COLUMN ONE : A Biting Analysis of Society : After years of disdain, scholars are studying the deeper meaning of dining. Dissertations on clambakes and cookbooks help show that, culturally speaking, we are what we eat.

Mario Montano, Ph.D., is a scholar of barbecued beef head, the castoff cattle heads cooked in pit ovens behind mom ‘n’ pop stores and served up every Sunday after Mass in the Texas border town where he grew up.

Montano was raised on those mesquite-smoked meals. Later, in college, he thought of them when he read Margaret Mead. Now, he is the author of a 476-page dissertation on the cultural meaning of barbacoa de cabeza .

“I believed the history of these people could be reached through eating,” said Montano, an anthropologist at Colorado College. “The beef head was a key symbol, something that could let me into the culture.”

Across the country, academics are leaping the triviality barrier to plumb the mysteries of food--the history, anthropology, sociology, symbolism and overall deep meaning of how and what people eat.

Scholars are studying clambakes and cookbooks. Academic presses are churning out books on eating. Dozens of universities are offering courses on food and culture, and, in one case, a master’s program in gastronomy.

For years, food and eating seemed unworthy of serious study. They were too trivial, too humble, perhaps too much fun. Cooking had been women’s work, so male scholars ignored it and female scholars turned their backs.

But the rise of women’s studies has hauled domesticity out of the closet. And the growing interest of historians in ordinary people and everyday life has legitimized among many academics the study of the commonplace.

Interest in ethnicity is also a motive; eating offers a window into cultures for which there is little written record. Finally, some scholars admit a personal incentive: They love food.

“It’s such a powerful dimension of our consciousness as living things,” said Sidney Mintz, a Johns Hopkins University anthropologist and expert on sugar. “To omit it from the study of human behavior would be egregious.”

The interest in eating promises not only insights into how people live and what they value, but also, some say, the possibility of greater respectability for such professions as food writer and chef.

The courses, seminars and conferences on food and eating are attracting not only academics but also some of those food writers and chefs, plus people in hotel management and those who are making mid-career shifts out of other fields and into food.

“If you’re going to take it as a serious business and a respectable discipline, you never can have too much education,” said Julia Child, who has long been an advocate for greater academic interest in food.

A few benighted souls, however, have not yet quite got it.

Kathy Neustadt, a folklorist, fended off wisecracks for years when people asked about her work. But she felt vindicated when her adviser pronounced her doctoral dissertation on clambakes truly “cutting edge.”

When Harvey Levenstein, a Canadian historian, used to tell people he was writing a history of eating in America, back would come the knee-jerk response, “Oh, you’re doing a history of McDonald’s!”

If there is a hotbed of food studies in the United States, it is Boston. The country’s first master’s degree program with a concentration in gastronomy is at Boston University. Radcliffe College has begun offering a special series of courses on food, culture and history.

An exhibition about food last spring at Harvard University’s Widener Library--which included Oliver Wendell Holmes’ lunch box and a letter in which Mahatma Gandhi toyed with eating meat--provoked more response than any other exhibition in curator Pamela Matz’s four years on the job.

But the phenomenon is nationwide. In anthropology alone, membership in the professional organization of scholars who study food has swelled over the past 15 years from a handful to 300. Members count 30 to 50 anthropology courses in food and culture being offered at several dozen schools, including UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and Cal State Fullerton.

“We’re beginning to see people using food as an entree into broader social and historical processes,” said Mary Beaudry, an associate professor of archeology and anthropology at Boston University. “I think it’s very clear that it’s getting greater academic credibility.”

One such person is Neustadt, who was a graduate student in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania when an aunt suggested one summer that she attend a clambake that was an annual ritual for an old Quaker community near Dartmouth, Mass.

The event had begun 100 years earlier as a simple Sunday picnic, with food baked outdoors on seaweed-draped rocks. As generations passed, it became a revered tradition. Members of the community, scattered around the country, would return every year. When Neustadt first went, turnout was well over 600, including dozens of visitors.

“The next thing I knew, I was in tears,” Neustadt recalled. “Because something was going on that was really powerful. What the people were doing was so ritualized and so focused. . . . This is a community with a history and a symbolic vocabulary that nobody talks about directly.”

The clambake, said Neustadt, who published a book on the subject last year, had become a “holy event.” Through it, the community expressed its values--for example, both the importance members placed on belonging to the group and their willingness, at the same time, to embrace outsiders.

Neustadt’s research led to historical, as well as cultural, insights. She ended up exploring the commercialization of clambakes in the 19th Century, which in turn drew her into the history of leisure in the United States and the selling of New England as a tourist destination.

“What makes it so interesting is, really, it’s not about eating clams,” Neustadt said. “It’s really about other stuff, as well.”

It’s that “other stuff” that inspires the study of food. Food is symbol, motivator, means of expression, researchers say. The need to secure food is a driving force in history. Its function is economic, utilitarian, social; it is the mortar binding families and communities.

Among Italian-Americans, food has been essential to cultural and family preservation, says Levenstein. Mary Weismantel of Occidental College in Los Angeles studied the role of food in helping Indians in the Ecuadorean Andes to preserve a sense of ethnic identity in the face of pressure to assimilate.

George Armelagos, an anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta, sees the rise of gourmet foods as “a way in which a society that is supposedly classless maintains social and economic differences between people. Knowledge of food becomes a way in which this is done.”

Food can be a medium of communication, a tool for showing defiance, a powerful weapon in interpersonal relations, said Mintz. Witness hunger strikes or a child’s refusal of proffered food. “We never just feed,” he said. “We always surround our eating behavior with all kinds of ceremony.”

“(Anthropologist) Audrey Richards says people should recognize that the food drive is much more powerful than the sexual drive,” Mintz said. “I say to my students if they don’t think so it’s because they’re very well fed at regular intervals and because they’re young.”

Mario Montano asked his mother: Which to study--food or sex?

“She said it was better to study food than sex,” he recalled. “Mexican people don’t talk very much about sex. And food was more important because you eat more times a day than you have sex.”

The study of food does have a history, however modest. Anthropologists have studied it for years, prompted initially by curiosity about events such as the Passover feast and the Last Supper and by the notions of offering sacrifices to the gods, and of gods and mortals dining at the same table.

The 1930s and 1940s brought seminal books on the history and social influence of the potato, and on land, labor and diet in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. In the late 1970s and early 1980s came an important survey of food in history and Mintz’s own book on sugar, “Sweetness and Power.”

“All of the good books on food by anthropologists are by women,” he insists. “. . . I think it’s because the men were so busy studying all those important macho things like kinship, war and circumcision, they left all the trivial pursuits to the women.”

Now, many people see feminism behind the recent surge of interest in food. Some cite the growth of women’s studies and the re-evaluation of women’s roles. Nancy Harmon Jenkins, a food writer and historian based in Maine and Italy, also pointed to shifts in the focus of the women’s movement.

After a “period of scraping through history and trying to find instances in which women led groups of people into battle,” feminists “finally recognized that women’s lives had historical validity even when they weren’t painting great pictures and composing symphonies,” she said.

At Radcliffe College, the Schlesinger Library long neglected its books and papers on cooking and food, said Barbara Haber, curator of printed books. They were seen as “diametrically opposed to the real work of the library,” which was to document and celebrate the accomplishments of women.

Now, she said, “domesticity is coming out of the shadows a bit.” Women are writing dissertations based on cookbooks and home economics texts, which she described as “prescriptive literature that indicate how women were expected to spend time in the home.”

In one book, for example, women were encouraged to feed the sick, Haber said, by “boiling beef for hours, then shaving it--practically chewing it” before serving. (Another book about laundry included the instruction, “First, catch rainwater.”)

Other factors behind the interest in food include the rise of social history, focusing on everyday life, and of the study of material culture, or the objects that societies produce and use. Both have shed light on topics on the far side of what one folklorist called “the triviality barrier.”

The work isn’t easy. Neustadt’s research required the careful scanning of old railroad brochures and newspaper ads for the occasional mention of a clambake. “It was guerrilla warfare: You had to be in there tooth and nail to do it.”

Robert L. Hall, an associate professor of African-American studies and history at Northeastern University in Boston, scoured the provisioning records of companies that shipped slaves. He ended up tracing African-American food preferences as part of a cultural history of the Atlantic slave trade.

Montano did much of his field work in mom ‘n’ pop stores--helping prepare barbecued beef head, watching people eat it and interviewing aficionados . He spent part of one summer with a longtime street vendor in Laredo who had once sold beef head using a team of horses.

For Montano, food became the vehicle in which he toured Mexican and Mexican-American history and culture--from Aztec food and the Mexican food that evolved after the arrival of the Spanish, to Tex-Mex and Southwestern cuisines that emerged when white European culture appropriated Mexican cooking.

What interested Montano about the beef head was how it was never co-opted. It belonged uniquely to what he calls “the outside culture.” Discarded by the Texas ranchers, the heads became central to an informal but distinctive ritual that bound the community together.

“In preparing and serving and eating food, people say who they are,” said David Wilson, director of American Studies at UC Davis. “They say to themselves who they are. Like whether you’re a gourmet, or a Spam-eater.”