The Anthropology of Food and Eating

TLDR

Anthropology has studied food and eating since the nineteenth century, beginning with scholars such as Garrick Mallery and William Robertson Smith. This review concentrates on food and eating studies published after 1984, arguing that the field is essential for understanding human sustenance and for advancing anthropological theory and methods. The review is organized into seven subsections covering classic food ethnographies, with less‑covered topics supplemented by relevant sociology and history literature. Food studies illuminate political‑economic and symbolic value creation, social memory construction, and provide a venue for debating theoretical frameworks, with the most extensive work focusing on food insecurity, ritual, and identity.

Abstract

▪ Abstract The study of food and eating has a long history in anthropology, beginning in the nineteenth century with Garrick Mallery and William Robertson Smith. This review notes landmark studies prior to the 1980s, sketching the history of the subfield. We concentrate primarily, however, on works published after 1984. We contend that the study of food and eating is important both for its own sake since food is utterly essential to human existence (and often insufficiently available) and because the subfield has proved valuable for debating and advancing anthropological theory and research methods. Food studies have illuminated broad societal processes such as political-economic value-creation, symbolic value-creation, and the social construction of memory. Such studies have also proved an important arena for debating the relative merits of cultural and historical materialism vs. structuralist or symbolic explanations for human behavior, and for refining our understanding of variation in informants' responses to ethnographic questions. Seven subsections examine classic food ethnographies: single commodities and substances; food and social change; food insecurity; eating and ritual; eating and identities; and instructional materials. The richest, most extensive anthropological work among these subtopics has focused on food insecurity, eating and ritual, and eating and identities. For topics whose anthropological coverage has not been extensive (e.g., book-length studies of single commodities, or works on the industrialization of food systems), useful publications from sister disciplines—primarily sociology and history—are discussed.