This comprehensive review, “The Anthropology of Food and Eating” by Sidney W. Mintz and Christine M. Du Bois (2002), offers an insightful overview of the significant developments and key themes within this anthropological subfield, particularly focusing on works published after 1984.
The study of food and eating in anthropology boasts a long history, with early contributions dating back to the nineteenth century from scholars such as Garrick Mallery and William Robertson Smith. Notable early works include Frank Hamilton Cushing’s monograph on Zuñi breadstuffs (1920) and Franz Boas’s treatment of Kwakiutl salmon recipes (1921), which even in their “mere fact collecting” form, could reveal much about social organization and hierarchy. More recently, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas made important contributions to a structuralist view of food and eating, with Jack Goody’s 1982 book Cooking, Cuisine, and Class marking a turning point for the subfield.
Mintz and Du Bois argue that the study of food and eating is crucial not only because food is fundamental to human existence, and often insufficiently available, but also because it has proven valuable for debating and advancing anthropological theory and research methods. The subfield has been instrumental in illuminating broad societal processes, including:
- Political-economic value-creation.
- Symbolic value-creation.
- The social construction of memory.
Furthermore, food studies have served as an important arena for discussing the merits of cultural and historical materialism versus structuralist or symbolic explanations for human behavior, and for refining the understanding of variation in informants’ ethnographic responses.
The review organizes its extensive coverage into seven primary subsections: classic food ethnographies, single commodities and substances, food and social change, food insecurity, eating and ritual, eating and identities, and instructional materials. Among these, the most extensive anthropological work has concentrated on food insecurity, eating and ritual, and eating and identities. While the literature on agriculture in developing countries is vast, the authors primarily focus on consumption rather than production, and note the scarcity of social science research on food production in industrialized contexts. They also highlight the lamentably rare occurrence of comprehensive anthropological monographs on food systems, citing Audrey Richards’s Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia (1939) as a model for the field.
In their concluding remarks, Mintz and Du Bois note the “staggering increase” in food literature, influenced by major trends such as globalization, the growing affluence and cosmopolitanism of Western societies, and the inclusivist tendencies of U.S. society. They posit that while anthropologists are well-positioned to contribute significantly to policy development in areas like health, nutrition, food inspection, and world hunger, they have “not taken full advantage of this opportunity”.
Reference:
Mintz, S. W., & Du Bois, C. M. (2002). The anthropology of food and eating. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, 99–119. doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.032702.131011
