Anthropology Classes Offer Food History for Thought

Is wolfing down a cheeseburger and fries an event of cultural significance?

Yes--and a very important one, food historians say.

“If you know how people eat, when they eat, who prepares the food, you know more than a lot about their culture,” said Mary Beaudry, an associate professor of archaeology at Boston University who is teaching a course on the anthropology of food.

Under course sections such as “Food Taboos and Rituals” and “Food and Drink as Social Glue,” Beaudry’s 12 students are studying the significance of eating tools, Aztec cooking and the Japanese tea ceremony.

Boston University’s Metropolitan College is offering the food anthropology course for the first time, joining an academic field that has gained popularity in recent years.

“There’s a lot of concern that it’s all sort of putting on your aprons and comparing recipes rather than a scholarly pursuit,” Beaudry said.

But her students learn how food and drink reflect culture in daily life and important events, such as Thanksgiving feasts, the baptism of babies or the crushing of a wine glass at Jewish weddings.

“Food goes beyond just the material applications into a whole symbolic realm,” Beaudry said. “It gets wrapped up in a whole ethos of the culture.”

Class members include would-be chefs, free-lance food writers and an assistant to author and television cook Julia Child. The course credit goes toward a master’s degree in liberal arts.

“It’s an extremely pervasive subject,” said student Mary Anne Parenty, a teaching assistant in the university’s culinary arts program. “Looking at food from all these perspectives is something that really hasn’t been done before.”

One topic of the course is how cultures keep their ethnic identity by cooking, a custom that has been losing its way in the United States.

“American ethnicity is expressed through fast foods and heavily prepared and packaged foods, conveniences overriding other things,” Beaudry said. “Even so, you can come across rather startling differences (in cooking) by just driving 600 miles.”

Food is a potent social indicator in modern American society, especially in grim economic times, Beaudry said.

“You don’t see champagne ads during a football game,” she said. “Things like truffles and white chocolate are associated with certain kinds of eating as well as certain kinds of foods.

“In our country, it’s probably not tied so much to class as to economics.”

Food has become an academic field in its own right in the last decade, although it has been studied for many years, said James Watson, an anthropology professor at Harvard University.

Rising interest in health and nutrition may have boosted its popularity, said Watson, who has taught food anthropology at Harvard and the University of Pittsburgh.

“Food is not just putting fuel in your mouth,” he said. “Food is drawing social boundaries, who do you eat with, what kind of foods do you eat, who cooks for whom.

“Food is a highly symbolic means of communication and exchange.”

Food tends not to influence culture but mirror it, just as the move from communal dishes to separate place settings reflects the rise of individualism in Western society, Beaudry said.

But there are times when food, or lack of it, becomes critical to social or political struggles. Beaudry cites hunger strikes by pro-democracy demonstrators in China or soldiers of the Irish Republican Army imprisoned by British authorities in the 1980s as examples.

“Other people become fascinated with the progress of the fast because as such an anti-social gesture, it’s a very powerful political statement,” Beaudry said.

And governments that become targets of such dramatic, life-threatening protests rarely ignore the hunger strikers.

“They try to make them eat not just so they won’t die, but by forcing the fast to be broken, they’re basically nullifying the political statement too,” Beaudry said.

Many anthropologists also point to famines, such as those in Ethiopia, as a reverse image of how crucial food is to social interaction.

“These people cease to share and begin to steal from one another and distrust one another and not welcome visitors because they don’t have food,” Beaudry said. “As their health declines, they just become exhausted and inactive even at the family level.”

Beaudry’s students will learn how colonizing nations blended tea, sugar and other foodstuffs into local cultures to create new economic markets for their empires. Beaudry says the worldwide spread of Coca-Cola is a modern equivalent.

But the self-taught cook can take only so much academic brainstorming about food, turning instead to its simpler pleasures.

“I read cookbooks in the morning to wake my brain up,” Beaudry said. “It’s very stimulating.”