other food values. While in a certain sense it is far-fetched, it is nonetheless significant that one of the consequences of the discovery of sugar was the eruption of the grotesque pattern of slavery, in which people were willy-nilly taken from one part of the world into another in order to grow the substance for which there was an explosive demand. It is intriguing and probably revealing that a food could have been associated with a social change of such magnitude, and in terms of the moral structure of the world, such gravity. The discovery of sugar was, on the one hand, a small event in the agricultural history of mankind, but a disastrous one in another sense, both because it was part of the stimulus of creating slavery and colonialism and, as we now know, of considerable consequence for the nutritional health of populations. There are several other relatively obvious points to make about the function of food as a fulcrum of social transaction. Food often provides us with an opportunity to do what other primates do, technically called grooming. Other primates physically touch each other, stroke each other, and generally associate with each other in a way they regard as convivial; this maintains social bonds and makes members of the social group feel part of it, feel at ease, feel wanted. In the human case, we frequently employ food for similar purposes. Television advertisement after advertisement appeals to the purchasers of food to use whatever is being advertised as a wholesome and delightful gift to the persons receiving the food. The role of television advertisement is presumably also an important factor in permitting children to be informed independently of their parents, about the exis-
CONFERENCE:
HEALTH
EFFECTS
OF
BLOOD
LIPIDS
605
tence of foods which they enjoy eating, even foods which in principle parents would not want them to eat. However because of the power of the advertising technique, withholding such foods from children can, in their view, be treated as punishment, while the giving of such foods may constitute a symbol of parental affection and respect for the child’s symbolic system. The fast food chains, for example, will entice children with giveaways, slogans, decals, various other inducements, and it is a churlish parent indeed (in the eyes of the child), who will try to withhold such colorful benefits from the child in the name of norms of healthful nutrition, the violation of which will not produce any consequences for an unimaginable (again, to the child) number of years to come. This particular feature of the industrialization of communication-the ability to isolate and communicate particularly effectively with a section of the child population-seems to have had a serious impact on the corresponding industrialization of food distribution in the society in the form of the so-called fast food enterprises. Food functions as a measurement of personal self-control and license. It is always intriguing to enter a bookstore to encounter a row of diet books facing their enemy volumes, cookbooks, on another shelf, and to recognize that the population is at war with itself in terms of its preoccupation with food. With a student at Rutgers, Barbara Blei, I did a relatively straightforward and simple study of the role of diets in the lives of Americans by surveying a number of magazines of a general nature largely oriented to women, such as Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, etc. What is immediately apparent from the cursory survey is the repetition of diets month after month. They reveal the fact that they in essencedo not work because the presumably regular readership still feels some interest in yet a new method for weight control. In this context, diets can be seen as a form of ritual of personal reaffirmation or an expression of personal optimism about the possibility of self-improvement. It is of course hardly surprising that bodily size and the image of the body an individual has will effect how positively they evaluate their own personal futures (10). Let me conclude with an additional note about the moral aspects of food use. An interesting feature of the increasing secularization of belief systems about the causes and effects in life and nature is the development of an “extermination model.” That is, members of societies will become polluted to death, radiated to death, internally polluted to death by cholesterol or carcinogenic substances. A combination of various forces, perhaps most vividly the intrusion of the industrial system into countless aspects of social and material life, as well as the development of statistical and epidemiological procedures, has produced a model of the future based on fear of extermination. The extermination model underlies a host of phenomena, again ranging from nuclear radiation to mercury poisoning, but it is the case of food which is, of course, most relevant. Our food is not yet in the category of nuclear radiation, for example, but it does appear possible for populations, or subsections of populations, as in vegetarian, natural food, or other relatively sectarian parts of the population, to become extremely agitated about the long-range effects of the foods they ingest. While food may not be itself the demon or ghost that pursues an individual, it can become a metaphor for human frailty itself. As in the past one could fear that the demons pursued one, or ghosts,
606
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or the spirit of disapproving ancestors, now it becomes possible to adjust one’s relation to the cosmos by adjusting one’s diet. Individuals of course have no particular proof that their actions will have significance for their future, insofar as the entire matter of diet and risk factor is a statistical one in which individuals must confront a generalized possibility rather than a personal certainty. This is an interesting difference, a particularly modern one, the notion of taking part in a Gaussian distribution in which one is not assured of experiencing an effect of what one does, such as having an x% risk of developing cancer after y number of cigarettes. It is rather different from the relatively straightforward connection to a theological dominant in terms of whom the rules of right and wrong are plain and the results of particular actions relatively clearly identifiable. In effect, the statistical epidemiological approach to these risks in terms of such an intimate and reiterative phenomenon as eating, introduces an enormous constraint on the sensory and enthusiastic response of human beings to their food supply. The decision about personal destiny, as far as health is concerned, is stressed directly on the individual, despite the fact that everywhere in the community blandishments exist to increase individual risk of disease development; for example, the countless public feeding facilities such as the fast food outlets who rely unduly on foods that are not highly desirable from the disease prevention point of view. So while the individual is faced with an entirely personal decision to take, he or she must take it in a social context which is relatively provocative in a destructive sense, because of the community’s indifference to or lack of information about suitable patterns of eating, or the vested interest of persons and groups committed to maintaining advantageous positions in the economy which depend upon less than medically desirable eating habits. Hence the problem of improving nutritional practices depends upon alteration of social practices as well as enhancement of private capacity for decision making. To ask of people that they turn their faces against many expressions of conviviality and participation in this culture, which also include the use of medically undesirable foods, is to make a large demand in a situation of apparent medical gravity-a demand which could be less severe were the social practices less untoward in the first place. The problem with nutrition might be seen as profoundly social and therefore, approachable in part with an anthropological perspective as to the functions of food for the maintenance of an expression of social structure. While recognizing the extent of this process may not make the improvement in public eating habits any easier in empirical terms, perhaps it will increase the opportunity to approach the elements of the situation in a realistic manner taking into account both individuals’ responsibility to their own health and communities’ responsibility to try to curtail the salience of stimuli that are temporarily attractive but in the long run unfortunate for both the commonweal and individuals. REFERENCES 1. Blurton-Jones, N. Comparative aspects of mother-child contact, in, “Ethologic~ Studies of Cl&j Behavior” (N. Blurton-Jones, Ed.). Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambfidge, 1972. 2. Chagnon, N., and Hames, R. Protein deficiency and tribal warfare in Amazonia: New data. Science March 2, 910-913 (1979).
CONFERENCE:
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
HEALTH
EFFECTS
OF
BLOOD
LIPIDS
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Feinman, S. An evolutionary theory of food sharing, Social Sci. Inform., 1979, in press. Harris, M. “Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches.” Random House, New York, 1974. Holden, C. Paul MacLean and the Triune brain. Science June 8, 1066-1068 (1979). Konner, M. J. Maternal care, infant behavior and development, in, “Kalohi Hunter Gatherers: Studies of the !Kung San and their Neighbors” (R. B. Lee and I. Devote, Eds.), Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1976. Leopold, C. A., and Ardrey, R. Toxic substances in plants and the food habits of early man, Science May 5, 417-425 (1972). MacLean, P. “Triune Concept of the Brain and Behavior” (V. A. Knol et al., Eds.). Univ. of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1973. Teleki, G. “The Predatory Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees.” Bucknell Univ. Press, Lewisberg, Pa., 1973. Tiger, L. “Optimism: The Biology of Hope.” Simon & Schuster, New York, 1979.
MEDICINE
8,
600-607 (1979)
Anthropological
Concepts’
LIONEL
TIGER
The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, 17 West 9th Street, New York, New York 10011 Our attitudes to and ideas surrounding the use of food are ours by nature, formed over the course of our development as a distinct species and not essentially changed from those of the hunting-gathering phase of our species’ evolution. The taste for animal fat that has precipitated the current medical crisis in incidents of coronary heart disease is firmly a part of our identity as a species, as is the complex connection of the food we eat and serve to others with ideas of status, affection, festivity, courtship, and our feelings of well being. Tastes that gave us some evolutionary advantage in the past have been rendered dangerous to us by technical innovations such as cooking with tire and the process of refining sugar, creating health problems with which our primitive ancestors did not have to cope. That we have such a complex array of feelings about food suggests that the choice of changing our eating habits in order to eat well-in medical terms-is not likely to be made easily by the individual without the support of society as a whole.
Obviously, an anthropologist doesn’t have a direct interest in the medical issues surrounding food values, disease patterns, and somatic traumas. Nevertheless, as I will suggest, food is such a critical feature of human social interaction that attention to nutrition must perforce include the network of social interactions, expectations, prejudices, and uncertainties which constitute a social system. Therefore, while my remarks will be of restricted value to medical procedures, they will nevertheless address themselves to the context of food use, its function as a unit of social transaction, and how contemporary ways of feeding may reflect food-gathering enthusiasms and aesthetic preferences appropriate to the hunting-gathering phase of our species’ evolution. Two critical points must be put first: We are hunter-gatherers. We have been so nearly all our formal evolution as a particular species. The estimates of our splitting off from the other primates vary from between 2.5 to in some cases 14 million years, but the critical issue is that throughout the period of Homo sapiens’ development as a distinct species, we have been getting our food by hunting it and gathering it, unlike the other primates, who principally only gather it. Agricultural and pastoral ways of getting food are relatively recent, perhaps 13,000 years old at most. The industrial system which encapsulates the agricultural and pastoral systems is only 250 years old, barely a dozen generations. These agricultural and pastoral schemes are very unlikely to have had any appreciable structural genetic effect on the physiological mechanism, the body, which receives and uses food or on people’s aesthetic, appetitive relationship to what and how they eat. Such essentially emotional responses are presumably, at least in part, governed by the rela’ Presented at the American Health Foundation Conference on the Health Effects of Blood Lipids: Optimal Distributions for Populations, New York, N.Y., April 12, 1979. 600 0091-7435/79/050600-08$02.00/O Copyright @ 1979 by Academic Press, Inc. All tights of reproduction in any form reserved.
CONFERENCE:
HEALTH
EFFECTS
OF
BLOOD
LIPIDS
601
tively primitive response patterns of what Paul MacLean early on described as the limbic system and which have since come to occupy a central place in the puzzle about the relationship between emotion, understanding, and action (8). (See also Holden (5) for a discussion of MacLean’s work.) This is, of course, essentially a direct, modern version of Darwin’s scientific concerns which he most carefully explained in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” The second critical point is that we are mammals, by definition an animal which receives its first food through a social relationship with a conspecitic. Thus, the density and complexity of our concern about food is hardly surprising, particularly in view of the fact that we are, in a certain important sense, the super mammal since we have the longest period of connection between the dependent young and the caretaking adults, as far as food is concerned. One needn’t be an acolyte of Sigmund Freud’s to appreciate the importance to both infant and mother of the feeding transaction. The persistence of the importance of the feeding transaction follows logically and biologically from its early importance in the organism’s life. As Nicholas Blurton-Jones, the ethologist, has suggested, we are a species designed to “carry” not “cache,” or store, our young (l), and by that token, animals designed to feed frequently when young. In his explication of BlurtonJones’s position, Konner notes, “Most important are that the “cachers” feed their young at widely spaced intervals, have high protein and fat content in their milk, and have high sucking rates, whereas “carriers,” including followers, feed more or less continuously, have milk with low protein and fat content, and have low sucking rates. Humans, along with all other primates studied, have the milk composition and sucking characteristics of continuous proximity, or “carrier” species” (6). It is clear that we are equipped, both as food givers and food takers, for an intense relationship surrounding food. Two other features of this feeding system are also important, if somewhat less global in their importance throughout the life cycle. The first is, that we are a food-sharing species, unlike nearly all the other primates nearly all the rest of the time. It has been estimated by Sherwood Washburn of the University of California at Berkeley that the total sum of meat protein hunted by other primates is less than one ungulate. Hunting is not an important dietary activity for the other primates, though there is some evidence that those that do hunt find it an exciting pursuit and one which directs their attention in a strong way. (See, for example, Teleki, Ref. (9).) If primates are occasionally enthusiastic about hunting, it appears to have been critical for humans. One of the important issues that arises from this enthusiasm for the hunting mode of life is a dire connection to animal fat. Thus we see a logical transition from the social and medical problem we face in a discussion of the effect of ingestion on coronary heart disease and the kind of evolutionary adaptation we made. Alone among the primates, we moved to a hunting-gathering system which now inescapably draws us, in an almost tragic way, to the dietary consequences under review here (3). Not only do we share food, but we also share its acquisition, unlike the other primates who, typically, once they are no longer suckling, get their own food. They rarely share. But we are exquisitely designed to share food, and a good deal of our evolutionary advantage over other primates, our ability to withstand the
602
LIONEL
TIGER
perturbations of ice ages, climatic changes and so on, undoubtedly had to do with the rapid development of means of cooperating in the acquisition of food. There are various side issues here which remain controversial. For example, the question of the relationship between the need for protein and travel or other warfare, which has been the subject of a spirited dialogue between for example, Chagnon and Hames (2) and Harris (4). In this particular controversy, the argument revolves about whether or not warfare among simpler societies is related to a need for protein, as Harris argues, or whether it is an expression of other forces relating to generalized resource control, access to reproductive females, etc. The data of Chagnon and Hames suggests strongly that the existence of warfare is hardly explicable as a function of protein intake; for example, the Yanomamo Indians of the Venezuela-Brazil border country who are uncommonly bellicose, have “protein intake comparable to that found in highly developed industrialized nations and as much as 200% more than the nutritional authorities recommend as daily allowances. Recent data on other Amazonian tribes likewise fail to indicate a correlation between protein intake and intensity of warfare patterns.” (2, pp. 9-10). In any event the exaggeration of preparation for warfare among the richest cultures in the world, the industrial ones, suggests again a disconnection between protein search and aggressive behavior. That people will struggle over access to resources is clear, but whether or not protein specifically, is the central stimulus, with its implications for enthusiasm for animal meat, remains highly questionable. Furthermore, though they posit biological bases for their view, the proponents of the protein-warfare linkage do not identify what would be an adequately potent mechanism for translating physiological need into cognitive and social patterns. The hypothesis is fatally fragile, if on this ground alone. My second subsidiary point is that people everywhere attach enormous symbolic and aesthetic importance to food, as Levi-Strauss among others has so extensively described. It is a widely used marker of social status and social commitment. Sharing food with people is an important index of the boundaries of social groups in general, and there are societies in which invitation to the domestic board constitutes a serious statement about durable social connection. Furthermore, food is a marker used by people who wish to announce their own status and sophistication through the kind and cost of the food they eat. When they distribute this food to others, they are claiming or affirming particular status in their social communities. One aspect of the sharing of food is that it confers status on the donor, and in any culture highly elaborate rituals of reciprocity surround the exchange of food. Even in relatively sophisticated industrial societies, in the middle-class dinner party pattern, for example, there are very clear-cut if also tacit rules governing the return of hospitality and the appropriate reply in one’s own dwelling to the enjoyment of luxurious food in the home of another. The calibration may be quite exquisite and, of course, the ritual surroundings-the dinnerware, silverware, the general decor surrounding the use of ritual foods-re again highly articulated. One subform of this function of food in reifying or dramatizing the social strutture involves its relationship to courtship and hence to the reproductive system. In cultures where marriages are arranged, marriage is usually marked by an immense
CONFERENCE:
HEALTH
EFFECTS
OF
BLOOD
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distribution of food, feasts which may require saving for extensive periods of time. For example, an Indian family may be obligated to husband resources for several years in order to provide an adequate wedding feast at a marriage ceremony. And while the economics of the matter are perhaps less dramatic in the North American case, even here where weddings are not necessarily the result of arrangements between the adults, they may nonetheless be marked by very costly distributions of food and associated luxurious goods and services, such as alcoholic beverages and music. What the North American and, for example, Indian patterns share is extensive exchange of unduly rich, unduly expensive, and clearly unnecessary amounts of food. There is an additional and extensive connection between food and courtship in cultures such as this one in which marriage is not arranged and in which there is a relatively free choice sociosexual economy. For example in her study at Rutgers University, Heather Fowler records a quite remarkable emphasis by females on the quality of food purchased for them by suitors. She is studying female mate selection and interviews women about the manner in which they selected their present or past mates. Some of her interview protocols indicate how vividly her respondents recall food details. She has had even complete menus of important courtship meals described to her more than a dozen years after the event. Should food possess such volatile meaning for courtship, particularly foods regarded as rich, expensive, and hence not usually useful or desirable in health terms, then it becomes clearer why social constraints or inducements conspire with patterns of taste and culinary skills to drive people to eat foods they are fully aware are either actively bad for them, or at least unnecessarily rich and ample. For the moment, it is appropriate to note that implicit in my remarks so far is the obvious assumption that food has not only a nutritional value but a social one, and that some concept of “social calorie” may be appropriate to define the value of food for specific people in specific circumstances. An implication of this in turn, is that food may make a temporary positive contribution to people’s parental, reproductive, social, and even economic lives -for example the three martini lunch of legend, the politician’s rubber chicken and so on. Food is clearly a feature of the means of social transaction in any kind of social system, including, of course, our own. While all this is obvious, perhaps the magnitude of the problem is not. Perhaps the discontinuity is far greater than we think between the quantity and constituence of food available in contemporary society and the evolved tastes and needs of a very old hunter-gatherer primate. I’d like to dwell for a moment on the aesthetic issue. Humans are omnivorous and are designed to be able to eat a wide variety of foods. We like a wide variety of foods. We have an excellent receptor system, which was presumably useful at some point in our evolution in permitting us to take advantage of shifting circumstances and a wide array of possible nutrients. Obviously, the crisis that we face in medical terms now is partly aesthetic. We appear to like the wrong things, given the ease with which we may acquire them and the tastiness with which they are presented to us. If we were prepared to enjoy animal products, we may well have been unprepared for some quite critical evolutionary stages (not biological evolutionary stages, but technical ones) which geared up our ability to produce a
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lively array of unexpected foods. Fire, is an example. Fire is of relatively recent origin, having first appeared some 500,000 years ago and probably not becoming a widespread social resource until about 50,000 years ago. With fire, a major shift became possible. Some of these changes in health terms were desirable ones, such as being able to eat certain kinds of pulses which would be poisonous unless cooked (7). Another effect of fire was to permit the cooking of fatty meats, which ended up tasting attractive. The most notable example perhaps is bacon, a food of little nutritional value considering its relative cost and effect on the population. However it is an attractive food-crisply cooked fatty meat generally appears to be attractive. Consistent with this hypothesis, as is advertising legend, the sizzle is sold as well as the steak. The desirability of eating animal meat was enhanced by the attractiveness of eating such meat cooked with hot fire which heightened the tastiness of the fat content, and the more recent combination of cooking very fatty corn-fed beef appears to exert a strong influence in the process of food choice. The existence of fire also permitted the frying of carbohydrates, which could also be mixed with sugar or baked in the form of pastry. The heating of carbohydrates in oil constitutes a staple procedure of the fast food industry, because the process is relatively inexpensive and easy for unskilled laborers and/or machines to monitor. The discovery of sugar was another surprising and unexpected historical event. When sugar was available neat, it could be put into beverages, desserts, etc. This constituted, again, a radical shift in the sense of human gastronomic possibility. No longer would people have to seek sugar in foods which contained it, such as fruit and some vegetables, but they could enjoy a highly attractive taste relatively unencumbered by other food values. While in a certain sense it is far-fetched, it is nonetheless significant that one of the consequences of the discovery of sugar was the eruption of the grotesque pattern of slavery, in which people were willy-nilly taken from one part of the world into another in order to grow the substance for which there was an explosive demand. It is intriguing and probably revealing that a food could have been associated with a social change of such magnitude, and in terms of the moral structure of the world, such gravity. The discovery of sugar was, on the one hand, a small event in the agricultural history of mankind, but a disastrous one in another sense, both because it was part of the stimulus of creating slavery and colonialism and, as we now know, of considerable consequence for the nutritional health of populations. There are several other relatively obvious points to make about the function of food as a fulcrum of social transaction. Food often provides us with an opportunity to do what other primates do, technically called grooming. Other primates physically touch each other, stroke each other, and generally associate with each other in a way they regard as convivial; this maintains social bonds and makes members of the social group feel part of it, feel at ease, feel wanted. In the human case, we frequently employ food for similar purposes. Television advertisement after advertisement appeals to the purchasers of food to use whatever is being advertised as a wholesome and delightful gift to the persons receiving the food. The role of television advertisement is presumably also an important factor in permitting children to be informed independently of their parents, about the exis-
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tence of foods which they enjoy eating, even foods which in principle parents would not want them to eat. However because of the power of the advertising technique, withholding such foods from children can, in their view, be treated as punishment, while the giving of such foods may constitute a symbol of parental affection and respect for the child’s symbolic system. The fast food chains, for example, will entice children with giveaways, slogans, decals, various other inducements, and it is a churlish parent indeed (in the eyes of the child), who will try to withhold such colorful benefits from the child in the name of norms of healthful nutrition, the violation of which will not produce any consequences for an unimaginable (again, to the child) number of years to come. This particular feature of the industrialization of communication-the ability to isolate and communicate particularly effectively with a section of the child population-seems to have had a serious impact on the corresponding industrialization of food distribution in the society in the form of the so-called fast food enterprises. Food functions as a measurement of personal self-control and license. It is always intriguing to enter a bookstore to encounter a row of diet books facing their enemy volumes, cookbooks, on another shelf, and to recognize that the population is at war with itself in terms of its preoccupation with food. With a student at Rutgers, Barbara Blei, I did a relatively straightforward and simple study of the role of diets in the lives of Americans by surveying a number of magazines of a general nature largely oriented to women, such as Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, etc. What is immediately apparent from the cursory survey is the repetition of diets month after month. They reveal the fact that they in essencedo not work because the presumably regular readership still feels some interest in yet a new method for weight control. In this context, diets can be seen as a form of ritual of personal reaffirmation or an expression of personal optimism about the possibility of self-improvement. It is of course hardly surprising that bodily size and the image of the body an individual has will effect how positively they evaluate their own personal futures (10). Let me conclude with an additional note about the moral aspects of food use. An interesting feature of the increasing secularization of belief systems about the causes and effects in life and nature is the development of an “extermination model.” That is, members of societies will become polluted to death, radiated to death, internally polluted to death by cholesterol or carcinogenic substances. A combination of various forces, perhaps most vividly the intrusion of the industrial system into countless aspects of social and material life, as well as the development of statistical and epidemiological procedures, has produced a model of the future based on fear of extermination. The extermination model underlies a host of phenomena, again ranging from nuclear radiation to mercury poisoning, but it is the case of food which is, of course, most relevant. Our food is not yet in the category of nuclear radiation, for example, but it does appear possible for populations, or subsections of populations, as in vegetarian, natural food, or other relatively sectarian parts of the population, to become extremely agitated about the long-range effects of the foods they ingest. While food may not be itself the demon or ghost that pursues an individual, it can become a metaphor for human frailty itself. As in the past one could fear that the demons pursued one, or ghosts,
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or the spirit of disapproving ancestors, now it becomes possible to adjust one’s relation to the cosmos by adjusting one’s diet. Individuals of course have no particular proof that their actions will have significance for their future, insofar as the entire matter of diet and risk factor is a statistical one in which individuals must confront a generalized possibility rather than a personal certainty. This is an interesting difference, a particularly modern one, the notion of taking part in a Gaussian distribution in which one is not assured of experiencing an effect of what one does, such as having an x% risk of developing cancer after y number of cigarettes. It is rather different from the relatively straightforward connection to a theological dominant in terms of whom the rules of right and wrong are plain and the results of particular actions relatively clearly identifiable. In effect, the statistical epidemiological approach to these risks in terms of such an intimate and reiterative phenomenon as eating, introduces an enormous constraint on the sensory and enthusiastic response of human beings to their food supply. The decision about personal destiny, as far as health is concerned, is stressed directly on the individual, despite the fact that everywhere in the community blandishments exist to increase individual risk of disease development; for example, the countless public feeding facilities such as the fast food outlets who rely unduly on foods that are not highly desirable from the disease prevention point of view. So while the individual is faced with an entirely personal decision to take, he or she must take it in a social context which is relatively provocative in a destructive sense, because of the community’s indifference to or lack of information about suitable patterns of eating, or the vested interest of persons and groups committed to maintaining advantageous positions in the economy which depend upon less than medically desirable eating habits. Hence the problem of improving nutritional practices depends upon alteration of social practices as well as enhancement of private capacity for decision making. To ask of people that they turn their faces against many expressions of conviviality and participation in this culture, which also include the use of medically undesirable foods, is to make a large demand in a situation of apparent medical gravity-a demand which could be less severe were the social practices less untoward in the first place. The problem with nutrition might be seen as profoundly social and therefore, approachable in part with an anthropological perspective as to the functions of food for the maintenance of an expression of social structure. While recognizing the extent of this process may not make the improvement in public eating habits any easier in empirical terms, perhaps it will increase the opportunity to approach the elements of the situation in a realistic manner taking into account both individuals’ responsibility to their own health and communities’ responsibility to try to curtail the salience of stimuli that are temporarily attractive but in the long run unfortunate for both the commonweal and individuals. REFERENCES 1. Blurton-Jones, N. Comparative aspects of mother-child contact, in, “Ethologic~ Studies of Cl&j Behavior” (N. Blurton-Jones, Ed.). Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambfidge, 1972. 2. Chagnon, N., and Hames, R. Protein deficiency and tribal warfare in Amazonia: New data. Science March 2, 910-913 (1979).
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Feinman, S. An evolutionary theory of food sharing, Social Sci. Inform., 1979, in press. Harris, M. “Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches.” Random House, New York, 1974. Holden, C. Paul MacLean and the Triune brain. Science June 8, 1066-1068 (1979). Konner, M. J. Maternal care, infant behavior and development, in, “Kalohi Hunter Gatherers: Studies of the !Kung San and their Neighbors” (R. B. Lee and I. Devote, Eds.), Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1976. Leopold, C. A., and Ardrey, R. Toxic substances in plants and the food habits of early man, Science May 5, 417-425 (1972). MacLean, P. “Triune Concept of the Brain and Behavior” (V. A. Knol et al., Eds.). Univ. of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1973. Teleki, G. “The Predatory Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees.” Bucknell Univ. Press, Lewisberg, Pa., 1973. Tiger, L. “Optimism: The Biology of Hope.” Simon & Schuster, New York, 1979.