Anthropology of Food

Being necessary to our basic biological survival, food is a human universal. Indeed, the paired technological revolutions of fire and cooking are central features of a common human experience reaching deep into our species’ evolutionary past. But food is much more than just an instrumental caloric requirement. In both modern and historic times, when it comes to the manner of its acquisition/production, preparation, and consumption food is among the most highly differentiated and symbolically laden of all socio-cultural domains. Scholars have long noted that in processes of assimilation, negotiation, and exchange characteristic of the colonial forces that have shaped our contemporary world, food traditions are the most persistent and resistant to change. Food is sacred and profane, food nourishes and malnourishes, food comforts and disgusts, food is shared and withheld, food can foster peace and it can kindle conflict. This class will examine this most complex and multifaceted of human necessities from an anthropological perspective that accounts for a range of possibilities along the continuum from local to global.