1980 introduction. in nutritional anthropology

7/30/2019 1980 Introduction. in Nutritional Anthropology

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InlroductionR. F. KandelN. W. JeromeG. H. Pelto

Most of the papers in this volume were originally presented inthree symposia on Nutritional Anthropology organized by theeditors at the Annual Meetings of the American AnthropologicalAssociation in 1973 and 1974. We organized these symposiabecause we realized that nutritional conditions are the result ofboth biological and cultural forces which are inseparably inter-twined; m9reover, we were committed to the idea that nutritionalproblems could only be understood and ameliorated when theyare considered from a comprehensive biocultural perspective.Food, by virtue of its pivotal place in human experience is, at

once, a bundle of energy and nutrients within the biologicalsphere, a commodity within the economic sphere, and a symbolwithin the social and religious spheres. Food ideas and attitudes,socioeconomic structure, patterns of resource allocation, dietaryintake, and nutritional status had to be studied holistically aspart ofa single system. Techniques of food production affect the naturalenvironment, which, in turn, influences dietary requirements.Patterns of land tenure, food distribution within the society, familytraditional cuisines, personal tastes, and financial pressures allinfluence what people will eat and how well nourished they will be.Differential nutritional status, by making some people more fit thanothers, has widesweeping social, political, and economicimplications.


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2 Nutritional AnthropologyIn organizing the symposia we hoped to draw together the

scattered but growi ng grou p of researchers who were investigati ngnutrition-related problems from a contextual perspective, whichcombined the theory and method of both the nutritional and socialsciences and to work together in developing the framework of anew theoretical approach.

At that time, we were acutely aware that a difficult task of crossdisciplinary education and communication lay before us becausemany nutritionists and social scientists lacked understanding of,and respect for, one another's fields. "Hard science" nutritioniststended to believe that requirements and standards could beestablished by experimental investigation, and good dietary habitscould be taught by traditional didactic methods. They tended todiscount the anthropologists' insights into the nonmaterial aspectsof food beliefs and the importance of non nutritional factors indietary decision making. Anthropologists, for their part, oftenlacked even the rudimentary knowledge of nutritional requirements, the nutrient content of foodstuffs, or the techniques ofcollecting accurate dietary information that would enable them tocollect field data useful for nutrition studies.

In developing a shared set of concepts and terms, it seemedpossible to draw upon four parallel, but previously unintegrated,lines of food research. The first was a long tradition of dietarysurvey studies which had evolved within the nutritional sciences.The emphasis in these studies had been upon the precise description of sample populations, the accurate assessment of dietaryintake, and the accurate measurements of the nutritional contentof foodstuffs. Dietary adequacy was evaluated against the background knowledge of the processes of intermediary metabolism,the genetic makeup, diversity and health status of the studiedpopulation, and the environmental and activity factors whichaffected dietary needs. A history of investigation into the mostaccurate techniques of data collection and analysis lay behindthese studies. It was essential to introduce the same degree of rigor,precision, and quantification into the field methods of nutritionalanthropology if the "hard" and ((soft" scientists were to communicate with each other.

The second line of research, which has been called "foodways"by anthropologists and ((food habits" by nutritionists, was a wideranging investigation into the nonnutritional aspects of food asthese related to ethnic identity, culinary tradition, social structure,


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Introduction 3social status, and culture change. It derived from the classic work ofAudrey Richards (1932) in demonstrating that food production anddistribution patterns were core elements of social structure, andthe work of Bennett (1943), Cussler, and de Give (1952), and theCommittee on Food Habits of the National Research Council,coordinated by Margaret Mead (NRC, 1945), in identifying theimpact of ethnicity, household economics, status and prestige,work schedules, family composition, social pressure, and othersimilar factors on dietary choices. We felt it was necessary torecognize that dietary intake was not totally conditioned by outsideforces. Rather, people make individual dietary decisions fromamong a limited range of possibilities in accordance with personalsets of values and goals-most of which do not concern nutrition.Personal preferences, tradition and appropriateness, status andprestige, finances and economics, and the availability and accesibility of foodstuffs all playa role in determining dietary selectionand dietary need.The third tradition, which derived from such seminal thinkers asF. Simoons (1961), stressed the cognitive aspects of food, analyzi ngthe nonnutritional meanings of food as ideological systems untothemselves. The approach and results of these cognitive studies hasrecently been well summarized by Eliot A. Singer:

Food has been studied not for itself, but as a medium for social and for cognitiveexpression. It has been shown to symbolize a wide variety of things, includingclan and ethnic identities and social statuses. Food transactions have been foundto express caste ranking, social distance, and commu nity. Food taboos have beenseen as maintainers of cosmic order and as reflectors of social order. Sacrifices,communions, feasts and fasts have been suggested to state the interdependenceof humans, gods, and nature. Thus eating is to be seen not primarily as aninstrumental behavior, but as an expressive act, which, in a conventionallyorganized way, is trying to say something about something. (1976:3)It seemed as foolish to ignore the importance of these deeply

entrenched cognitive systems for nutritional problems within thefield context as it would be, within the clinical context, to attemptto get a hypertensive patient, who was also a deeply Orthodox Jewto abandon koshering his meat. Rather, we believed that nutri-

. tional anthropology should investigate the nutritionally-significantintersection of food beliefs and behaviors with a methodology thatcombined the grammatical rigor of cognitive studies with themathematical rigor of dietary studies.The fourth tradition upon which it seemed possible to draw was


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4 Nutritional Anthropologythat of ecological studies. The theory of human or culturalecology-originally formulated by anthropologists such as LeslieWhite (1949), Julian Steward (1955), Elman Service (1962, 1971), andmore recently expounded by John Bennett in his profound bookThe Ecological Transition (1976)-viewed human beings as intelligent, technologically equipped, and culturally conditionedbiological actors existing in open feedback systems with otherbiological units oftheir environment. Thus, food becomes a meansfor the transfer of energy among ecosystem components, andnutritional requirements are conditioned by the multiplicity ofecological factors.

The strength of the ecological approach is that it makes itpossible to relate biological and cultural factors on the same levelof analysis. Thus, an ecological explanation of early childhoodmalnutrition in a Third World agricultural population mightinclude patterns of family size and composition, infant weaningpractices, cultural elaboration of high carbohydrate "superfoods"methods of crop production, high levels of chronic parasiticinfection, and low levels of education and income as explanatoryfactors of the same magnitude. Similarly, epidemic rates of midlifeovernutrition in the developed countrieS might be visualized asembedded in a matrix which includes high cholesterol diets andcocktail parties, high stress white collar jobs and sedentary lifestyles, and the advertising and distribution tactics of food-processing corporations.

The essence of ecological theory is that human experience is notonly biocultural but evolutionary. Environmental transfers eventually result in environmental transformations when critical thresholds are crossed in both the biological and sociocultural realms.Thus, diet has played a critical role in human biological evolution infostering our omnivorous habits, our eight essential amino acidrequirements, and population specific differences in lactose andsalt tolerances. It continues to playa role in patterning the geneticnature of the human species as high carbohydrate-weaning dietsselect out inviable children for early death, and as mysteriousmalignancies-partially associated with chemical food additivesalter the nature of urban populations.

Ecological transformations have played a critical role in sociocultural change as well. Changes in the predominant ways ofgetting food have precipitated rapid increases in population,which, in turn, have required increasingly complex systems of


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Introduction 5

social organization. Transactions between cultural and environmental systems, seen not as teleological determinants, but asmutable processes susceptible of modification by the human will,have led us irreversibly out of our hunting-and-gathering past tothe brink of the global village.

From ecological theory it seemed possible to derive for nutritional anthropology a truly biocultural approach to nutritionalproblems in the field context, an evolutionary scheme for linkingnutritional systems of the past, present, and future, and an overallorientation to the solution of the global food crisis.Happily, the three Nutritional Anthropology symposia proveduseful in coordinating a new biocultural thrust in nutrition researchand in linking together an interdisciplinary network of concernedresearchers. The eleven papers in this volume, therefore, areamong the research efforts that launched a new direction innutritional anthropology. The authors include anthropologists,nutritionists, and professionals with interdisciplinary training. Mostof the studies combine the intensive long-term participant observation field methods characteristic of anthropology with thecollection and quantification of hard data characteristic of thenutritional sciences. The analytical emphasis is upon the quantification and clear and rigorous delineation of all nutritionallyrelevant factors, whether these occur within the natural environment, the social, political and economic systems, the culturalideology, or out-of-awareness behavior patterns. The papersattempt to integrate these areas into multifactorial explanations.Although each study was conducted independently in a differentarea and employed a different set of methods, hypotheses, andmidrange theories, they are unified in their theoretical foundationswhich have become the hallmark of contemporary research innutritional anthropology. They unify the intellectual traditionsdiscussed above into a new definition of the nutritional system asaseries of biocultural transactions, mediated by human decisions atevery stage from food production, through dietary intake, tonutritional status and its health and behavioral implications.Decisions within the nutritional system lead to a series of adjustments and readjustments which have biological and social consequences for individuals and population groups and evolutionaryimplications for the world community.

Over the past five years this new speciality of nutritionalanthropology has grown by both reputation and result. Courses in


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6 Nutritional Anthropology"culture and nutrition" have become fundamental parts of undergraduate curricula for both anthropology and nutrition students.Specialized training programs stressing the integrated use ofmethodologies from both disciplines have produced a new breedof well-prepared professionals. The field itself has yielded newinsights into areas which could barely be foreseen five years ago.These include:

1. a new perspective on the cultural sensitivity of nutritionalstandards and the question of biological adaptation2. the role of maternal feeding practices in fostering differentialnutritional status among children within a single socioeconomiccommunity3. the role of social networks in changing dietary models4. the nutritional implications of the cognitive structure of mealplanning5. the impact of dietary anomalies, such as chronic hypoglycemia, in influencing the culture focus of entire isolatedethnic groups6. the precise description of the behavioral consequences ofdifferential nutritional status.Recently, it has become clear that the study of the nutritional

system has come full circle. While earlier studies have concentratedupon the social and cultural factors which influence nutritionalstatus, the new thrust of research is toward the elucidation of thesocial and cultural consequences of differential nutritional status.We believe that nutritional anthropology can contribute significantly to these studies in at least three areas: First, it can analyze thedevelopment of differences in economic statuses and occupationscaused by differential nutritional status, as mediated throughdifferences in -physical activity, work output, and motivation.Second, it can address the question of differences in culturalpractices, as these are influenced by differences in cognitive andsensory capacity, and consequent learning skills, resulting fromdifferential nutritional status. Third, it can study the formation,structure, and interactive processes within families, social networks, and communities, as these are influenced by differentialnutritional statuses mediated through the development of differential social competence. Work by Gross and Underwood (1971)and others has already shown that dose, quantified observation of


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Introduction 7intrafamilial food distribution patterns can reveal the existence ofdifferent biocultural groupings within a single socioeconomiccommunity. These can have profound effects upon the lifestylesand success potentials of family members.In writing the introduction, the editors are acutely aware that weexist not merely in an academic context but within a broader

human environment. The "food habits" field which lay dormantfor twenty years after the Committee on Food Habits abandonedthe formulation of a policy to "feed the world" has been spurred tolife as nutritional anthropology not simply to address scientificquestions, but also to address the pressing national and globalissues of food production, distribution, and use.The publication of Hunger, USA in 1968 and the White HouseConference on Food, Nutrition and Health in 1969 publicized theexistence of pockets of starvation and malnutrition in the United

States. In those years food became ammunition in the govern-ment's "War on Poverty." A new popular consciousness in Americasaw dietary change as a route to health maintenance and "eatinglower on the food chain" as a means to restore global ecologicalbalance. Then, in the early 1970s, drought in the Sahara, massivesecret purchases of American wheat by the Russians, and pricefixing by the OPEC nations created global economic shock waves.Between 1972 and 1973 the price of wheat in the internationalmarketplace rose from $2.00 to $5.00 a bushel. A politics of globalfood scarcity was born! Food and petroleum purchasing nationsresponded in kind by raising prices of cash crops like coffee andsugar. The pinch in the pocketbook was felt round the world.People are cognizant of the massive global inequities in fooddistribution between the rich and the poor; they realize that eventhe diets of the affluent are not conducive to optimum health and

fear that the world is caught in a last ditch race for survival betweenpopulation growth and increased food production. Books like theworks by the Club of Rome and Diet for aSmall Planet (Lappe, 1971)have argued back and forth over the primacy of population controland increased food production.Against this dire backdrop, the inequities of distribution in aworld-where overnutrition may be implicated in the death oftwo-thirds of the affluent, and undernutrition may be implicated inthe deaths of two-thirds of the poor-appears a tragic injustice.Books like Food First (Lappe a~d Collins, 1977) and How the Other


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8 Nutritional Anthropology

Half Dies (George, 1977) have laid the blame on profit-seekingagribusiness and selfish governments. The need to develop apolitically, economically, and environmentally secure world foodreserve has been clearly manifested.

It is evident that the experimental establishments of nutritionalrequirements and standards and the development and dissemination of Green Revolution technology alone cannot improve thenutritional status of the large masses of needy human beings unlessthey are understood and employed in conjunction with social,cultural, economic, and political forces. It is in this dramatic contextthat the new nutritional anthropology has been born, and it istoward the solution of these critical problems that we hope itsmaturity will serve. We believe that the nutritional health of theinternational community will be facilitated by the search forsvlutions to improve our ability to operationalize the bioculturalapproach presented in these pages and to employ its insights in theformulation of a global nutritional policy.[he papers in this volume spotlight various points in thebiocultural matrix of nutritional need. The papers are organizedaround an evolutionary scheme through past and current nutritional systems. Chapter 1 provides an ecological model for thebiocultural discipline, nutritional anthropology. In addition toproviding a framework for generating and organizing theory, themodel contains guidelines for organizing research operations. Ageneral methodological strategy based on this model is describedand discussed in chapter 2. The biocultural approach of nutritionalanthropology is addressed in chapter 3 as Eide, a nutritionalscientist, and Steady, a sociocultural anthropologist, apply certainelements of the ecological model to a discussion of women's rolesand functions in nutritional processes in rural African economies.

In chapter 4, Yesner, an archaeologist, places human dietaryadaptations for different groups, localities, and conditions inevolutionary perspective. The archaeological evidence indicatesthat settlement patterns are "minimax" adaptive strategies thatinvolve responses to external factors (e.g., environmental change),as well as to internal cultural factors (e.g., patterns of selection,exchange, or redistribution of resources) (d. Alland, 1970). Thesesettlement patterns maximize the use of dietary resources.

Cassidy, a biological anthropologist, expands on Yesner's discussion (in chapter 5) by providing data on nutrition and health fortwo prehistoric hunter-gatherer and agricultural skeletal popula-


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introduction 9

tions obtained from two archaeological sites in Kentucky. Thearchaeological evidence indicates that agriculturalists had poorerhealth and shorter life spans than the hu nter-gatherers, a differenceapparently attributable to the inferior diet used by the agricu Itu ral ists. Cassidy ind icates that agricu Itu rists experienced population growth and increased cultural complexity in spite of unpredictable and low food supplies and the consumption of items oflow nutritional quality, (jnd despite increased rates of ill health.

The evolutionary perspective pursued in chapters 4 and 5 isadvanced in chapter 6 by Weiss, a cultural anthropologist. Weissprovides a detailed description of food production, distribution,and consumption patterns of a contemporary group-the MiskitoIndians of eastern Nicaragua. In this case, the theme is nutritionaladaptation and cultural maladaption. By combining ethnographicand nutrition survey methods, Weiss shows that the aboriginalMiskito, who had achieved environmental adaptation throughmultiple resource exploitation. later became victims of externalintervention.

Aboriginally, the Miskito had utilized a divergent set of localresourcesto supply their matter-energy requirements throughoutthe annual cycle. Later, with the onset of commercial turtling, thealteration of the evolutionary timeframe, and the virtual elimination of multiple subsistence pathways, maladaptation to theenvironment ensued. Weiss supplements Cassidy's conclusions onthe nutritional consequences of tradeoffs in economic systems.However, he emphasizes the internal systems-breakdown factor inthe evolutionary timeframe through external control.

The ethnographic evidence on adaptive mechanisms for controlling population size is fairly rich. However, there is a small body ofdata to indicate that sex-differential diets may yet be another formof population control. Rosenberg, a cultural anthropologist, explores the question of sex-differential diets by examining theethnographic literature. Her findings are presented in chapter 7.The chapter presents descriptions of sex-differential nutrition for avariety of societies. Can these practices be considered mechanismsfor population control? It is difficult to say.What arethe nutritionalconsequ ences of these sex-specific diets? Again, given the data, it isdifficult to say, but it is well worth exploring these diets beyond thecurrently available literature.'

Although sex-differentiated diet patterns require further testingin the field, we have fairly reliable data on the nutritional


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10 Nutritional Anthropologyconsequences of microeconomic and minicultural differentiateddiet patterns. Economic microdifferentiation and diet variation areprobably key factors in preventing internal systems-breakdown inchanging economies and living situations. Chapters 8 and 9 pursuethese themes. DeWalt, Kelly, and Pelto (chapter 8) and Jerome(chapter 9) demonstrate that these twin situations are played out atthe village level in a Mexican agricultural community and in anurban blue-collar black community in the American Midwest.Their findings are unique only in the sense that the researchersemployed methodologies which penetrated "the culture" andconstructs of "food beliefs:' in order to unfold heterogeneity insituations which have been described as homogeneous. Combined ethnographic and nutritional methodologies as used by theauthors permitted insights and perspectives which are usuallyindiscernible by uni-disciplinary procedures.Nutrition correlates of intracultural variation and economicmicro-differentiation probably reflect an individual or family'sadaptation or maladaptation to the local environment. The correlates of nutritional intake with microeconomics and miniculturesuggest that these factors could be used as sensitive indices ofenvironmental adaption.Marchione (chapter 10) takes us one step further by quantifyingsome intracultural and microeconomic factors influencing nutri

tional status. With the aid of factor analysis, he links young childmalnutrition to ecological factors in one of Jamaica's westernparishes. This method of analysis permits the reader to view fooduse and diet patterning within the context of the larger society.Highly specific household measures are integrated into macroscopic socioeconomic and environmental variability which arerelatable to both young child malnutrition and socioeconomicconditions in Jamaica. The cultural anthropologist thus demonstrates that a biological condition (young child malnutrition) is anadaptational response to scarce food energy resources and material conditions which, in turn, is built into the socioenvironmentalstructure.Chapter 11 should be considered the next logical step inexpanding the use of nutritional-anthropological perspectives on

food use bya contemporary group. Kandel and Pelto (chapter 11)compel us to view the health food movement of the early 1970s inthe United States as a social revitalization force and a consumerdesigned health maintenance system. The theme of this chapter is


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Introduction 11

dietary change. The reader is presented with a wealth of data thatshow how ideology and dissatisfaction with the status quo lead toredefinitions of health and diet and the development of systems forsocial interaction and self-realization.

References

Alland, A.1970 Adaptation in Cultural Evolution. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.Bennett, J.

1943 Food and Social Status in a Rural Society. American SociologicalReview 8:561-569.1976 The Ecological Transition: Cultural Anthropology and Human Adapta-tion. New York: Pergamon Press.Cussler, M. G. and de Give, M. L.1952 Twixt the Cup and the Lip. New York: Twayne.

George, S.1977 How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger.Montclair, New jersey: Allanheld, Osmun and Company.

Gross, D. R. and Underwood, B. A.1971 Technological Change and Caloric Costs: Sisal Agriculture in Northeastern Brazil. American Anthropologist 73: 725-740.

Hunger, USA1968 A Report by the Citizens Board of Inquiry into Hunger and Malnutrition in the United States. Boston: Beacon Press.

Lappe, F.M.1971 Diet for a Small Planet. New York: Ballantine Books, Inc.Lappe, F. M. and Collins, j.

1977 Food First: Beyqnd the Myth of Scarcity. Boston: Houghton MifflinCompany.National Research Council, Committee on Food Habits1945 Manual for the Study of Food Habits. Washington, D.C.: NationalAcademy of Sciences, National Research Council.Richards, A. I.1932 Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe. London: G. Routledge and Sons,Ltd.

Service, E.1962 Primitive Social Organization. New York: Random House.1971 Cultural Evolutionism. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Simoons, F.1961 Eat Not This Flesh. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Singer, E. A.

1978 Guest Editorial: Thoughts on the New Foodways. The Digest: ANewsletter for the Interdisciplinary Study of Food 1:3.Steward, j.1955 Theory of Culture Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.White, L.1949 The Science of Culture. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy Company.1959 The Evolution of Culture. New York: McGraw-Hili Book Company.

1980 introduction. in nutritional anthropology

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