Food and eating as subjects of serious inquiry have engaged anthropology from its very beginnings. Varieties of foods and modes of preparation have always evoked the attention, sometimes horrifi ed, of observant travelers, particularly when the processing techniques (e.g., chewing and spitting to encourage fermentation) and the substances (e.g., live larvae, insects, the contents of animal intestines, rotten eggs) have been foreign to their experience and eating habits. At the same time, repeated demonstrations of the intimate relationship between ingestion and sociality among living peoples of all sorts, as well as the importance attributed to it in classic literary accounts, including the Bible, have led to active refl ection about the nature of the links that connect them. Long before students of Native America had invented “culture areas,” or students of the Old World had formulated evolutionary stages for pastoralism or semiagriculture, W. Robertson Smith had set forth elegantly the concept of commensality and had sought to explain the food prohibitions of the ancient Semites. But food and eating were studies for the most part in their more unusual aspects—food prohibitions and taboos, cannibalism, the consumption of unfamiliar and distasteful items—rather than as everyday and essential features of the life of all humankind.
Food and eating are now becoming actively of interest to anthropologists once more, and in certain new ways. An awakened concern with resources, including variant forms of energy and the relative costs of their trade-offs—the perception of real fi nitudes that may not always respond to higher prices with increased production— seems to have made some anthropological relativism stylish, and has led to the rediscovery of a treasure-trove of old ideas, mostly bad, about natural, healthful, and energy-saving foods. Interest in the everyday life of everyday people and in categories of the oppressed—women, slaves, serfs, Untouchables, “racial” minorities, as well as those who simply work with their hands—has led, among other things, to interest in women’s work, slave food, and discriminations and exclusions. (It is surely no accident that the best early anthropological studies of food should have come from the pens of women, Audrey Richards 2 and Rosemary Firth. 3 ) What is more, the upsurge of interest in meaning among anthropologists has also reenlivened the study of any subject matter that can be treated by seeing the patterned relationships between substances and human groups as forms of communication.
Beginnings of Food Tourism: How People Started to Travel for Food?
