Biocultural Perspectives on Foods and Beverages That Mediate Sociability Nina L

Foods of Association FOODS OF ASSOCIATION Biocultural Perspectives on Foods and Beverages that Mediate Sociability Nina L. Etkin The University of Arizona Press Tucson The University of Arizona Press www.uapress.arizona.edu © 2009 by The Arizona Board of Regents Open-access edition published 2019 ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-2777-9 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3932-1 (open-access e-book) The text of this book is licensed under the Creative Commons Atrribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivsatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Etkin, Nina L. (Nina Lilian), 1948– Foods of association : biocultural perspectives on foods and beverages that mediate sociability / Nina L. Etkin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8165-2777-9 (hard cover : alk. paper) 1. Food habits. 2. Drinking customs. 3. Nutritional anthropology. 4. Hausa (African people)—Food. 5. Hausa (African people)—Social life and customs. I. Title. gt2850.e876 2009 394.1ʹ2—dc22 2009007538 An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-0-8165-3932-1. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. To my husband, Paul Ross, for stimulating me intellectually, being my best friend, and encouraging me in so many ways Contents List of Figures viii List of Tables ix Acknowledgments xi 1 Introduction 1 2 The Imperial Roots of European Foodways 50 3 Street Foods and Beverages 89 4 Foods and Beverages of Occasion, Circumstance, and Ceremony 127 5 Aspects of Health, Hype, and Identity in Bottled Water 171 6 Overview 206 Notes 209 References 213 Index 239 Figures Hausa girls beside a dish of chile peppers 73 Author with Hausa women and children 112 Young Hausa men sharing cowpea fritters 116 Hausa boys removing seed coats from roasted groundnuts 118 Head of a Hausa household offers goro to guests at a suna 154 Hausa girls simulate the celebration of marriage 157 Hausa children wait in line for grinding mill 164 Hausa woman pounding millet with a mortar and pestle 165 Hausa water collectors at a well in Hurumi 195 Author and her associate interviewing a Hausa informant 197 All photographs are by Paul Ross, 1988. Tables 1.1 Categories of USDA-authorized organic foods 30 1.2 Vitamin susceptibility to environmental conditions 30 1.3 A brief history of low-carbohydrate (CHO) diets 35 2.1 Caffeine and theobromine in beverages of association 78 2.2 Sites of action and relative strengths of methylxanthines 84 3.1 Polynesian botanical canoe foods 96 3.2 Hawaiian Plate Lunch nutrient values 100 3.3 Terms for semiwild fruit in Hurumi 119 Acknowledgments I credit collaborations on Hausa research with Paul Ross and Malam Ibrahim Muazzamu and express gratitude to the people of Hurumi who taught me so much about Hausa medicine and animate my broader reflections on the meanings of food, medicine, and health. I applaud Jo Ann Steele, Laurie Ross Fielding, and Edward Steele for their encourage- ment. Thank you to a legion of stimulating University of Hawai¿i anthropology graduate students and to Christine Szuter, Allyson Carter, and other energetically professional staff of the University of Arizona Press. chapter 1 Introduction This book explores the biology and culture of foods and beverages that are consumed in communal settings, with special attention to the implications of these items for people’s health. As defined for this book, foods and beverages of association are consumed by diverse social groups: these might be durable, such as the regular congregation of a church; impermanent, such as guests at a wedding; or some variation in between. In the case of public consumables such as street foods, eating and drinking overlap in time and space, although a social entity of consumption may exist only in the abstract or have limited longevity. A substantial literature on food sociability that centers on the social context of food exists, but it largely neglects the foods and beverages that are consumed in social settings, which is the current volume’s focus.∞ Food sociability foregrounds gastronomy, in which the central axis is the intersection of cultural and social features of food and eating. That literature does not consider physiology and food chemistry but instead focuses on how locus, praxis, and discourse—the context, social organization, and semantics—of eating are important means by which to understand diverse foodways. By employing a biocultural perspective, I likewise acknowledge that foods are conduits of meaning and that they mediate social relations. However, my primary focus is on the biology of the foods themselves, how they impact individual and collective physiologies, and how the tangible aspects of foods contribute to their meaning. My analysis coheres around foods and beverages that fuel the body, induce physical satiety, provide nutrients, and have pharmacologic potential. In a departure from much of the contemporary (largely popular) literature, this book does not promote certain foods or recommend dietary regimens. Instead, I advance an integrated perspective and draw on an extensive multidisciplinary literature to explore themes such as food chemistry, human evolution, history of cuisines, nutrition, and food and culture. I examine what exists, or once did, in real ethnographic contexts 2 chapter 1 and consider the physiologic implications of those foodways. I also in- clude my research on Hausa food and medicine. The book is organized around a handful of circumstances in which foods and beverages of association are consumed. The criteria providing the framework for my research are that the foods and beverages should be ingested in the company, or at least proximity, of other people and that the communal consumption of these items contributes to their meaning. The key concern was to select foods and drinks for which there is suffi- cient scholarship on nutrients, pharmacodynamic constituents, physiologic actions, history, and ethnography. The Structure of the Book In this introductory chapter, I outline the theoretical foundations of my work and reflect on the physiologic and cultural circumstances of food sharing and other transfers in evolutionary perspective. I consider the evolution of food management strategies among noncaptive animals gen- erally, nonhuman primates in near-natural environments, and archaeo- logical and historical human populations. Following that, I discuss some dietary strategies in the contemporary and affluent West, where individ- uals form confederations around foodways that are designed to meet general and specific health goals: the Slow Food movement; vegetarian and low-carbohydrate diets; and foodways that accommodate the genetic conditions diabetes, gluten enteropathy, and lactose intolerance. Chapter 2 offers a general treatment of European exploration and colonial activities to illustrate how certain foods and beverages were appropriated from other cultures and geographic regions and became items of association in European foodways. A more thorough biocultural analysis is applied to spices, which forge association as signatures of cuisines, and the social beverages coffee, cocoa, and tea. Chapter 3 is about street foods, that is, items that are consumed in public but not in conven- tional restaurants. A global overview serves as a backdrop for in-depth treatment of street foods in Hawai¿i and northern Nigeria. In chapter 4, I explore foods and beverages consumed for all manner of ceremonies and occasions; they mark occasions that range from the mundane to the ritually sacred and have significant nutritional and pharmacologic potential. While celebratory customs and ritual elements are included to pro- introduction 3 vide context, the primary focus is on the foods themselves. Chapter 5 traces the history and health potential of a very contemporary beverage of association: bottled water. I concentrate on the branded, individual-sized products that are vigorously promoted for a variety of health claims— which, I argue, have not been established or even substantially explored. The concluding chapter is an overview of themes that recur throughout the book and also suggests additional directions for research. Theoretical Perspectives My work is framed by a biocultural perspective that explores both the physiologic implications of consumption and the cultural construction and social circulation of food. This perspective is more comprehensive than are approaches in the biosciences, which commonly explore foods out of context, with the objective of identifying discrete constituents and specific activities. Biocultural analysis also expands many of the other anthropological inquiries on food, which center on issues of body, gen- der, identity, and commodification (e.g., Counihan 1999; Pence 2002; Bryant et al. 2003) but not on how those meaning-centered issues inter- sect food pharmacology and human physiology. I emphasize that people regard foods and beverages simultaneously as biodynamic substances and cultural objects: their pharmacologic profiles both transcend and contribute to their cultural signification. In other work, I conflate the biocultural perspective with the term ethnopharmacology, which is the intersection of medical ethnography and the biology of therapeutic action, a transdis- ciplinary exploration that spans the biological and social sciences (Greek etymology, from ethno-, ‘‘culture’’ or ‘‘people’’; pharm-, ‘‘drug’’) (e.g., Etkin 2006a; Etkin and Elisabetsky 2005). I also invoke issues of globaliza- tion and political economy to illustrate how physiology and cuisine are influenced by asymmetrical access to food, knowledge, and other re- sources, disparities that bear directly and indirectly on nutrient sufficiency and other health issues.

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