Inlroduction

R. F. Kandel N. W. Jerome G. H. Pelto

Most of the papers in this volume were originally presented in three symposia on Nutritional Anthropology organized by the editors at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association in 1973 and 1974. We organized these symposia because we realized that nutritional conditions are the result of both biological and cultural forces which are inseparably intertwined; m9reover, we were committed to the idea that nutritional problems could only be understood and ameliorated when they are 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 biological sphere, a commodity within the economic sphere, and a symbol within the social and religious spheres. Food ideas and attitudes, socioeconomic structure, patterns of resource allocation, dietary intake, and nutritional status had to be studied holistically aspart of a single system. Techniques of food production affect the natural environment, which, in turn, influences dietary requirements. Patterns of land tenure, food distribution within the society, family traditional cuisines, personal tastes, and financial pressures all influence what people will eat and how well nourished they will be. Differential nutritional status, by making some people more fit than others, has widesweeping social, political, and economic implications.

Nutritional Anthropology

In organizing the symposia we hoped to draw together the scattered but growi ng grou p of researchers who were i nvestigati ng nutrition-related problems from a contextual perspective, which combined the theory and method of both the nutritional and social sciences and to work together in developing the framework of a new theoretical approach. At that time, we were acutely aware that a difficult task of crossdisciplinary education and communication lay before us because many nutritionists and social scientists lacked understanding of, and respect for, one another's fields. "Hard science" nutritionists tended to believe that requirements and standards could be established by experimental investigation, and good dietary habits could be taught by traditional didactic methods. They tended to discount the anthropologists' insights into the nonmaterial aspects of food beliefs and the importance of non nutritional factors in dietary decision making. Anthropologists, for their part, often lacked even the rudimentary knowledge of nutritional requirements, the nutrient content of foodstuffs, or the techniques of collecting accurate dietary information that would enable them to collect field data useful for nutrition studies. In developing a shared set of concepts and terms, it seemed possible to draw upon four parallel, but previously unintegrated, lines of food research. The first was a long tradition of dietary survey 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 dietary intake, and the accurate measurements of the nutritional content of foodstuffs. Dietary adequacy was evaluated against the background knowledge of the processes of intermediary metabolism, the genetic makeup, diversity and health status of the studied population, and the environmental and activity factors which affected dietary needs. A history of investigation into the most accurate techniques of data collection and analysis lay behind these studies. It was essential to introduce the same degree of rigor, precision, and quantification into the field methods of nutritional anthropology 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 as these related to ethnic identity, culinary tradition, social structure,

Introduction

social status, and culture change. It derived from the classic work of Audrey Richards (1932) in demonstrating that food production and distribution patterns were core elements of social structure, and the work of Bennett (1943), Cussler, and de Give (1952), and the Committee on Food Habits of the National Research Council, coordinated by Margaret Mead (NRC, 1945), in identifying the impact of ethnicity, household economics, status and prestige, work schedules, family composition, social pressure, and other similar factors on dietary choices. We felt it was necessary to recognize that dietary intake was not totally conditioned by outside forces. Rather, people make individual dietary decisions from among a limited range of possibilities in accordance with personal sets of values and goals-most of which do not concern nutrition. Personal preferences, tradition and appropriateness, status and prestige, finances and economics, and the availability and accesibility of foodstuffs all playa role in determining dietary selection and dietary need. The third tradition, which derived from such seminal thinkers as F. Simoons (1961), stressed the cognitive aspects of food, analyzi ng the nonnutritional meanings of food as ideological systems unto themselves. The approach and results of these cognitive studies has recently been well summarized by Eliot A. Singer:
Food has been studied not for itself, but as a medium for social and for cognitive expression. It has been shown to symbolize a wide variety of things, including clan and ethnic identities and social statuses. Food transactions have been found to express caste ranking, social distance, and commu nity. Food taboos have been seen as maintainers of cosmic order and as reflectors of social order. Sacrifices, communions, feasts and fasts have been suggested to state the interdependence of humans, gods, and nature. Thus eating is to be seen not primarily as an instrumental behavior, but as an expressive act, which, in a conventionally organized 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 the field context as it would be, within the clinical context, to attempt to get a hypertensive patient, who was also a deeply Orthodox Jew to abandon koshering his meat. Rather, we believed that nutri. tional anthropology should investigate the nutritionally-significant intersection of food beliefs and behaviors with a methodology that combined the grammatical rigor of cognitive studies with the mathematical rigor of dietary studies. The fourth tradition upon which it seemed possible to draw was

Nutritional Anthropology

that of ecological studies. The theory of human or cultural ecology-originally formulated by anthropologists such as Leslie White (1949), Julian Steward (1955), Elman Service (1962, 1971), and more recently expounded by John Bennett in his profound book The Ecological Transition (1976)-viewed human beings as intelligent, technologically equipped, and culturally conditioned biological actors existing in open feedback systems with other biological units oftheir environment. Thus, food becomes a means for the transfer of energy among ecosystem components, and nutritional requirements are conditioned by the multiplicity of ecological factors. The strength of the ecological approach is that it makes it possible to relate biological and cultural factors on the same level of analysis. Thus, an ecological explanation of early childhood malnutrition in a Third World agricultural population might include patterns of family size and composition, infant weaning practices, cultural elaboration of high carbohydrate "superfoods" methods of crop production, high levels of chronic parasitic infection, and low levels of education and income as explanatory factors of the same magnitude. Similarly, epidemic rates of midlife overnutrition in the developed countrieS might be visualized as embedded in a matrix which includes high cholesterol diets and cocktail 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 not only 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 in fostering our omnivorous habits, our eight essential amino acid requirements, and population specific differences in lactose and salt tolerances. It continues to playa role in patterning the genetic nature of the human species as high carbohydrate-weaning diets select out inviable children for early death, and as mysterious malignancies-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 of getting food have precipitated rapid increases in population, which, in turn, have required increasingly complex systems of

Introduction

social organization. Transactions between cultural and environmental systems, seen not as teleological determinants, but as mutable processes susceptible of modification by the human will, have led us irreversibly out of our hunting-and-gathering past to the brink of the global village. From ecological theory it seemed possible to derive for nutritional anthropology a truly biocultural approach to nutritional problems in the field context, an evolutionary scheme for linking nutritional systems of the past, present, and future, and an overall orientation to the solution of the global food crisis. Happily, the three Nutritional Anthropology symposia proved useful in coordinating a new biocultural thrust in nutrition research and in linking together an interdisciplinary network of concerned researchers. The eleven papers in this volume, therefore, are among the research efforts that launched a new direction in nutritional anthropology. The authors include anthropologists, nutritionists, and professionals with interdisciplinary training. Most of the studies combine the intensive long-term participant observation field methods characteristic of anthropology with the collection and quantification of hard data characteristic of the nutritional sciences. The analytical emphasis is upon the quantification and clear and rigorous delineation of all nutritionally relevant factors, whether these occur within the natural environment, the social, political and economic systems, the cultural ideology, or out-of-awareness behavior patterns. The papers attempt to integrate these areas into multifactorial explanations. Although each study was conducted independently in a different area and employed a different set of methods, hypotheses, and midrange theories, they are unified in their theoretical foundations which have become the hallmark of contemporary research in nutritional anthropology. They unify the intellectual traditions discussed above into a new definition of the nutritional system as a series of biocultural transactions, mediated by human decisions at every stage from food production, through dietary intake, to nutritional 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 evolutionary implications for the world community. Over the past five years this new speciality of nutritional anthropology has grown by both reputation and result. Courses in

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 of methodologies from both disciplines have produced a new breed of well-prepared professionals. The field itself has yielded new insights into areas which could barely be foreseen five years ago. These include: 1. a new perspective on the cultural sensitivity of nutritional standards and the question of biological adaptation 2. the role of maternal feeding practices in fostering differential nutritional status among children within a single socioeconomic community 3. the role of social networks 4. the nutritional planning implications in changing dietary models of the cognitive structure of meal

5. the impact of dietary anomalies, such as chronic hypoglycemia, in influencing the culture focus of entire isolated ethnic groups 6. the precise description of the behavioral differential nutritional status. consequences of

Recently, it has become clear that the study of the nutritional system has come full circle. While earlier studies have concentrated upon the social and cultural factors which influence nutritional status, the new thrust of research is toward the elucidation of the social 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 the development of differences in economic statuses and occupations caused by differential nutritional status, as mediated through differences in -physical activity, work output, and motivation. Second, it can address the question of differences in cultural practices, as these are influenced by differences in cognitive and sensory capacity, and consequent learning skills, resulting from differential nutritional status. Third, it can study the formation, structure, and interactive processes within families, social networks, and communities, as these are influenced by differential nutritional 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

Introduction

intrafamilial food distribution patterns can reveal the existence of different biocultural groupings within a single socioeconomic community. These can have profound effects upon the lifestyles and success potentials of family members. In writing the introduction, the editors are acutely aware that we exist not merely in an academic context but within a broader human environment. The "food habits" field which lay dormant for twenty years after the Committee on Food Habits abandoned the formulation of a policy to "feed the world" has been spurred to life as nutritional anthropology not simply to address scientific questions, but also to address the pressing national and global issues of food production, distribution, and use. The publication of Hunger, USA in 1968 and the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health in 1969 publicized the existence of pockets of starvation and malnutrition in the United States. In those years food became ammunition in the government's "War on Poverty." A new popular consciousness in America saw dietary change as a route to health maintenance and "eating lower on the food chain" as a means to restore global ecological balance. Then, in the early 1970s, drought in the Sahara, massive secret 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 international marketplace rose from $2.00 to $5.00 a bushel. A politics of global food scarcity was born! Food and petroleum purchasing nations responded in kind by raising prices of cash crops like coffee and sugar. The pinch in the pocketbook was felt round the world. People are cognizant of the massive global inequities in food distribution between the rich and the poor; they realize that even the diets of the affluent are not conducive to optimum health and fear that the world is caught in a last ditch race for survival between population growth and increased food production. Books like the works by the Club of Rome and Diet for a Small Planet (Lappe, 1971) have argued back and forth over the primacy of population control and increased food production. Against this dire backdrop, the inequities of distribution in a world-where overnutrition may be implicated in the death of two-thirds of the affluent, and undernutrition may be implicated in the deaths of two-thirds of the poor-appears a tragic injustice. Books like Food First (Lappe a~d Collins, 1977) and How the Other

Nutritional Anthropology

Half Dies (George, 1977) have laid the blame on profit-seeking agribusiness and selfish governments. The need to develop a politically, economically, and environmentally secure world food reserve has been clearly manifested. It is evident that the experimental establishments of nutritional requirements and standards and the development and dissemination of Green Revolution technology alone cannot improve the nutritional status of the large masses of needy human beings unless they are understood and employed in conjunction with social, cultural, economic, and political forces. It is in this dramatic context that the new nutritional anthropology has been born, and it is toward the solution of these critical problems that we hope its maturity will serve. We believe that the nutritional health of the international community will be facilitated by the search for svlutions to improve our ability to operationalize the biocultural approach presented in these pages and to employ its insights in the formulation of a global nutritional policy. [he papers in this volume spotlight various points in the biocultural matrix of nutritional need. The papers are organized around an evolutionary scheme through past and current nutritional systems. Chapter 1 provides an ecological model for the biocultural discipline, nutritional anthropology. In addition to providing a framework for generating and organizing theory, the model contains guidelines for organizing research operations. A general methodological strategy based on this model is described and discussed in chapter 2. The biocultural approach of nutritional anthropology is addressed in chapter 3 as Eide, a nutritional scientist, and Steady, a sociocultural anthropologist, apply certain elements of the ecological model to a discussion of women's roles and functions in nutritional processes in rural African economies. In chapter 4, Yesner, an archaeologist, places human dietary adaptations for different groups, localities, and conditions in evolutionary perspective. The archaeological evidence indicates that settlement patterns are "minimax" adaptive strategies that involve 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). These

settlement 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 for two prehistoric hunter-gatherer and agricultural skeletal popula-

introduction

tions obtained from two archaeological sites in Kentucky. The archaeological evidence indicates that agriculturalists had poorer health and shorter life spans than the hu nter-gatherers, a difference apparently 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 of low nutritional quality, (jnd despite increased rates of ill health. The evolutionary perspective pursued in chapters 4 and 5 is advanced in chapter 6 by Weiss, a cultural anthropologist. Weiss provides a detailed description of food production, distribution, and consumption patterns of a contemporary group-the Miskito Indians of eastern Nicaragua. In this case, the theme is nutritional adaptation and cultural maladaption. By combining ethnographic and nutrition survey methods, Weiss shows that the aboriginal Miskito, who had achieved environmental adaptation through multiple resource exploitation. later became victims of external intervention. Aboriginally, the Miskito had utilized a divergent set of local resourcesto supply their matter-energy requirements throughout the annual cycle. Later, with the onset of commercial turtling, the alteration of the evolutionary timeframe, and the virtual elimination of multiple subsistence pathways, maladaptation to the environment ensued. Weiss supplements Cassidy's conclusions on the nutritional consequences of tradeoffs in economic systems. However, he emphasizes the internal systems-breakdown factor in the evolutionary timeframe through external control. The ethnographic evidence on adaptive mechanisms for controlling population size is fairly rich. However, there is a small body of data to indicate that sex-differential diets may yet be another form of population control. Rosenberg, a cultural anthropologist, explores the question of sex-differential diets by examining the ethnographic literature. Her findings are presented in chapter 7. The chapter presents descriptions of sex-differential nutrition for a variety of societies. Can these practices be considered mechanisms for population control? It is difficult to say. What arethe nutritional consequ ences of these sex-specific diets? Again, given the data, it is difficult to say, but it is well worth exploring these diets beyond the currently available literature.' Although sex-differentiated diet patterns require further testing in the field, we have fairly reliable data on the nutritional

10

Nutritional

Anthropology

consequences of microeconomic and minicultural differentiated diet patterns. Economic microdifferentiation and diet variation are probably key factors in preventing internal systems-breakdown in changing economies and living situations. Chapters 8 and 9 pursue these themes. DeWalt, Kelly, and Pelto (chapter 8) and Jerome (chapter 9) demonstrate that these twin situations are played out at the village level in a Mexican agricultural community and in an urban blue-collar black community in the American Midwest. Their findings are unique only in the sense that the researchers employed methodologies which penetrated "the culture" and constructs of "food beliefs:' in order to unfold heterogeneity in situations which have been described as homogeneous. Combined ethnographic and nutritional methodologies as used by the authors permitted insights and perspectives which are usually indiscernible by uni-disciplinary procedures. Nutrition correlates of intracultural variation and economic micro-differentiation probably reflect an individual or family's adaptation or maladaptation to the local environment. The correlates of nutritional intake with microeconomics and miniculture suggest that these factors could be used as sensitive indices of environmental adaption. Marchione (chapter 10) takes us one step further by quantifying some intracultural and microeconomic factors influencing nutritional status. With the aid of factor analysis, he links young child malnutrition to ecological factors in one of Jamaica's western parishes. This method of analysis permits the reader to view food use and diet patterning within the context of the larger society. Highly specific household measures are integrated into macroscopic socioeconomic and environmental variability which are relatable to both young child malnutrition and socioeconomic conditions in Jamaica. The cultural anthropologist thus demonstrates that a biological condition (young child malnutrition) is an adaptational response to scarce food energy resources and material conditions which, in turn, is built into the socioenvironmental structure. Chapter 11 should be considered the next logical step in expanding 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 in the United States as a social revitalization force and a consumerdesigned health maintenance system. The theme of this chapter is

Introduction

11

dietary change. The reader is presented with a wealth of data that show how ideology and dissatisfaction with the status quo lead to redefinitions of health and diet and the development of systems for social interaction and self-realization.

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