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VI.14 - The Social and Cultural Uses of Food

from Part VI - History, Nutrition, and Health

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Carole Counihan
Edited by
Kenneth F. Kiple  and
Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas
Kenneth F. Kiple
Affiliation:
Bowling Green State University, Ohio
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Summary

Food is what Marcel Mauss (1967) called a “total social fact.” It is a part of culture that is central, connected to many kinds of behavior, and infinitely meaningful. Food is a prism that absorbs a host of assorted cultural phenomena and unites them into one coherent domain while simultaneously speaking through that domain about everything that is important. For example, for Sardinians, bread is world (Counihan 1984). In the production, distribution, and consumption of bread are manifest Sardinian economic realities, social relations, and cultural ideals. An examination of foodways in all cultures reveals much about power relations, the shaping of community and personality, the construction of the family, systems of meaning and communication, and conceptions of sex, sexuality, and gender. The study of foodways has contributed to the understanding of personhood across cultures and historical periods (see Messer 1984).

Every coherent social group has its own unique alimentary system. Even cultures in the process of disintegration reveal their plight in the ways they deal with and think about eating. Cultures articulate and recognize their distinctiveness through the medium of food. The English call the French “Frogs” because of their habit (wildly barbarian to the English) of eating the legs of that creature (Leach 1964: 31). In the Amazon region, Indian tribes that appear alike in the eyes of an outsider nonetheless distinguish themselves from one another in part through their different habits, manners, and conceptions of eating. Maligned other groups are defined as those who eat people and animals thought disgusting, as for example, “frogs and snakes and mice” (Gregor 1985: 14). Food systems are, of course, intimately related to the local environment, but in most cultures “only a small part of this edible environment will actually be classified as potential food. Such classification is a matter of language and culture, not of nature” (Leach 1964: 31). The study of foodways enables a holistic and coherent look at how humans mediate their relationships with nature and with one another across cultures and throughout history.

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The Cambridge World History of Food , pp. 1513 - 1523
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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