Food and Culture

Food and Culture

1. Through the Harris book, we have learned that food is culturally classified.  Many factors enter into the selection of dietary items for human food use; however, much of human dietary behavior can be viewed as adaptive.   Discuss 5 examples from the Harris book that illustrate how human diet and food use is adaptive.  What is adaptive about these cultural decisions?  Why do cultures choose to consume certain items and not other items?
2. What is optimal foraging and how does it relate to the issue of adaptation and food choice in foraging societies?  How do environmental factors such as latitude enter into the variation in food choice? What dietary changes occurred with agriculture and pastoralism that modified dietary patterns/choices? Did human diet breadth increase or decrease with the adoption of agriculture and pastoralism? What is the reason for this change?
3. Humans are said to be highly omnivorous animals, having a broad range of potential food items.  However, in spite of this there are various nutritional components, which can only be met by restricted classes of foods. What are these various biological nutritional requirements and how are they distributed in the various packages that we term food. Discuss the evolutionary significance of this development in biocultural terms; that is, how biology and social factors (i.e. how people organize themselves into distinctive groups) influence and are involved in the emergence of this pattern.  When considering the optimal foraging theory, what cultural (or behavioral if referring to non-modern human ancestral forms) developments (technological and social) expand this pattern beyond that of lower primates (i.e. monkeys, etc.)?

Harris, Marvin. Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc. 1995)