The Omnivorous Mind

Our Evolving Relationship with Food

John S. Allen

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780674055728
• eBook ISBN: 9780674069879
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

In this gustatory tour of human history, John S. Allen demonstrates that the everyday activity of eating offers deep insights into human beings' biological and cultural heritage.

We humans eat a wide array of plants and animals, but unlike other omnivores we eat with our minds as much as our stomachs. This thoughtful relationship with food is part of what makes us a unique species, and makes culinary cultures diverse. Not even our closest primate relatives think about food in the way Homo sapiens does. We are superomnivores whose palates reflect the natural history of our species.

Drawing on the work of food historians and chefs, anthropologists and neuroscientists, Allen starts out with the diets of our earliest ancestors, explores cooking's role in our evolving brain, and moves on to the preoccupations of contemporary foodies. The Omnivorous Mind delivers insights into food aversions and cravings, our compulsive need to label foods as good or bad, dietary deviation from "healthy" food pyramids, and cross-cultural attitudes toward eating (with the French, bien sûr, exemplifying the pursuit of gastronomic pleasure).

To explain, for example, the worldwide popularity of crispy foods, Allen considers first the food habits of our insect-eating relatives. He also suggests that the sound of crunch may stave off dietary boredom by adding variety to sensory experience. Or perhaps fried foods, which we think of as bad for us, interject a frisson of illicit pleasure. When it comes to eating, Allen shows, there's no one way to account for taste.

1

CRISPY

The single word “crispy” sells more food than a barrage of adjectives describing the ingredients or cooking techniques. There is something innately appealing about crispy food.

—MARIO BATALI, The Babbo Cookbook (Random House, 2002)

WE HAVE ALL AT ONE TIME OR ANOTHER been drawn to the allure of the crispy. Mario Batali runs high-end restaurants featuring wonderful (and often expensive) reimaginings of regional Italian dishes. At restaurants of this kind, the word crispy may be a bit too blunt to appear in menu item titles, but it can always be casually mentioned by the server when describing a dish or reciting the specials of the day. We do not go to fast-food restaurants for a personalized, subtle, or sublime dining experience, so there is little cause for restraint in these establishments; crispy is freely used as an inducement to buy. When in the early 1970s Kentucky Fried Chicken added a new chicken preparation to their menu, they dubbed it “Extra Crispy.” This bit of marketing genius accomplished two things: first, it made it clear that the chicken was not just crispy but extra crispy; second, it necessarily reinforced the idea that the “Original Recipe” chicken was itself crispy (any alternative to crispy being unacceptable).

So why do we humans like crispy? The appeal of crispy food appears, like our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to be self-evident. Everybody seems to enjoy crispy food. In support of this notion is the fact that crispy foods are very adept at crossing culinary cultural boundaries. A cultural anthropologist colleague of mine used to lament that the evening plane from New Zealand to Samoa always smelled of Kentucky Fried Chicken, as the Samoan passengers made sure to stock up for their families and friends on the way to the airport. Or consider the potato. It did well enough in spreading from the New World to the Old in the preindustrial era, but with the technology that made possible the large-scale production and distribution of crispier forms of the root vegetable (primarily chips and frozen french fries), the potato “came into its own,” according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. This organization saw fit to celebrate 2008 as the Year of the Potato.1 Even in nations where the potato has been supplanted as a staple crop, its availability in crisp and convenient forms helps maintain its overall popularity.

Crispy seems to have the power to penetrate even the most formidable of cultural barriers. For much of its history, Japan deliberately isolated itself from foreign influences; its cuisine is often seen to be the embodiment of this literally and figuratively insular culture. Yet the well-known crispy aspects of classic Japanese cuisine are all adapted from other cultures.2 Batter-fried tempura was either invented or imported by Spanish and Portuguese missionaries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who were allowed into the country until Japan severely limited all contact with the outside world beginning in the 1630s. The breaded, deep-fried pork cutlet called tonkatsu is a Japanese adaptation of the schnitzel found in Austria, Germany, and other European countries. Deep frying using only flour or cornstarch as a coating is referred to as kara-age, a term that originally meant “Chinese frying” in Japanese. So when you go to a Japanese restaurant and enjoy your very delicious kara-age chicken wings, tonkatsu, and vegetable tempura, you can at least be certain that your California sushi roll appetizer is traditionally Japanese.

Some scientists, such as evolutionary psychologists and biocultural anthropologists, become very excited when they see a behavioral or cognitive pattern that seems to transcend cultural boundaries. Quite reasonably, they hypothesize that the pattern may have some underlying biological and evolutionary basis and that it is not solely the product of local environmental or cultural influences. In other words, some patterns and practices appear in different and diverse cultures with such frequency that it is unlikely to be due to convergence or borrowing from another culture. The appeal of crispy appears to be one of these phenomena. The crispy foods themselves may be transmitted from one culture to another, but many cultures seems to be preadapted to receive them with enthusiasm.

Batali’s statement at the opening of the chapter frames the hypothesis that crispy foods are innately appealing to humans. At first glance, this seems to be quite reasonable. But innate is a strong word—even a fighting word in some social science circles. Like instinctual, it conveys the sense that the human brain is hardwired to produce a certain behavior or preference under almost any environmental circumstances. There is broad acceptance that humans possess a language instinct, but can a case be made for an instinct for crispy? Is crispy as deeply rooted in our evolutionary past as language, and is it as culturally transcendent? Words such as innate and instinctual may be too strong for the appeal of crispy, or maybe we need to adopt a somewhat softer perspective about what these words mean in the context of human behavior and cognition. I look at crispy here as an exemplar of my biocultural approach to the human diet and eating behavior in general. If we want to understand why we like crispy, then we need to understand how we think crispy.

Sources of Crispy: Insects

Where does crispy come from? If we look at the natural world, at foods consumed in their most unprocessed form, sources of crispy are abundant but not terribly appealing, especially to those accustomed to a contemporary Western diet. Insects are probably the crispiest of animal foods thanks to their hard exoskeleton, which is made of a polysaccharide called chitin (though of course insects can also be eaten in their earlier, squishier stages of development, such as grubs).

Insects can be good sources of fat and protein, and throughout the world insects appear as both bit and featured players in human diets. Although Western observers tend to view insects as either a food of desperation or an effete delicacy, the reality in many traditional cuisines is something in between: they are available, so they are eaten.3 And in many cases, when adult insects with a mature exoskeleton are eaten, they are roasted, grilled, or fried to an extra-crispy state. Here is a nice recipe for grasshoppers from the tribal peoples of Nagaland in far northeastern India:

Grasshoppers are usually collected after the harvest of the paddy. The wings and stomach of the insect are removed, washed with clean water and then fried in vegetable oil with ingredients like ginger, garlic, chili, salt, onion, fermented bamboo shoot, etc. Water is usually not added and it is cooked dry.4

That does not sound too bad. Crispy grasshoppers prepared in this fashion are readily available in the markets of Nagaland and in other traditional and not-so-traditional markets throughout the world.

Even to Western observers, the prospect of a nice crispy fried insect is no doubt more attractive than that of a bug not prepared to maximize its crunchiness. The widespread consumption of insects may indeed support the idea that crispy has an innate appeal. But why do Westerners so definitively reject insects as food? Anthropologist Marvin Harris considered this issue at some length.5 He argued that Europeans and Americans regard insects as “dirty and loathsome” because they do not eat them, not the other way around. If insects have no value as food, then their roles as disease carriers and despoilers of food, as invasive pests, come to dominate perception of them. But why do insects have no value as food in some cultures? Harris suggested that if there are adequate quantities of large vertebrates combined with an absence of reasonable-sized swarming insects, then foraging strategies will not include insects. In other words, we will take meat over bugs any day. These conditions are met in the northern latitudes where traditional Western diets originated. However, good-sized nutritious insects were and are available seasonally in these regions, and other cuisines that originated in these same climates, such as those of the native North Americans, traditionally made use of both large vertebrates and insects.6 Harris argued that the Euro-American perspective represented an optimal solution to a specific set of environmental conditions. Although Harris’s idea is interesting, it may have been an overly rational explanation for why Westerners reject insects as food. As we will see, food choices at both the individual and cultural levels can be influenced by a wide range of factors, and what is and isn’t considered to be food is one of the fundamental markers of cultural identity.

Humans are primates, members of the order of mammals that also includes all monkeys and apes and a curious collection of small-bodied forms known as prosimians (lemurs, tarsiers, bush babies, and so on). A quick survey of the diets of primates (see Chapter 2) reveals that many of them eat bugs quite enthusiastically. In fact, the original primates living some 50 million years ago may have been predominantly insect-eaters.7 Given this insectivorous primate heritage and the fact that the practice of eating insects is quite widespread among humans, there is likely no basis for an innate aversion to eating insects—quite the opposite, in fact. Do we as a species eat insects because many of them are crispy? Or do we like crispy foods because crispy insects were a food of choice among our ancestors? The latter would suggest that the appeal of crispy foods is ancient and cognitively deep-seated. Perhaps there is a connection between crickets and extra-crispy fried chicken, beyond the occasional unwanted visitor to the deep fryer.

Sources of Crispy: Plants

Plants provides us with another source of crispy food au naturel. One of the common associations we make between crispness and plant foods involves freshness. Now, freshness is a multifaceted concept, dependent upon the food itself and the context in which it is obtained, marketed, and consumed.8 Fresh meat and fish are obviously not very crisp. But crispness and firmness in vegetables (at least those of the leaf and stalk variety) are signs of water retention, and once a vegetable is picked, it not only begins to lose moisture but also undergoes a change in nutrient composition. For example, sugars begin to convert to starches very quickly, as anyone who has compared the flavor of store-bought sweet corn to that just picked from the garden knows. In addition, the nutrients in fresher vegetables tend to be more accessible than those in less-fresh vegetables, especially when the produce is eaten raw. Vegetable foods contaminated by bacteria also tend to lose crispness and gain sliminess.

As historian Susanne Freidberg describes it, the way we eat fresh vegetables today in the developed world is quite unprecedented in human history.9 Traditionally, anywhere they were consumed, green vegetables were locally produced and seasonal. Today, with refrigeration and industrial production and transport, they can come from virtually anywhere and be eaten at virtually any time. Aggressive marketing emphasizing the healthful benefits of green leafy vegetables helped overcome the perspective that they were secondary foods after cereals and meats. This drove demand, which in turn supported technological advances in production and packaging that led to the development of a “fresher” product, even though it was one that had an origin quite different from that of the traditional hand-harvested, quickly consumed fresh vegetable.

I would argue that this industrialized produce is not really fresh but conveys a sense or facsimile of freshness. Furthermore, the importance of freshness has led to the development and propagation of varieties chosen and bred to signal freshness to consumers at the expense of flavor. In terms of assessing freshness, the “crisp button” in our brains is one that is meant to be pushed. The importance of crispness can be seen in the increased popularity of iceberg lettuce and Red Delicious apples—crisp, visually appealing, but blandly flavored products that have become the culinary poster children for all that is wrong with mass-market produce.

A problem for today’s advocates of local food consumption, small-scale production, and organic methods is that the fresh produce we buy at the farmers’ market more or less resembles the stuff available at the supermarket. The bell pepper picked on an August morning a few miles outside of town looks a lot like the one grown in a Canadian hothouse in February. As a species, we humans have evolved to assess finished products more than processes. The ability to “read” the signals for freshness, edibility, and palatability has been critical to survival; much less so has been the ability to figure out how the food got the way it is. We also like convenience: for the busy working single mother, the accessibility of food plays an important part in its appeal, much as it did for the Paleolithic hunter. So the value, for both our bodies and the environment, of producing food more sustainably is not always something we take into consideration when we’re making our decisions about what to eat.

The contemporary diet in developed countries is often maligned, but anyone wanting to change how contemporary consumers look at the food they eat is going to have an uphill climb. Recent cultural evolution has produced environments that can easily confound the food-related behavior and cognition that evolved over millennia. Contemporary food habits have been shaped over generations by an industrial and technological world of food production and distribution. This industry has become adept at making products that continuously push the food-related evolutionary buttons in our minds. I will talk more about these buttons later.

Despite the marketing that has made salad a year-round part of the contemporary dinner table, of course not everyone likes crisp, raw vegetables. Food writer Jeffrey Steingarten happens to like raw veggies in moderation, but he derides the “salad gluttons” with their “heads bowed, snouts brought close to their plastic wood-grained bowls, crunching and shoveling simultaneously.”10 He points out that many of the leaves, stalks, pods, and beans that we classify as vegetables (a somewhat arbitrary collection of savory plant foods that can include botanical fruits, such as the tomato) typically come well equipped with a range of toxins designed to prevent animals such as ourselves from eating them. In the ancient battle between eaters and the eaten, consumers of plants evolve methods to overcome plants’ defenses, while in turn, plants ramp up their defenses or find alternative methods to limit the damage done by their predators. (The same sort of battle goes on between bugs and the eaters of bugs.) One of the alternative methods plants employ is not to fight their would-be consumers but to entice them. Some plants produce sweet, succulent, juicy seed-carrying fruits to attract animals, who then unwittingly become the vehicles of the plants’ genetic dispersal by eating the seeds in one location and depositing them in another.

Among our closest primate relatives, we have cousins that are primarily fruit-eaters (frugivores), such as chimpanzees, and those that are primarily leaf- and stalk-eaters (folivores), such as the gorilla. We are more closely related to chimpanzees, and share with them a body size and activity pattern that are more consistent with the roving lifestyle of a creature seeking ripe fruit than with the slow grazing behavior of animals that consume large quantities of high-fiber, low-calorie leaves and stalks. Our ancestral dietary patterns therefore likely tended toward frugivory, which may explain the aversion of some to raw vegetables.

Primatologists have learned, however, that a simple distinction ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Crispy
• 2. The Two-Legged, Large-Brained, Small-Faced, Superomnivorous Ape
• 3. Food and the Sensuous Brain
• 4. Eating More, Eating Less
• 5. Memories of Food and Eating
• 6. Categories: Good Food, Bad Food, Yes Food, No Food
• 7. Food and the Creative Journey
• 8. Theory of Mind, Theory of Food?
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index