The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship with Food
John S. Allen
Language: English
Pages: 328
ISBN: 0674055721
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this gustatory tour of human history, John S. Allen demonstrates that the everyday activity of eating offers deep insights into human beings’ biological and cultural heritage.
We humans eat a wide array of plants and animals, but unlike other omnivores we eat with our minds as much as our stomachs. This thoughtful relationship with food is part of what makes us a unique species, and makes culinary cultures diverse. Not even our closest primate relatives think about food in the way Homo sapiens does. We are superomnivores whose palates reflect the natural history of our species.
Drawing on the work of food historians and chefs, anthropologists and neuroscientists, Allen starts out with the diets of our earliest ancestors, explores cooking’s role in our evolving brain, and moves on to the preoccupations of contemporary foodies. The Omnivorous Mind delivers insights into food aversions and cravings, our compulsive need to label foods as good or bad, dietary deviation from “healthy” food pyramids, and cross-cultural attitudes toward eating (with the French, bien sûr, exemplifying the pursuit of gastronomic pleasure).
To explain, for example, the worldwide popularity of crispy foods, Allen considers first the food habits of our insect-eating relatives. He also suggests that the sound of crunch may stave off dietary boredom by adding variety to sensory experience. Or perhaps fried foods, which we think of as bad for us, interject a frisson of illicit pleasure. When it comes to eating, Allen shows, there’s no one way to account for taste.
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Period 2 million to 2.5 million years ago, the earliest members of genus Homo likely began the transition from being almost fully plant-eaters to being much more omnivorous. There is no way of knowing if early Homo hunted in the same way as modern humans do; it seems highly unlikely. But the basic technology of defleshing bones with a sharp stone leaves the same signs no matter how the animal was killed. Washburn’s scenario of how humanness derived from hunting is still difficult to place in the.
Colleagues.31 Carefully picking through this collection, they found at least eleven edible mollusk species and four fish species that would be obtainable from shallow water; a hominin with little technology could have done quite well grazing in these waters. But did Homo erectus take advantage of this aquatic larder? To answer this question, Joordens and colleagues looked at the distribution and size of the shell remains. Two particularly abundant mollusks presented a somewhat intriguing picture.
Certain that your California sushi roll appetizer is traditionally Japanese. Some scientists, such as evolutionary psychologists and biocultural anthropologists, become very excited when they see a behavioral or cognitive pattern that seems to transcend cultural boundaries. Quite reasonably, they hypothesize that the pattern may have some underlying biological and evolutionary basis and that it is not solely the product of local environmental or cultural influences. In other words, some patterns.
Although there has been much effort devoted to fi nding a disease connection. Mathematical models suggest that in many populations both tasting and non-tasting variants of the gene are being actively maintained by natural selection.37 This “balancing selection” occurs when one allele has an advantage up to a certain frequency in a population, but if it exceeds that frequency, the advantage is lost. Stephen Wooding and colleagues hypothesize that the polymorphism for PTC tasting is maintained.
Occurred in regions important for visual processing. This difference was seen only for food items; there was no difference among the groups when they were looking at neutral items. McCaffrey and colleagues suggest that this increased activity in the visual processing regions may reflect the increased monitoring of food that SWLs apply to keep the weight off. The more closely they pay attention to food, the less likely they are to engage in passive eating. There was one other significant result.