That today we consider food to be part of our culture we owe it to the science of food anthropology, founded by the studies of two anthropologists: Margaret Mead (1901–1978) and Audrey Richards (1899–1984).
What is food anthropology? According to The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology (John Wiley
Mead, born into a family of American social scientists, was perhaps the most publicized anthropologist from the mid-1920s until her death. Success came early to the young Mead, a disciple of Franz Boas (who redefined the concept of 'culture', until now considered a teaching, to give it an anthropological aspect) and Ruth Benedict (with whom she maintained a relationship throughout of her life), founders of modern anthropology, who was not even thirty years old when she published the bestseller that would lead her to bring anthropology to the media and even the government: Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), which studied upbringing and the education of children and adolescents and premarital sexual practices on this island in Oceania occupied by the American army. It is said that she was the last anthropologist who had a decisive impact on public debates and mass culture.
But it was not until the Second World War that Mead made his anthropological knowledge of food available to the State. Although the United States Department of Agriculture had undertaken various studies in previous decades on the eating habits of impoverished populations with the intention of changing them, they had never thought that anthropology could have any interest in these investigations. And he had it. Mead worked on the so-called Eating Habits Committee Reports (1941-1943), for which he defined, for example, what exactly eating habits are: “an aspect of individual behavior subject to changes exerted by parents, teachers, doctors and personal trainers, among others.” In his theory, he differentiated between central and peripheral foods according to frequency of use, with the central ones being more difficult to give up than the peripheral ones.
Mead argued that since food is part of our culture, since the way we obtain food is inseparable from the ritual and beliefs that surround each of them, to change the way we eat, the culture must be changed. Thus, he wrote in The Factor of Food Habits (Nutrition and Food Supply: The War and After, vol. 225, 1943), that to change the diet in the long term it is necessary to know the specific details of the diet in that place, how how its inhabitants perceive their diet, how changes should be formulated so that they are welcomed and accepted and what formulas should be avoided so as not to generate resistance. “When nutritionists, thinking about daily calories, or economists, planning for maximum utilization of available food, leave out attitudes toward changing eating habits, even if they are successful in changing a number of individuals, there are no guarantees of "May the changes introduced lay the foundation for a future greater response to nutritional science or contribute to war morale."
Furthermore, Mead was, along with various anthropologists whose lives and contributions are collected in Gods of the Upper Air, by Charles King (Anchor, 2020), including Baos and Benedict, a scientist who contributed to establishing that the concept of race It is learned and, therefore, that racism has no biological principle. As Douglas recalls, “in some places equals are defined not by blood ties, but by foods and types of food they share,” and that is also a cultural prejudice. Despite everything, at the end of her life she considered that her contributions in the field of food anthropology had not been taken up by previous generations, which she regretted. She received the Medal of Freedom in 1979, a year after her death, from President Jimmy Carter.
As for the British Audrey Richards, she first graduated in natural sciences and later became interested in anthropology, considered a 'young science' at that time. She was a disciple of the renowned Bronislaw Malinowski and focused her interest from the beginning on food, nutrition, agriculture and the economy, as well as social psychology, of the people of East Africa, in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Uganda and in the Transvaal, with whom he lived extensively and from whom he collected countless data in all his travels and expeditions. Richards founded the Center for African Studies at the University of Cambridge in 1965, where she also taught, as well as at the London School of Economics, Makerere College in Uganda and the University of London.
One of his most recognized publications was Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe (1932), where he examines the cultural aspects that intervene in the ways of eating and the foods chosen by the southern Bantu, incorporating as a premise something new until the date: “that nutrition as a biological process is more fundamental than sex.” That caused a sensation and laid the foundations on which a sociological theory of nutrition would later be developed. Furthermore, in the same book, Richards stood out with another unprecedented approach: she established that the lives of women and their social sphere were subjects worthy of anthropological study.
In another of his most notable works, Land, labor and diet in Northern Rhodesia (1939), he addressed a premise that he developed in his previous study, in which he said that “the need for food shapes human institutions.” On this occasion, she stated that fieldwork (a method of which she was a strong advocate) had provided her with “concrete material to demonstrate that the biological fact of appetite and diet are shaped by systems of human relations and traditional activities.” . She promoted research in African administrations and also held different positions, such as in the Committee of Advisors on Nutrition and Food.
Much of his life and career is collected in The interpretation of Ritual, by Jean La Fontaine (1972). She was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honor of the British Empire in 1955.
