Anthropology Of Food Quotes

Surely we should try to save something that, when done well, is not only a supreme example of the art of cooking, but a dish that encapsulates humankind's entire culinary history?

Nature remains focused on survival.

There is a mystery inherent in a pie by virtue of its contents being hidden beneath its crust.

Before there was wedding cake, there was bride pie.

Nature may have even less patience than politicians.

They all know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts," he says, "The weather, which, as they're farmers, affects everything else. Dying and birthing, of both people and animals. And what we eat - this last item comprising what we ate the day before and what we're planning to eat tomorrow. And all three of these major subjects encompass, in one way or another, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, the physical sciences, history, art, literature, and religion. We get around to sparring about all that counts in life but we usually do it while we're talking about food, it being a subject inseparable from every other subject. It's the table and the bed that count in life. And everything else we do, we do so we can get back to the table, back to the bed.

Newfoundlanders debated over when "the cod was coming back". Few dared ask if. Or what happens to the ocean if they don't come back?

Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.

Antoine-Auguste Parmentier was an eighteenth-century officer who popularized the potato in the French Army, and his name has ever since meant "with potatoes".

How fragile is a world so connected and tied together that a change in food fashion in one place can lead to starvation halfway through the world?

Food is also the stuff of international politics, and the power of one country to control the daily bread of another has always been politically important.

Love and travel are both powerful spurs to change.

Cod meat has virtually no fat (.3 percent) and is more than 18 percent protein, which is unusually high even for fish. And when cod is dried, the more than 80 percent of its flesh that is water having evaporated, it becomes concentrated protein - almost 80 percent protein.

I did not see Pirahã teenagers moping, sleeping in late, refusing to accept responsibility for their own actions, or trying out what they considered to be radically new approaches to life. They in fact are highly productive and conformist members of their community in the Pirahã sense of productivity (good fishermen, contributing generally to the security, food needs, and other aspects of the physical survival of the community). One gets no sense of teenage angst, depression, or insecurity among the Pirahã youth. They do not seem to be searching for answers. They have them. And new questions rarely arise.

When the Basque whalers applied to cod the salting techniques they were using on whale, they discovered a particularly good marriage because the cod is virtually without fat, and so if salted and dried well, would rarely spoil. It would outlast whale, which is red meat, and it would outlast herring, a fatty fish that became a popular salted item of the northern countries in the Middle Ages.

From a historical point of view, restricting the availability of addictive substances must be seen as a peculiarly perverse example of Calvinist dominator thought - a system in which the sinner is to be punished in this world by being transformed into an exploitable, of his cash, by the criminal/governmental combine that provides the addicitve substances. The image is more horrifying than that of the serpent that devours itself - it is once again the Dionysian image of the mother who devours her children, the image of a house divided against itself.

America has developed a pie tradition unequivocally and unapologetically at the sweet end of the scale, and at no time is this better demonstrated than at Thanksgiving in November. It seems that the country goes pie-mad at this time, and the traditional pies reflect that this is harvest season.

The town of Lunenburg was built on a hill running down to a sheltered harbour. On one of the upper streets stands a Presbyterian church with a huge gilded cod on its weather vane. Along the waterfront, the wooden-shingled houses are brick red, a color that originally came from mixing clay with cod-liver oil to protect the wood against the salt of the waterfront. It is the look of Nova Scotia - brick red wood, dark green pine, charcoal sea.

the reality of survival for my Triqui companions shows that it would be riskier to stay in San Miguel without work, money, food, or education. In this original context, crossing the border is not a choice to engage in a risk behavior but rather a process necessary to survive, to make life less risky.

In the hallowed tradition of squishy doughball liberals, I believe that science, reason, kindness, and understanding—maybe a little food—can set the world right. B

Not even remotely. It was an anthropological essay on the relationship between the fifth taste and pre-Hispanic food. Do you even know which mews you live in?’ ‘Yes,

A pie, like a building, requires construction after all.

The pie-cook and the pie-consumer are both lucky if the smell of the pie 'sells' not only its desirability as biological fuel but also remembrance of pies past.

There is no mention of savoury pies anywhere in any discussion of Thanksgiving. The American preoccupation with sweet dessert pies is absolute.

Every English village seems to have a particular day when some local tradition is celebrated - and the celebratory food is often pie.

Fruit pies started to come into their own during the sixteenth century as sugar became cheaper and more delicate forms of pastry were available.

In America, the unqualified word 'pie' unequivocally means a sweet dessert item, whereas in Australia it just as certainly means a meat pie.

An outstanding historical feature of the pie is that it is a self-contained meal which can be eaten in the hand, without the need of cutlery, crockery or napery.

Massachusetts had elevated cod from commodity to fetish.

gastronomically, a wild salmon and a farmed salmon have as much in common as a side of wild boar has with pork chops.

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is the natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world.

Salt cod, morue, had slowly made its way up from peasant food in the south to become an honored French tradition. But not fresh cod.

Politics and nationalism often play far greater roles than conservation in the decision-making process.

Where there are Norwegian communities, there are cod clubs.

Cod became almost a religious icon - a mythological crusader for Christian observance.

A foodie is somebody who thinks about food not just as biological sustenance, but also a key part of their identity, and a kind of lifestyle.

People want to think of a food tradition as something that would continue unchanging and timeless, unless some outside force knocked things askew.

There is no culture where everyone cooks in the same way.

Home cooking is always concerned with quality, because people you care about will eat the meal.

If you travel internationally, you will feel shocked by contemptuous talk of America. To hear your fellow citizens characterized as barbarians who know nothing of love, food, health, and religion, but everything of lawsuits, fast food, and guns, is to experience a national fidelity of which you may not have thought yourself capable. And yet, you’re at a loss for a defense.

Both commensality, the act of eating together, and the sharing of food are powerful means by which human beings create, express, and solidify feelings of mutual trust, intimacy, and kinship.

Foodways like any other aspect of culture, are never static. Even without the influence of other cultures, we would be eating and cooking differently from the generations that came before us.

The inevitable result of any search for authenticity is that you always end up with something completely modern in intent, since the purpose of the performance lies in the present, not the past.

A cook who has gone to extra trouble, who loves you enough not to just toss the stew onto a plate with a lump of bread, but to craft for it its own little pastry gift-box. Is this the crux of it?

It is hardly surprising that to this day New England is considered to be the pie capital of America, whose inhabitants traditionally eat (sweet) pie for breakfast. Apple pies in particular became deeply embedded in the history of America - associated with the old country, the new country and the pioneering spirit, and indelibly identified with the sense of nationhood and patriotic sentiment.

The most highly developed salt cod cuisine in the world is that of the Spanish Basque provinces. Until the nineteenth century, salt cod was exclusively food for the poor, usually broken up in stews.

How old does a recipe have to be in order to be traditional? What should we think when an old industrial food like salted (corned) beef or pickled herring becomes a part of “traditional” ethnic cuisine?

A pie is only as good as its pastry, and one of the delights of a good pie is the contrast in texture between the crisp pastry and the filling - whatever it might be. In a perfect pie, each component is independently perfect - the mouthfeel of the pastry (buttery, flaky, crumbly) and the mouthfeel of the filling (rich, unctuous, tender, sticky, crunchy, etc.); and the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

A culinary cosmopolitan perspective resides in a context of tremendous inequality, but it may simultaneously facilitate meaningful cultural exchange, and attempt to link food choices to global risks like climate change.

There was no doubt in the minds of nineteenth-century cooks and cookbook writers that there was something about pie - a difficult to grasp something that made it universally esteemed in a way that cake or stew or soup was not.

In Middle English, cod meant "a bag or a sack", or by inference, "a scrotum", which is why the outrageous purse that sixteenth-century men wore at their crotch to give the appearance of enormous and decorative genitals was called a codpiece.

Since the industrial revolution, Great Britain had been developing an ever-increasing market for groundfish - especially cod, haddock, and plaice - because fried fish, later fish-and-chips, became the favorite dish of the urban working class.

The medieval church imposed fast days on which sexual intercourse and the eating of flesh were forbidden, but eating "cold" foods was permitted. because fish came from water, it was deemed cold, as were waterfowl and whale, but meat was considered hot food.

It is often thought that the life of the hunter-gatherer was one of feast and famine. But most available data suggest that they were surprisingly healthy and had a fairly stable diet and lifestyle. Not so the primitive farmers. In years when the crops failed, in settlements where the population density was high and where disease weakened the ability to cope even further, life would have been very hard indeed. The settled population could not migrate to follow the food supply as could hunter-gatherers. They were trapped.

Our olfactory bulbs have gathered endless sense patterns of foods high in sugar, fat and salt. These flavour memories have become part of the fabric of our sense of self and are not easily discarded, because the system, as we have seen, is designed ‘not to forget’.

Practical, versatile, universally esteemed and provided with its own edible, easily decorated gift-box of pastry - small wonder that pie still plays a feature role at many of our favourite celebrations, so much so that it is often symbolic of the very event itself.

We are social animals, and we don't usually find and eat food alone, so we associate it at an emotional level with people, events and circumstances. Eventually a food becomes embedded with meaning, allowing anthropologists to asks questions like: 'Do pies mean anything?

There is a big difference between living in a society that hunts whales and living in one that views them. Nature is being reduced to precious demonstrations for entertainment and education, something far less natural than hunting. Are we headed for a world where nothing is left of nature but parks?

There is a type of pie strongly associated with Scotland which has aesthetic and health dangers that justify its inclusion here amongst the sinister pies. It is the Fried Pie - which is just what it says, a baked pie cooked a second time by frying. Scotland is not called the Land of the Brave for nothing.

People who know fresh cod - from the great restaurants of France, to British working-class fish shops, to the St. John's waterfront - all agree on three things: It should be cooked quickly and gently, it should be prepared simply, and, above all, it must be a thick piece. Only a large piece can be properly cooked.

Newlyn does not look like the Cornish towns on either side: Penzance and Mousehole. Those are resort towns where British vacationers practice that peculiarly British pastime of strolling the beaches and walkways, bundled in sweaters and mufflers. But Newlyn is a fishing town - or, increasingly, an out-of-work fishing town.

The traditional ingredients of the 'oggie', as it is called in the old Cornish language, are naturally disputed, but on some things most experts agree: the meat must be chopped, not minced, the vegetables (perhaps potato, onion and turnip) must be sliced and the ingredients are not pre-cooked before they are put in the pastry.

By the time the war ended, Iceland was a changed country. Not least among the changes, in 1944 it had negotiated full independence from Denmark. Now it was free to negotiate its own relations with the rest of the world. Because of cod, it had moved in one generation from a fifteenth-century colonial society to a modern postwar nation.

A discussion of the pie in movies would hardly be complete without mention of the classic comic device of custard-pie throwing, now legitimized and made semi-serious as the subversive political act of 'entarting'. 'Entarting' is delivering (by 'lovingly pushing', not throwing) a cream pie into the face of a deserving celebrity, preferably in full view of the world's media, in order to make a point.

It is the food that looks backwards through our shared family memories. It is comfort food, the food inextricably linked in our cultural consciousness with motherhood and nationhood. Even though the pies are no longer a daily item on our dinner tables, they still figure large in many of our memories: pies mean Thanksgiving and Christmas and picnics and silly old Aunt Mabel and going to the football with Dad.

Typical of Iberia, both the Basques and the Catalans claim the word comes from their own languages, and the rest of Spain disagrees. Catalans have a myth that cod was the proud king of fish and was always speaking boastfully, which was an offence to God. "Va callar!" (Will you be quiet!), God told the cod in Catalan. Whatever the word's origin, in Spain lo que corta el bacalao, the person who cuts the salt cod, is a colloquialism for the person in charge.

Food processors, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and clothes-washing machines have substancially lessened the physical activity required to cook and clean. Air conditioners and central heating have decreased how much energy our bodies spend to maintain a stable body temperature. Countless other devices, such as electric can openers, remote controls, electric razors and suitcases on wheels, have reduced, calorie by calorie, the amount of energy we expend to exist.

We were always looking for the perfect man. Even those of us who were not signed up for the traditional, heteronormative experience were nevertheless fascinated with the anthropological, unicorn-like search for one. Married or single, we were either searching for him or trying to mold him from one we already had. This perfect specimen would consist of the following essential attributes: He shared his food and always ordered dessert. When we recommended a book, he bought it without needing a friend to second our suggestion first. He knew how to pack a diaper bag without being told. He was a Southern gentleman with a mother from the East Coast who fostered his quietly progressive sensibilities. He said “I love you” after 2.5 months. He didn’t get drunk. He knew how to do taxes. He never questioned our feminist ideals when we refused to squish bugs or change oil. He didn’t sit down to put on his shoes. He had enough money for retirement. He wished vehemently for male-hormonal birth control. He had a slight unease with the concept of women’s shaved vaginas, but not enough to take a stance one way or another. He thought Mindy Kaling was funny. He liked throw pillows. He didn’t care if we made more money than him. He liked women his own age. We were reasonable and irrational, cynical and naïve, but always, always on the hunt. Of course, this story isn’t about perfect men, but Ardie Valdez unfortunately didn’t know that yet when, the day after Desmond’s untimely death, Ardie’s phone lit up: a notification from her dating app.

There were a number of reasons for decreeing abstention from meat. In ancient times meat was thought to inflame the passions (thereby distracting the mind from higher thoughts) whereas fish (or rather, creatures that lived in the water, which included whales and 'porpuses') were seen as cooling. It was also believed that the characteristics or habits of everything in the natural world would be transmitted to the eater, so the fact that fish did not have an obvious sex life added to its suitability for days of religious observance.

Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would have likely fed himself on the go and alone, like all the other animals. (Or, come to think of it, like the industrial eaters we've more recently become, grazing at gas stations and eating by ourselves whenever and wherever.) But sitting down to common meals, making eye contact, sharing food, and exercising self-restraint all served to civilize us.

Pastry-making, as every amateur baker fears, is as much about technique as ingredients. The rationale behind the well-known advice to keep the hands, implements and kitchen cool while making pastry, to use minimal water and to handle it lightly is obvious, now that we understand the process. Cool handling lengthens the time that the fat in the dough stays solid; using minimum amount of water reduces the gluten content and also allows the dough to be crisper; minimal handling also reduces the gluten, so we do not knead pastry dough as we do bread.

The word cod is of unknown origin. For something that began as food for good Catholics on the days they were to abstain from sex, it is not clear why, in several languages, the words for salt cod have come to have sexual connotations. In the English-speaking West Indies, saltfish is the common name for salt cod. In slang, saltfish means "a woman's genitals", and while Caribbeans do love their salt cod, it is this other meaning that is responsible for the frequent appearance of the word saltfish in Caribbean songs such as the Mighty Sparrow's "Saltfish".

Only from our position of power can we afford to ignore where things really come from, because we know that all things drain, like syrup through a pipeline, from the edges of the world into the centre. What we want will appear, as if by magic, on the shelves of our supermarkets because were have the money to pay for it. We don’t have to know - other people grow it and process it, and buy it and sell it until all we see is the brand, a language we understand without effort. All those strange substances are fuzed together for our convenience, our health, our pleasure.

How did the Vikings survive in greenless Greenland and earthless Scotland? How did they have enough provisions to push on to Woodland and Vineland, where they dared not go inland to gather food, and yet they still had enough food to get back? What did these Norsemen eat on the five expeditions to America between 985 and 1011 that have been recorded in Icelandic sagas? There were able to travel to all these distant, barren shores because they had learned to preserve codfish by hanging it in the frosty winter air until it lost four-fifths of its weight and became a durable woodlike plank.

This crucial functional role for alcohol and other intoxicants is slowly gaining wider acceptance in the anthropological community. 131 Proponents of the beer before bread hypotheses rightly emphasize how the increased cohesiveness and scale of intoxicant-using cultures would give them a distinct advantage in competition with other groups, allowing them to cooperate more effectively in work, food production, and warfare. 132 The inexorable pressure of cultural group selection would, in this way, encourage and disseminate the cultural use of intoxicants in the manner that we actually observe in the historical record, and that is completely inconsistent with any hijack or hangover theory of intoxication.

know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts,” he says. “The weather, which, as they’re farmers, affects everything else. Dying and birthing, of both people and animals. And what we eat—this last item comprising what we ate the day before and what we’re planning to eat tomorrow. And all three of these major subjects encompass, in one way or another, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, the physical sciences, history, art, literature, and religion. We get around to sparring about all that counts in a life but we usually do it while we’re talking about food, it being a subject inseparable from every other subject. It’s the table and the bed that count in life. And everything else we do, we do so we can get back to the table, back to the bed.

According to Felicitas Goodman, the hunter-gatherers arrived on the scene no earlier than 200,000 years ago. She explains: In a very real way, the hunters and gatherers open the first chapter of our human history. And fittingly, this dawning was as close to paradise as humans have ever been able to achieve. The men did the hunting and scavenging, working for about three hours a week, and the women took care of daily sustenance by gathering vegetal food and small animals. It was such a harmonious existence, such a successful adaptation, that it did not materially alter for many thousands of years. This view is not romanticizing matters. Those hunter-gatherer societies that have survived into the present still pursue the same lifestyle, and we are quite familiar with it from contemporary anthropological observation. Despite the unavoidable privations of human existence, despite occasional hunger, illness and other trials, what makes their life way so enviable is the fact that knowing every nook and cranny of their home territory and all that grows and lives in it, the bands make their regular rounds and take only what they need. By modern calculations, that amounted to only about 10 percent of the yield, easily recoverable under undisturbed conditions. They live a life of total balance, because they do not aspire to control their habitat; they are a part of it.

The decisions we make lead us to complex behavioral sets, and what we decide to do can be consciously and unconsciously motivated. The human being, however, is a small-group decision-making animal, a small pack animal, with a will to life, who engages in sex and the food quest to propagate and maintain that life, and who needs acceptance and recognition from group members.

Cooking deserves its place as one of the great revolutionary innovations of history, not because of the way it transforms food—there are plenty of other ways of doing that—but because of the way it transformed society. Culture begins when the raw gets cooked. The campfire becomes a place of communion when people eat around it. Cooking is not just a way of preparing food but of organizing society around communal meals and predictable mealtimes. It introduces new specialized functions and shared pleasures and responsibilities. It is more creative, more constructive of social ties than mere eating together. It can even replace eating together as a ritual of social adhesion.

...humans have evolved a desire to consume animal protein, and they are not going to lose that desire. As such, it is wrong-and likely suboptimal to our well-being-to expect us all to become strict vegans. 56 That is simply a fact for which there is anatomical, physiological, morphological (cranial and dental), paleobiological, parasitological, archaeological, cross-cultural, anthropological, nutritional, genomic, genetical, medical, sexual, and psychological data to support my argument.

In her 1975 essay “Ethnicity and Anthropology in America,” anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote, “Being American is a matter of abstention from foreign ways, foreign food, foreign ideas, foreign accents.

Anthropological evidence strongly suggests that it was saturated fats, protein and omega-3 fatty acids from animal foods that provided both the raw materials and energy necessary for the human brain to grow larger and more sophisticated over the course of evolution.

Indeed, cheap rice has only made the availability of cowherds more difficult, if not impossible. People who tended cattle for payment in kind (food every day and grain at the end of the year) did not do it any more.

Food should figure in the writing of Adivasi identity. In villages far off the road, all the food – meat, fish, kuccha, yams – comes from the forest. Having complete independence in procuring one’s food allows a people to disregard all outside interference, even apparently relevant NGO (non-governmental organization) or government programmes. Consider, for instance, the luxury in food choices and tastes

According to Heidegger, the notion of “Event” (Ereignis) – is routine rupture, an encounter with something, what had not been. This is anthropological, ontological and temporal essence of revolution. That’s why the time of revolution is the opposite to any other time, because one becomes himself in this time. The rest of time one is essentially asleep waiting for revolution. The rest of time – is antitime, that separates two revolutions, it is a moment of break. And his anti-time is maximally alienated from one. During this dreamy period between two revolutions one considers his identity as positive, that means he starts to associate himself not with deficiency, but with something present (with the food, welfare, care, fine details of reality). According to Heidegger, this exact condition is defined as unauthentic existence. One does not live as part of this existence, he is being replaced with das Man, and genuine humane existence, Dasein, is absent. Dasein is revealed only in revolution, the rest of time – is the time of das Man, a framework, which limits within one identifies himself with a fiction, with a fetish. But this is not a man’s figure, this is not a man in his true sense.

Cuisine is much more than a sum of dishes - it is everything we have, think, and do with food.

In short, the invention of agriculture caused the human food supply to increase in quantity and deteriorate in quality, but food industrialization multiplied this effect. Over the las hundred years, people have developed many technologies to produce orders of magnitude more food that is usually nutrient poor but calorie rich. Since the Industrial Revolution began about twelve generations ago, these changes have enabled us to feed more than an order of magnitude more people and to feed them more. Although approximately 800 million people today still face shortages of food, more than 1.6 billion people are overweight or obese.

Many seed savers see themselves as stewards, not only of their own family memories but of the shared stories and genetic codes contained within these plants. This kind of recollection works against collective forgetting and the widespread disappearance of so many agricultural plants and animals. Old localized, traditional varieties of plants and animals fell (or were pushed) out of everyday use as agriculture became increasingly large scale, industrialized, and standardized, relying on ever fewer varieties in order to achieve the high levels of uniformity and predictability expected not only by stockholders but also by grocery store shoppers. The loss of biodiversity also means a broader form of forgetting.

While this book focuses on the heirloom food movement, I argue that edible memory is far more expansive than simply the way people treat old-fashioned tomatoes or apples. Based on my observations, edible memory is something people enact with regard to a whole range of foods--including some of the most highly processed foods around. The heirloom varieties I focus on in most of this book are a particularly charged site of the intersections of food, memory, and meaning, but they serve as one rich example of a much larger process.

I came upon the links between a simple midday meal and the complex webs of history and geography in which we dwell. I learned the ways a tomato can evoke the past and an apple can offer hope for the future.

as long as we associate food preparation with "love" and "family," while a capitalist economy continually erodes the ties that bind, we will continue to reproduce these variations on nostalgia for the real

Some people hate pigs, Some people love pigs, Some people behave like pigs. Some people worship cows, Some people feast on cows, Some people just act like cows. Eat what you like, Believe what you like. As long as you don't behave like pigs and cows, let no tradition be your guide.

Undecided' sounds terrible; I hate uncertainty. This doesn't feel like drifitng aimlessly to me though, because I have a solid plan. It just happens to be a plan to try everything, like a big ol' college buffet. One helping of Anthropology of Food, one side of Introduction to Oceanography, one spoonful of History of Opera... I think it's more like 'overdecided'.

The squabs in wine sauce and the fragrant, steaming frumenty and apples seethed in almond milk went some way to reviving his strength, as did the sweet, potent ice-wine with which they plied him.

For someone who is fifty pounds overweight, losing three to five pounds over half a year is a frustrating drop in the bucket. Accordingly, a stock response to these studies has been to declare exercise futile for trimming your waist. Before we entirely dismiss the weight control benefits of walking, the most fundamental type of endurance physical activity, let’s examine the major arguments behind this contention through the lens of evolutionary anthropology. The first is the specter of compensatory mechanisms, notably fatigue and hunger. If I walk ten thousand extra steps, I’ll be more tired and hungry, so I’ll rest and eat more to recoup lost calories. From an evolutionary perspective, these urges make sense. Because natural selection ultimately favors those who can allocate as much energy as possible to reproduction, our physiology has been tuned over millions of generations to hoard energy, especially fat. Further, because almost no one until recently was able to become overweight or obese, our bodies primarily sense if we are gaining or losing weight rather than how much excess fat we have. Whether you are skinny or stout, negative energy balance—including dieting—causes a starvation response that helps us restore energetic equilibrium or, better yet, gain weight so we can shunt more energy toward reproduction.35 It’s unfair, but losing ten pounds elicits food cravings and the desire to be inactive regardless of whether one is skinny or obese.

Food is language; cuisine is a dialect.

Bon VoyApetit!

Some may go so far as to label these pleasures vices, but I would not, for what is a vice after all, but a pleasure with a bad reputation?

Like children, many of us eat what we like and we only like what we know.

What we forget is that, as omnivores, we are extremely gifted at changing the way we eat to accommodate different environments.