Foods of Association FOODS OF ASSOCIATION Biocultural Perspectives on Foods and Beverages that Mediate Sociability Nina L. Etkin The University of Arizona Press Tucson The University of Arizona Press www.uapress.arizona.edu © 2009 by The Arizona Board of Regents Open-access edition published 2019 ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-2777-9 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3932-1 (open-access e-book) The text of this book is licensed under the Creative Commons Atrribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivsatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Etkin, Nina L. (Nina Lilian), 1948– Foods of association : biocultural perspectives on foods and beverages that mediate sociability / Nina L. Etkin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8165-2777-9 (hard cover : alk. paper) 1. Food habits. 2. Drinking customs. 3. Nutritional anthropology. 4. Hausa (African people)—Food. 5. Hausa (African people)—Social life and customs. I. Title. gt2850.e876 2009 394.1 ʹ 2—dc22 2009007538 An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-0-8165-3932-1. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. To my husband, Paul Ross, for stimulating me intellectually, being my best friend, and encouraging me in so many ways Contents List of Figures viii List of Tables ix Acknowledgments xi 1 Introduction 1 2 The Imperial Roots of European Foodways 50 3 Street Foods and Beverages 89 4 Foods and Beverages of Occasion, Circumstance, and Ceremony 127 5 Aspects of Health, Hype, and Identity in Bottled Water 171 6 Overview 206 Notes 209 References 213 Index 239 Figures Hausa girls beside a dish of chile peppers 73 Author with Hausa women and children 112 Young Hausa men sharing cowpea fritters 116 Hausa boys removing seed coats from roasted groundnuts 118 Head of a Hausa household offers goro to guests at a suna 154 Hausa girls simulate the celebration of marriage 157 Hausa children wait in line for grinding mill 164 Hausa woman pounding millet with a mortar and pestle 165 Hausa water collectors at a well in Hurumi 195 Author and her associate interviewing a Hausa informant 197 All photographs are by Paul Ross, 1988. Tables 1.1 Categories of USDA-authorized organic foods 30 1.2 Vitamin susceptibility to environmental conditions 30 1.3 A brief history of low-carbohydrate (CHO) diets 35 2.1 Caffeine and theobromine in beverages of association 78 2.2 Sites of action and relative strengths of methylxanthines 84 3.1 Polynesian botanical canoe foods 96 3.2 Hawaiian Plate Lunch nutrient values 100 3.3 Terms for semiwild fruit in Hurumi 119 Acknowledgments I credit collaborations on Hausa research with Paul Ross and Malam Ibrahim Muazzamu and express gratitude to the people of Hurumi who taught me so much about Hausa medicine and animate my broader reflections on the meanings of food, medicine, and health. I applaud Jo Ann Steele, Laurie Ross Fielding, and Edward Steele for their encourage- ment. Thank you to a legion of stimulating University of Hawai ¿ i anthro- pology graduate students and to Christine Szuter, Allyson Carter, and other energetically professional staff of the University of Arizona Press. c h a p t e r 1 Introduction This book explores the biology and culture of foods and beverages that are consumed in communal settings, with special attention to the implications of these items for people’s health. As defined for this book, foods and beverages of association are consumed by diverse social groups: these might be durable, such as the regular congregation of a church; impermanent, such as guests at a wedding; or some variation in between. In the case of public consumables such as street foods, eating and drink- ing overlap in time and space, although a social entity of consumption may exist only in the abstract or have limited longevity. A substantial literature on food sociability that centers on the social context of food exists, but it largely neglects the foods and beverages that are consumed in social settings, which is the current volume’s focus. ∞ Food sociability foregrounds gastronomy, in which the central axis is the intersection of cultural and social features of food and eating. That litera- ture does not consider physiology and food chemistry but instead focuses on how locus, praxis, and discourse—the context, social organization, and semantics—of eating are important means by which to understand diverse foodways. By employing a bio cultural perspective, I likewise acknowledge that foods are conduits of meaning and that they mediate social relations. However, my primary focus is on the biology of the foods themselves, how they impact individual and collective physiologies, and how the tangible aspects of foods contribute to their meaning. My analysis coheres around foods and beverages that fuel the body, induce physical satiety, provide nutrients, and have pharmacologic potential. In a departure from much of the contemporary (largely popular) lit- erature, this book does not promote certain foods or recommend dietary regimens. Instead, I advance an integrated perspective and draw on an extensive multidisciplinary literature to explore themes such as food chemistry, human evolution, history of cuisines, nutrition, and food and culture. I examine what exists, or once did, in real ethnographic contexts 2 c h a p t e r 1 and consider the physiologic implications of those foodways. I also in- clude my research on Hausa food and medicine. The book is organized around a handful of circumstances in which foods and beverages of association are consumed. The criteria providing the framework for my research are that the foods and beverages should be ingested in the company, or at least proximity, of other people and that the communal consumption of these items contributes to their meaning. The key concern was to select foods and drinks for which there is suffi- cient scholarship on nutrients, pharmacodynamic constituents, physio- logic actions, history, and ethnography. The Structure of the Book In this introductory chapter, I outline the theoretical foundations of my work and reflect on the physiologic and cultural circumstances of food sharing and other transfers in evolutionary perspective. I consider the evolution of food management strategies among noncaptive animals gen- erally, nonhuman primates in near-natural environments, and archaeo- logical and historical human populations. Following that, I discuss some dietary strategies in the contemporary and affluent West, where individ- uals form confederations around foodways that are designed to meet general and specific health goals: the Slow Food movement; vegetarian and low-carbohydrate diets; and foodways that accommodate the genetic conditions diabetes, gluten enteropathy, and lactose intolerance. Chapter 2 offers a general treatment of European exploration and colonial activities to illustrate how certain foods and beverages were appropriated from other cultures and geographic regions and became items of association in European foodways. A more thorough biocultural analysis is applied to spices, which forge association as signatures of cui- sines, and the social beverages coffee, cocoa, and tea. Chapter 3 is about street foods, that is, items that are consumed in public but not in conven- tional restaurants. A global overview serves as a backdrop for in-depth treatment of street foods in Hawai ¿ i and northern Nigeria. In chapter 4, I explore foods and beverages consumed for all manner of ceremonies and occasions; they mark occasions that range from the mundane to the ritually sacred and have significant nutritional and pharmacologic poten- tial. While celebratory customs and ritual elements are included to pro- i n t r o d u c t i o n 3 vide context, the primary focus is on the foods themselves. Chapter 5 traces the history and health potential of a very contemporary beverage of association: bottled water. I concentrate on the branded, individual-sized products that are vigorously promoted for a variety of health claims— which, I argue, have not been established or even substantially explored. The concluding chapter is an overview of themes that recur throughout the book and also suggests additional directions for research. Theoretical Perspectives My work is framed by a biocultural perspective that explores both the physiologic implications of consumption and the cultural construction and social circulation of food. This perspective is more comprehensive than are approaches in the biosciences, which commonly explore foods out of context, with the objective of identifying discrete constituents and specific activities. Biocultural analysis also expands many of the other anthropological inquiries on food, which center on issues of body, gen- der, identity, and commodification (e.g., Counihan 1999; Pence 2002; Bryant et al. 2003) but not on how those meaning-centered issues inter- sect food pharmacology and human physiology. I emphasize that people regard foods and beverages simultaneously as biodynamic substances and cultural objects: their pharmacologic profiles both transcend and contrib- ute to their cultural signification. In other work, I conflate the biocultural perspective with the term ethnopharmacology , which is the intersection of medical ethnography and the biology of therapeutic action, a transdis- ciplinary exploration that spans the biological and social sciences (Greek etymology, from ethno -, ‘‘culture’’ or ‘‘people’’; pharm -, ‘‘drug’’) (e.g., Etkin 2006a; Etkin and Elisabetsky 2005). I also invoke issues of globaliza- tion and political economy to illustrate how physiology and cuisine are influenced by asymmetrical access to food, knowledge, and other re- sources, disparities that bear directly and indirectly on nutrient sufficiency and other health issues. My consideration of the physiologic implications of foods and bev- erages focuses primarily on botanicals. Logically, we understand that plants, which are not mobile and do not have the behavioral repertoires that animals employ, would have evolved attributes that support their survival. For example, plant reproduction is assisted by allelochemicals 4 c h a p t e r 1 and structures that attract pollinators and seed dispersers or prevent com- peting species from sharing adjacent territories; toxins and other deter- rents discourage herbivory and microorganismal infection. That many of these attributes benefit sympatric species of plants and animals, including humans, illustrates the coevolutionary relations among complex assem- blages of flora and fauna. This means that an organism can be fully apprehended only through attention being paid to the context of its place in the world and the other life-forms that synchronically or diachronically share its environment. Food Sharing Scholars from many disciplines have contemplated intra- and cross- specific cooperative behaviors for millennia. Early philosophical reflec- tions on humanity ranged among ‘‘questions of good and evil, of [peo- ple’s] . . . tendency to be in a state of peace or war, and [their] . . . proclivity to cooperate or to cheat when the option presents itself ’’ (Dugatkin 1997:4). Aristotle and the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke portrayed people as naturally cooperative. Others held the opposite view, which was expanded by another English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, in his classic work Leviathan (1651), in which he was absorbed by people’s uncooperative tendencies and the laws necessary to counter these inclina- tions. Hobbes did not generalize his view to all taxa and remarked on cooperation among social insects (see the section on bees, below). In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin struggled with how cooperation and altruism might compromise his theory of natural selection through sur- vival of the most fit; he eventually resolved this apparent contradiction by drafting a theory of inclusive fitness, which was expanded and formalized a century later by the evolutionary biologist William Hamilton. In the late nineteenth century, Darwin’s tenacious advocate Thomas Huxley empha- sized lack of cooperation among many taxa, while Alfred Russel Wallace, who developed a theory of natural selection at the same time that Darwin did, took the position that cooperation in the animal kingdom is norma- tive, not exceptional. In the 1930s, Warder Clyde Alee, cofounder of the Chicago school of animal social behavior, described what he perceived to be the ubiquity of cooperative behaviors, nuanced by dominance hier- i n t r o d u c t i o n 5 archies, and was challenged by proponents who saw an uneven distribu- tion of cooperative conduct among diverse taxa (Dugatkin 1997). Unlike their earlier counterparts, Hamilton’s 1960s publications on inclusive fitness were framed by a theoretical perspective and are re- garded by some as a watershed that signals the modern era of cooperation and altruism studies, as well as the advent of modern sociobiology and behavioral ecology. A decade later, Edward O. Wilson reemphasized the central paradigm that cooperation should be more common among bio- logical kin than among unrelated individuals. In Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975:4), he defined the field as ‘‘the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior’’ (emphasis added) and claimed that animal behaviors, including those of humans, are genetically inherited and subject to natural selection and other evolutionary processes. Like Hamilton’s position, Wilson’s theory was foundational and influential. It also was, and remains, controversial because of its rigidity and its implica- tions for understanding social dynamics in human societies. For example, if demographics such as ethnicity and gender are defined genetically, can social policies adequately address inequities? During the same years, Rob- ert Trivers offered his cornerstone argument that reciprocal altruism ex- plains cooperation among nonkin. Lee Dugatkin and colleagues argue that at least three other categories of cooperative behavior signify: group selection, kin selection, and by-product mutualism (in harsh environ- ments in which individuals more than groups are likely to be subject to predation) (Dugatkin 1997). Social scientists who explore food transfer as a medium of nonverbal communication overlook that it also has substantial physiologic signifi- cance and in many instances and for many taxa has verbal components as well. Food sharing refers to the circumstances in which one individual allows another to consume all or part of a food that the holder could protect and withhold if he or she wished. It occurs among animals repre- senting a spectrum of taxa, including insects, birds, cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises), and other mammals. Much of that sharing is parent- offspring and other kin provisioning; nonkin sharing is less well under- stood, except among human groups. Jeffrey Stevens and Ian Gilby’s (2004) review of nonkin sharing in species from arthropods to nonhuman pri- mates offers a novel framework that explores two axes: the interval be- 6 c h a p t e r 1 tween when an item is shared and when the sharer accrues benefits; and the ‘‘currency units’’ in which the individual who shares receives benefits. Although the terms provisioning and sharing are used interchangeably in some literature, they are not the same: provisioning embodies com- prehensive rules that govern interactions within the social group; sharing refers to less formal, perhaps occasion-specific, circumstances. In the idiom of animal behavior, provisioning refers to one individual feeding another, including hierarchically vertical and horizontal kin feeding— parents to offspring and vice versa, siblings to siblings, cross-gender ex- changes, and so on. This may take various forms: for example, trophalaxis refers to members of a colony feeding one another, and mass provisioning denotes the feeding of the different growth stages of a hive or colony by some subset of the whole population. In contrast, food sharing is one way to learn about foods. When social relations include interest in, and toler- ance of, others’ activities, individuals are likely to encounter, try, and eat the same foods. Reception of a novel food by naive group members of diverse taxa is more likely to occur in the proximity of other, more knowl- edgeable group members (Addessi and Visalberghi 2004). Animals Among social insects, honeybees ( Apis mellifera L., Apiidae) offer an interesting example of the complexity of provisioning in the larger context of social relations that include caste, age, gender, and labor asymmetries. At the start of a season, each hive houses one queen, several dozen drones (males), thousands of foraging female workers, and about twice as many workers that maintain and defend the hive and convert nectar into honey for their hive mates. The honeybee colony has been described as a super- organism that houses individuals and groups of bees whose secretions and actions bring about physiologic and behavioral changes within the organ- ism. The most potent individual is the colony’s queen, who secretes a combination of chemicals that direct the workers in their tasks. These workers communicate about food sources in both phonetic (‘‘buzzing’’) and kinetic (‘‘dancing’’) modes that convey information about the smell and taste of the pollen and nectar that they forage for and carry back to the hive. Hive mates influence one another as specialized groups of workers, i n t r o d u c t i o n 7 drones, and brood (eggs, larvae, pupae). Workers feed adults and the brood the honey-pollen mixture known as beebread. A more honey-dense version of this, called royal jelly, is fed to the worker egg that is desig- nated to become the new queen. This complex and organized provision- ing integrates primarily gene-based, but also learned, elements without whose orchestration the colony would not survive (Moritz and Southwick 1992; see below, mutualism and honeyguides; see also chapter 4). While animals such as squirrels ( Sciurus carolinensis Gmelin, Sciuri- dae) and some hawks (several genera, Accipitridae) do not come together for foraging or eating, many others are social foragers, a definition that does not extend to individuals who were attracted independently to a food source, whose propinquity is fortuitous, and who disperse as quickly as they appeared to come together. Social foraging occurs when the pres- ence of conspecifics or heterospecifics attracts individuals to a feeding locale. This strategy typically is used when the success of foraging de- pends on the actions of associates in the same range of communication. The actions of associates can affect all phases of foraging, from the initia- tion of the search to food division and consumption. Social foraging can decrease predation risk as the number of vigilants increases so that food sources, especially those that are widely distributed, are seen by more group members more quickly. Vultures (several genera, Accipitridae) and seabirds ( Larus spp., Laridae), for example, forage as groups over ex- tended areas; when one or a small number identify a food source, the others quickly converge. Social foraging also can increase foraging skill- fulness, because larger group size predicts better (more often, more spe- cific) location of foods, and groups can take down larger prey than indi- vidual foragers can. Lions ( Panthera leo L., Felidae) that forage alone take small prey, while groups can go after larger animals that can feed more individuals. In this example, labor is divided between stalkers and lions that wait to take down the fleeing prey (Beauchamp 2004; Smuts 2004). Harris’s hawks ( Parabuteo unicinctus Temm., Accipitridae) hunt in cohesive groups, most commonly to surprise-pounce as several individ- uals converge on prey from different directions. They also flush and am- bush after the prey has found cover, surrounding the location of the prey and sometimes penetrating the cover location. A third strategy in- volves sustained chase of prey with individual hawks rotating in the lead