Anthropology of food

Short description: Study of history behind food production and consumption

thumb Anthropology of food is a sub-field of cultural anthropology that connects an ethnographic and historical perspective with contemporary social issues in food production and consumption systems.[1][2]

Although early anthropological accounts often dealt with cooking and eating as part of ritual or daily life, food was rarely regarded as the central point of academic focus. This changed in the later half of the 20th century, when foundational work by Mary Douglas, Marvin Harris, Arjun Appadurai, Jack Goody, and Sidney Mintz cemented the study of food as a key insight into modern social life.[3] Mintz is known as the "Father of food anthropology"[4] for his 1985 work Sweetness and Power,[5] which linked British demand for sugar with the creation of empire and exploitative industrial labor conditions.

Research has traced the material and symbolic importance of food, as well as how they intersect.[6] Examples of ongoing themes are food as a form of differentiation,[7] commensality, and food's role in industrialization and globalizing labor and commodity chains.

Several related and interdisciplinary academic programs exist in the US and UK[8] (listed under Food studies institutions).

Anthropology of food is also the name of a scientific journal first published in 2001.[9]

## History

In 1885, John Gregory Bourke wrote the first anthropological paper specifically on food: "The Urine Dance of the Zuni Indians of New Mexico". In the paper Bourke questioned what it meant for something to be edible. After some work on the symbolic value of food, anthropologists focused on food from a "functionalist" perspective, writing on how food served a role of nutrition, as seen in the work of Audrey Richards. Others produced ethnographic accounts of food practices and in the US, some focused on the role of psychology, in particular the role of infant feeding. After WWII, food anthropologists took an ecological perspective, to explain cultural notions of habits, taboos etc. One such major figure at this time was Marvin Harris. At the same time, thinkers who characterized food as the product of shared thinking, including Mary Douglas and structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss were influential.[10]: 3–4

Disputes between thinkers continued in the 1980s, when the publications of Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power, Jack Goody's Cooking, Cuisine and Class and Mary Weismantel's Food, Gender, and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes shifted the field to taking a less rigid approach to symbolism, and being more focused on history and economics. Identity became a popular axis of investigation, until at the beginning of the 21st century it was criticised by some scholars as staid and as being theorized in an unsophisticated manner. Following thinkers researched how food could be understood as maintaining a historical identity among eaters, and how this can change with shifts brought about by economic development.[10]: 4–5

## See also

* Nutritional anthropology
* Sociology of food
* Foodways
* Food studies
* The Cooking Gene
* Gastronomica

## References

1. ↑ Parrish, Sabine; Begueria, Arantza; Bevan, Imogen; Choi, Tyffany; Kelly, Therese M.; Mejia López, Juan; Pozzi, Sara; Reid, Memory et al. (2025). "Anthropology of Food: History, Topics, and Trajectories to Understand a Discipline". Encyclopedia 5 (1): 22. doi:10.3390/encyclopedia5010022.
2. ↑ Tierney, R. Kenji; Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko (2012). "Anthropology of Food". in Pilcher, Jeffrey M.. The Oxford Handbook of Food History. Oxford University Press. pp. 117–134. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199729937.013.0007. ISBN 978-0-19-972993-7.
3. ↑ Klein and Watson (2016). The Handbook of Food and Anthropology. ]Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 3. ISBN 9780857855947.
4. ↑ Roberts, Sam (30 December 2015). "Sidney Mintz, Father of Food Anthropology, dies at 93". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/us/sidney-mintz-father-of-food-anthropology-dies-at-93.html.
5. ↑ Mintz, Sidney (1985). Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. ISBN 0140092331. https://archive.org/details/sweetnesspowerpl00mint.
6. ↑ Pilcher, Jeremy (2012). The Oxford Handbook of Food History. ISBN 9780199729937.
7. ↑ Bourdieu, Pierre (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge. ISBN 0-674-21277-0. https://archive.org/details/distinctionsocia0000bour.
8. ↑ "Food Studies Programs". http://www.food-culture.org/food-studies-programs/.
9. ↑ "Anthropology of food". https://journals.openedition.org/aof/.
10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Dirks, Robert; Hunter, Gina (2013). "The anthropology of food". in Albala, Ken. Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies. Oxford & New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-78264-7.

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