Everyone Eats

Understanding Food and Culture, Second Edition

E. N. Anderson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780814789162
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Everyone eats, but rarely do we investigate why we eat what we eat. Why do we love spices, sweets, coffee? How did rice become such a staple food throughout so much of eastern Asia? Everyone Eats examines the social and cultural reasons for our food choices and provides an explanation of the nutritional reasons for why humans eat what they do, resulting in a unique cultural and biological approach to the topic. E. N. Anderson explains the economics of food in the globalization era; food’s relationship to religion, medicine, and ethnicity; and offers suggestions on how to end hunger, starvation, and malnutrition. This thoroughly updated Second Edition incorporates the latest food scholarship, most notably recognizing the impact of sustainable eating advocacy and the state of food security in the world today. Anderson also brings more insight than ever before into the historical and scientific underpinnings of our food customs, fleshing this out with fifteen new and original photographs from his own extensive fieldwork. A perennial classic in the anthropology of food, Everyone Eats feeds our need to understand human ecology by explaining the ways that cultures and political systems structure the edible environment.

1 OBLIGATORY OMNIVORES

Only those who can appreciate the least palatable of vegetable roots know the meaning of life.

—Hung Tzu-ch’eng, A Chinese Garden of Serenity (1959 [sixteenth century])

Omnivore Origins

The long and circumstantial story of human evolution explains why we need, and want, so much variety in our diets. It explains why we crave sugar and fat. It explains specific nutritional needs: vitamin C from our fruit-eating heritage, protein in quantity because of our large size, active life, and long history of eating not only meat but also high-nutrient plant foods like beans.

It does not explain the specifics of human diets. In fact, it explains why there are no such specifics. Humans have been selected for three key things:

• the ability to live on anything we can bite (with our relatively small teeth);

• the ability to learn, reason, and plan; and

• social life, including conformity to local group ways.

Thanks to that complex of abilities and faculties, we can figure out how to leach poisons from nuts, how to cook down sinews to make them edible, how to mash bones and boil them for marrow, and, ultimately, how to grow, process, and distribute the thousands of domestic crops. A particularly interesting accomplishment, considering it was done thousands of years ago, was the domestication of life forms we could not even see: the yeasts and bacteria that are now necessary for making bread, beer, wine, and other common foods.

Humans are fond of ascribing their success in populating the world to their great intelligence. At least some of the credit is due to our adaptable guts. Humans manage on almost anything. The Inuit lived until recently on seal and whale meat. The staple food of Roti, in Indonesia, is palm sugar (Fox 1977). Termites are vital to survival in central Africa. Salmon provided perhaps 80% of the food of the native nations of northwestern North America. And Americans today subsist on food so indigestible that American zoos have had to prevent visitors from feeding the animals; the junk foods that zoos sell to people can be fatal to the other zoo inmates (as explained by warning signs at the San Diego Zoo).

Withal, we cannot compete with true specialists in surviving on one thing. Unlike the koala, we cannot digest eucalyptus leaves. Unlike the cat, we cannot live on mice. We do not have squirrels’ internal enzyme laboratory, which lets them devour mushrooms fatal to us and to most other mammals. We cannot even fall back on grass, as horses do. Our eating apparatus, so ready to adapt to new and strange foods, cannot deal effectively with such common matters as cellulose, tannins, or large bones. We usually eat only relatively soft, chemically simple items.

We come from a long line of primate generalists. Our ape ancestors lived in Africa, a land of dramatic contrasts. Not only does it have lush rain forests, glacial mountains, vast swamps, parched deserts, and game-rich savannahs, it often has them all in the same area (O’Brien and Peters 1999). In parts of East Africa, a highly mobile hominid could visit all five of those habitats within a few days. When I first visited Africa, I expected vast sun-baked plains and deserts, relieved in some areas by rain forests. But, especially in the Rift areas, I found an incredible variety of scenery packed into small areas. Any hominid, in a daily feeding range, would almost inevitably move through several habitats. Diverse habitats with much woodland, especially riparian habitats, are the most promising for human evolution (Bromage and Schrenk 1999; see esp. O’Brien and Peters 1999).

Some 6 or 8 MYA (million years ago), the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans was living a sleepy, contented sort of life in the forests of Africa. We now have some skulls from this period, indicating that the human line may have branched from the chimpanzee-gorilla line by 7 MYA or somewhat later. This idyll was not to last. By 5 MYA, the continent was facing ever drier conditions. Lightning fires swept through droughty forests, creating vast openings. Grasses, previously humble members of the plant community, exploded in abundance. Tough and resilient, able to regrow from root stocks when grazed, these plants took over most of the continent in the next few million years. Either the drying up of the continent (Vrba et al. 1995) or the very change and diversity itself (Potts 1996), or both, selected apes that could live in diverse habitats and lifestyles.

Fossil evidence implies that humans evolved in mixed environments, with streamside forests, marshes, rocks, woodlands, and savannahs together; almost all the fossils come from riparian environments, though this is at least partly an accident of preservation.

Chimpanzees retreated with the forest, there to evolve into Rousseau’s Savage—for his Savage was, in fact, the chimp (Rousseau 1983 [1782]:204–206). Rousseau saw these animals as powerful, wild, sociable, unencumbered by the trammels of civilization (and not “noble”; he did not use the word). So indeed they are. And, like most higher primates (Milton 2000a, 2000b, 2000c), they eat a diet far higher in vitamins and minerals—and also in odd and varied plant chemicals—than the diet of modern humans. Chimps live largely on fruits and leaves, and their intake of nutrients such as vitamin C is many times that of most of us. Their diet is rather insipid, except for bitter medicinal herbs they know and use, and a few sweets; like some humans, some chimps can’t taste the bitter principle in cabbages (see Chapter 4; Nishida et al. 2000). They eat a little meat and hunt monkeys on occasion, but they are not well adapted to meat eating; a small amount of saturated fat sends their cholesterol levels very high (Mestel 2002:A20). Humans can eat more meat without this problem, especially when they are young; this is clearly an adaptation to a higher-meat diet. But humans, too, may form too much cholesterol when they eat too much saturated fat from animals.

Other apes of the original lineage began to adjust to drier conditions in East and South Africa. We have skeletons more than 4 million years old now, from the Great Rift Valley, that vast fracture zone where Africa almost tore itself apart before giving up and opting (geologically) for unity. These skeletons—Australopithecus and its apparent ancestral form Ardipithecus—are ape-like: the animals were small (three or four feet tall), with limbs still adapted for tree climbing and brains the size of chimps’. Their bones and skulls are small and light. They ate a varied diet with seeds, meat, and other items. They too evidently got far more nutrients and phytochemicals in their diets than we do today.

One place it all began. Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, where human remains reveal 2 million years of human evolution. Louis and Mary Leakey and their associates excavated here over many decades, finding a long sequence of hominids. The gorge is named for the abundance of sansevieria, called olduvai locally. It is an aloe-like plant that supplies a good, hard fiber from the leaves. Photo by E. N. Anderson, 1998.

Most interesting of all, their teeth are small and diverse. They do not have anything like the savage canine tusks of chimpanzees and gorillas. Their teeth, in fact, are very much like our own. The one striking difference (leaving aside certain technical obscurities) lies in the molars: Australopithecines (but not Ardipithecus) were basically grinders of vegetable matter. Their molars are large and millstone-like. Their tiny front teeth were adapted to nipping off vegetation, and not too much else; the work was in the back, where powerful jaws and strong, heavy teeth ground tough vegetable matter down. But the early Australopithecines were not very specialized as vegetarians either, and there is no doubt that they—like chimpanzees—ate small animals, eggs, termites and other insects, and any other animal food that couldn’t defend itself. Tooth-wear patterns resemble those of chimps, indicating a similar diet (Unger and Sponheimer 2011).

Several species have been described for the Australopithecines, but there may have been, at first, only one slowly evolving lineage. Somewhat more than 2 MYA, this lineage branched in at least two directions. This process was presumably the result of continued climatic change in the direction of a drier and more variable climate. Once again, some authorities stress the “dry” side, some the “variable”; we do not know enough to decide which was more directly important, so the cautious researcher opts for both factors.

Australopithecine and early Homo fossils have been found largely in river valleys, where forests along the rivers alternate with marshes and lakes and where savannahs, deserts, rock cliffs, and mountains may all surround the river and marsh landscape. Lions, hyenas, hippopotami, antelopes, giraffes, and hundreds of smaller animals and birds abound. Wild figs, grass seeds, berries, oily palm fruits, and a wealth of edible roots and tubers can be reliable sources of food, but only if one follows a complex round, moving from resource to resource as ripening progresses. One of the Australopithecine species, Australopithecus sediba, turns out to have had a diet like that of modern foragers in the same area (southern Africa): leaves, fruit, probably small animals, but, at any rate, not much grass (Henry et al. 2012; Schoeninger 2012).

One branch of the Australopithecines grew larger, with thick skulls and enormous molar teeth. This “robust” branch, represented by Australopithecus robustus and A. (robustus) boisei, died out in a million years or so. Apparently, the robust Australopithecine line evolved to exploit the river-and-savannah plant world by eating more and more of it. They lived to process tough, resistant plant material, specializing in grass (Sponheimer et al. 2006; Unger and Sponheimer 2011). The idea of a grazing human seems a bit strange, but other australopithecines and even early Homo used a good deal of grass, possibly seeds. They made a good living at it for about a million years, but a combination of factors—progressive drying, fire, predators, and very possibly some hunting by Homo—finally wiped them out.

The other branch, which led to modern humanity, took the opposite path; presumably the process of “disruptive selection” was working here. Their molar teeth grew smaller, yet their bodies grew larger. By that time, the members of this branch were within the category we recognize as Homo. Several species have been described from around 2–3 MYA; whether these species are valid or merely members of one highly variable population remains to be determined.

After 1.7–1.8 MYA, as the third molars shrank, the brain suddenly began to grow, much faster than the body. There followed a sustained, spectacular increase that is without any known parallel in all geologic history. In a million and a half years, the brain increased in size by almost 400%. Such a rate of evolution is rare enough for any organ; for the nervous system, it is unique (according to present knowledge).

Moreover, the growth was not a mere expansion to keep up with the body. The whole brain expanded, but the real explosion occurred in the frontal lobes and a few other specialized structures. This, of course, is the system that gives us the fine-tuned complex of abilities that enables us to combine exceedingly involved social lives, highly adaptable and learning-based foraging, and, above all, especially in the orbitofrontal cortex, the integration of emotional drives with a sophisticated ability to weigh many factors in making decisions.¹ Social sensitivity, responsiveness, and engagement are mediated in the anterior cingulate cortex.

Robin Dunbar (1993, 1996) notes that social animals have larger brains than their non-social relatives. The larger and/or more complex the group, the larger the difference. Humans, with brains almost four times the size of chimps’, would be expected to have social groups proportionately larger; Dunbar figures about 50–150 people. This is an educated guess, but it fits uncannily well with a number of estimates of the size of the typical face-to-face, intimate, manageable social group found among humans today. However, people also aggregate into much larger groups, numbering about 500 in Dunbar’s calculation of early human life, but up to millions in modern times. This aggregation seems to rely on socialization by slightly older peers in early adolescence (Bowles and Gintis 2011; Boyd and Richerson 2005; Harris 1998; Richerson and Boyd 2005). Whoever gets to the teenager just breaking out of the family’s tight grip—be it school, military, gang, or national service—tends to win a lifelong allegiance. This makes possible civil society, in the sense of some real identification with and responsibility toward a group much bigger than 50–150 close associates.

Our lineage evolved from the small-sized, small-brained Homo forms (Homo habilis, etc.) through the larger-sized and brainier Homo erectus to modern Homo sapiens. Various intermediate and transitional forms, as well as local side branches, have been dignified by other species names, but they seem to reflect minor variation. Most of the real action took place in Homo erectus. This is a “temporal species”; it evolved into Homo sapiens. It is, basically, a name given to that slice of human history in which the brain grew from 400 cubic centimeters (at most) to almost its modern size of 1,400 cubic centimeters. The same period saw the social group number increase from perhaps 20 to the above-mentioned 50–150 (or some comparable level).

The Result: A Hypersocial Omnivore

Brains are incredibly costly. The human nervous system makes up only 3% of body weight but uses fully 25% of basal metabolic calories. This means that (if one is completely resting) 25% of blood flow must go to the head, and that, in turn, means that 25% of heat loss is from the head (given the thin scalp), a reason for long, thick hair. Moreover, in conditions of stress, the brain is protected; it gets first call on the blood and the heat. As outdoorspeople proverbially say, “If your feet are cold, put on your hat”—because the head is draining the heat from the rest of the body.

A woman must provide enough milk not only to permit her baby to grow but also to permit it to develop this enormous, demanding brain. Human infants are born with very small brains (roughly the size of a chimp brain), since erect posture and a huge pelvic opening cannot go together in this world and a small pelvic opening means a small head. Therefore, most brain growth has to be outside the mother’s body—to a degree otherwise found (in mammals) largely among carnivores. Rapid brain growth requires excellent maternal nutrition, typically a fairly high level of meat eating, around 20% or more. This is especially true since humans wean their young after only 2 or 3 years (as opposed to 4 or 5 for chimps). In a mammal, weaning from milk is possible only if the brain has grown to a certain point (Psouni et al. 2012), and only high-quality nutrition for the mother allows high-quality nutrition for the baby. Meat provides that, and carnivores are often born tiny, with small brains, thereafter growing fast, as is seen in dogs and cats. Rapid growth and fairly early weaning gave us an advantage over other apes.

Our fully erect posture and striding walk have other costs. A dog with a broken leg can manage on the other three. A human with a broken leg needs help. Being fully bipedal and depending on both running (probably newly evolved in Homo) and walking are developments that could occur only in a highly social species with mutual care. Our powerful running muscles give us terrific endurance. Our ability to sweat lets us dissipate heat fast. Thus we can run down animals (Noakes and Spedding 2012)—especially wounded ones.

Finally, there is the gut. Here we differ less from the chimps, who are rather similarly equipped. We have a moderate-sized stomach, a moderately long intestinal tube, and a digestive apparatus that can handle moderate but not overwhelming amounts of fats or proteins. By contrast, a true carnivore like a cat has a shorter, straighter, smoother intestinal array, while a true vegetarian like a koala or langur monkey has much longer, more convoluted intestines. Human intestines are closely comparable to those of other omnivores, such as swine. Nothing more clearly shows our omnivorous heritage (see Mann 1987; Navarrete et al. [2011] point out that we manage to support a big brain, a big gut, and often a big fat layer).

Noteworthy, also, is the ability of the human stomach to expand. Few mammals can eat more at a sitting than humans can. Today, this ability goes unappreciated except at seasonal feasts (such as Thanksgiving or Id al-Fitr), but in the old days it was vital. Humans could gorge when they had the chance and live off stored fat for days.

We probably evolved from an opportunistic vegetation eater that ate some animal food (Australopithecus) to an opportunistic specialist in high-nutrient foods: meat, eggs, shoots, tubers, nuts, seeds, honey (Homo). By 1.95 MYA, right at the Australopithecus/Homo border, people in Kenya were eating elephants, crocodiles, hippos, and fish—mostly scavenged (Braun et al. 2010). The early hominids would have been as adept as we are now at shifting from dead animals to starchy tubers to oily fruits, depending on what their range afforded them at the time. The average human of 1 MYA probably lived largely on tender young plant material, got at least 10%–20% of calories from meat from hunting and scavenging, ate many insects and loved them, dug up roots and tubers during bad times, and gorged on anything and everything edible when a good patch was found. Most of the meat would have been from small animals, insects, and carrion. Five hundred thousand years later, more hunted game and fewer small animals would have been in the picture, and perhaps by then cooking was important, rendering available a vast range of roots, tubers, and seeds such as beans. Fifty thousand years ago, when modern Homo sapiens was established throughout most of the Old World, hunting was more important, but taming fire had probably made cooking-dependent plant foods even more so. Carrion, coarse shoots and leaves, small seeds, and the tougher insects were falling out of the picture. Various views and topics related to early human nutrition are well treated in various sources (see Ungar and Teaford 2002). Meat has been the focus of a superb collection of papers, Meat-Eating and Human Evolution, edited by Craig Stanford and Henry Bunn (2001), which greatly advances our understanding of carnivory among modern primates and ancient humans as well as among us moderns.

The shift to more meat, often credited with allowing brain expansion by providing high-quality food, has recently been confirmed from an odd direction: tapeworms (Hoberg et al. 2001; Shipman 2001). Human tapeworms are derived from those infesting hyenas, lions, jackals, and (more rarely) other scavenger/hunters of the African savannah. Their intermediate hosts there are wild pigs (including hippopotami, basically overgrown pigs) and antelopes. (Modern human populations are more apt to catch them from domestic pigs and cattle.) Apparently, humans became infested with these tapeworms at about the time that Homo appeared. The assumption is that this is the point at which people were eating enough meat regularly enough to keep the transmission links going.

There are three reasonable explanations for this pattern of development. First, the sudden change at 1.7–1.8 MYA could represent the invention of cooking and its use to tenderize a wide range of plant materials, such as tough tubers. This has been advocated by Richard Wrangham and others (Carmody et al. 2011; Wrangham 2009), but there is little evidence for it, and Pat Shipman (2009) points out that we really have looked enough to find evidence if there was very much out there. If hominids were using fire in a controlled way and on a large scale, they left astonishingly little record of it. There is now, however, burned bone from Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, so deep in the cave that it could not be from a natural wildfire, and associated with tools of Homo erectus (or someone very similar; see Berna et al. 2012). So Wrangham’s ideas look more plausible.

Second, the sudden change could represent the progressive addition of more meat to the diet, as humans became better at scavenging leopard and lion kills and hunting small animals (Blumenschine and Cavallo 1992). Recent research makes it seem likely that humans (like lions and hyenas) both scavenged and hunted. Stone tools were being made by this time and were being used to butcher animals. Tools begin to increase in sophi...