Point of Origin Episode 26

what do we mean when we say food anthropology?

“Every action is an ecological action, whether we realize it or not. Every meal that you sit down for has ecological ripples, that ripple out through the food chain, through the resources through the ecosystem.”

GinaRae LaCerva

From the onset of Whetstone Magazine we’ve talked about food anthropology as a cornerstone of the work we wanted to put out into the world. In doing that, we recognize and acknowledge, perhaps not enough, the problematic nature of framing anthropology into the work that we want to do based on our own de-colonial work as founders, as a media platform, and through the stories that we represent.

So what do we mean when we say anthropology, and specifically food anthropology? On today’s episode our aim is to answer that question with all its complexities and hopefully shed light on a critical form of research and human understanding. To do that we’re joined by two researchers: GinaRae LaCerva and Professor Hanna Garth.

Listen to Episode 26

Available on Apple Podcast, Spotify, & iHeartRadio

Highlights

( 00:00 ) Introduction with GinaRae LaCerva

( 03:25 ) History of Anthropology

( 06:33 ) GinaRae’s Perspective on Anthropology

( 08:45 ) Wild Foods

( 15:40 ) The Rise of Viruses

( 18:20 ) Wild Meat

( 21:25 ) Closing with GinaRae

( 22:30 ) Introduction with Professor Hanna Garth

( 24:55 ) How Anthropologists Began Studying Food

( 29:10 ) Closing Remarks from Stephen

Defining Food Anthropology

The defining questions that Food Anthropology asks is:

What can food tell us about human culture and social organization?

Developed as a subfield of Cultural Anthropology, Food Anthropology traces the material and symbolic importance of food, ritual, commensality and how they intersect with human behavior.

Studying food as a way of gaining insights into social life of people was not in practice until the second half of the 20th century. Work was done by Mary Douglas, Marvin Harris, Arjun Appadurai, Jack Goody, and Sidney Mintz to bring the idea of “Food Anthropology” alive. Particularly, Mintz is seen as the "Father of food anthropology" for his work, Sweetness and Power (1985), which linked British demand for sugar with the creation of empire and exploitative industrial labor conditions.

The Historic Issues of Anthropology

“Both geography and Anthropology started out in service to empire and colonialism. Very much based in going out and scientifically studying people and cultures.”

Anthropology was a field of study that began through the lens of the white European colonists and empires. This led to studies that relied more on subjective conclusions than objective facts. Anthropologists were positioning other cultures as “the other” and never themselves.

French Jesuit priests were some of the first Anthropologists—writing about Native American tribes. They wrote down a lived culture that was filtered through their European and religious lenses. Because of their viewpoints, they saw the Native American culture as “primitive” and “savage”. They already came with such a heavy burden of their own cultural ideology that they couldn’t possibly come to objective conclusions.

The Capitalistic Elevation of Wild Foods

“For most of our history we ate wild food, and now it’s kind of reserved in some ways as a luxury item”

“I always think of Capitalism as eating its tail, like its gone full circle and now its trying to commodify the very weirdness that shouldn’t fit into capitalism, so something that starts out as a resistance movement, which gathering your own food can feel like, like resisting the system and connecting to the land, that’s being taken in by the beast, and that resistance is suddenly being spread by Coca-Cola or whatever it is.”

Advice for Foraging

From GinaRae LaCerva

“If you want to learn to forage, go to the same place for a year, visit it through all the seasons, start to identify what plants are there, learn whose land it used to be. Like have a relationship with the place. I think in its best and most helpful way, eating wild foods is about relationship with nonhuman species and the nonhuman world we share this planet with.”

GinaRae LaCerva’s Book

Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food

A writer and anthropologist searches for wild foods—and reveals what we lose in a world where wildness itself is misunderstood, commodified, and hotly pursued.

For most of human history, we hunted and gathered. Today, most people will never eat anything undomesticated. And yet the desire to eat wild has never been stronger.

To understand this trend, LaCerva forages for wild onions in a Danish cemetery, tracks the trade in illegal game meat from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Europe, sips elusive bird’s nest soup in Borneo, and smuggles Swedish "heartbreak" moose meat home in her suitcase.

Feasting Wild is a remarkable celebration of biodiversity, Indigenous and women's knowledge, our vital connection to nature, and delicious flavors!

Buy the Book

“Looking at how people consume food, reveals things about human life, and that’s what’s fundamental to me about the anthropology of food as a field.”

Professor Hanna Garth

Hanna Garth’s Book

Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal

Food in Cuba follows Cuban families as they struggle to maintain a decent quality of life in Cuba's faltering, post-Soviet welfare state by specifically looking at the social and emotional dimensions of shifts in access to food.

Based on extensive fieldwork with families in Santiago de Cuba, the island's second largest city, Hanna Garth examines Cuban families' attempts to acquire and assemble "a decent meal," unraveling the layers of household dynamics, community interactions, and individual reflections on everyday life in today's Cuba. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the subsequent loss of its most significant trade partner, Cuba entered a period of economic hardship. Although trade agreements have significantly improved the quantity and quality of rationed food in Cuba, many Cubans report that they continue to live with food shortages and economic hardship. Garth tells the stories of families that face the daily challenge of acquiring not only enough food, but food that meets local and personal cultural standards. She ultimately argues that these ongoing struggles produce what the Cuban families describe as "a change in character," and that for some, this shifting concept of self and sense of social relation leads to a transformation in society. Food in Cuba shows how the practices of acquisition and the politics of adequacy are intricately linked to the local moral stances on what it means to be a good person, family member, community member, and ultimately, a good Cuban.

Buy the Book

Meet our Guests

About GinaRae LaCerva

GinaRae LaCerva is a geographer and environmental anthropologist. She holds degrees from Yale University, The University of Cambridge, and Vassar College.

An avid adventurer, LaCerva has researched tsunamis in Indonesia, crossed the Pacific Ocean on a sailboat, and gone scuba diving with barracudas. Her love of being outside began in childhood, as she grew up exploring the mountains of northern New Mexico. She is dedicated to writing about environmental science and philosophy in ways that both personalize and contextualize dense academic research, broadening the scope of engagement with these subjects to scientists and non-scientists alike.

Her writing has been published in Leonardo/ISAST (The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology) by MIT Press, THE Magazine, Sage Magazine, Feedback: The Open Humanities Press, Vassar ScienceWorks, The Santa Fe Reporter, Gender and Forests: Climate Change, Tenure, Value Chains, and Emerging Issues (Routledge, 2016), and in Tropical Resources: The Bulletin of the Yale Tropical Resources Institute.

Visit her Website

About Hanna Garth

*Image Credit: https://anthropology.princeton.edu/people/faculty/hanna-garth*

Dr. Garth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She completed her BA with a triple major in Anthropology, Hispanic Studies, and Policy Studies at Rice University, an MPH in Global Health at Boston University, and a PhD in Anthropology at UCLA. She held a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Irvine from 2015-2016. Hanna Garth will join the Anthropology department at Princeton in September 2021 as a sociocultural and medical anthropologist.

Her work addresses issues of inequality and structural violence, with regional interests in Latin American, the Caribbean, and the United States. She currently has active research projects in Cuba and Los Angeles. In Cuba, she has conducted research on household food acquisition practices and the changing Cuban food system. In Los Angeles, she has been researching the food justice movement and the organizations that work toward increasing healthy food access in low-income areas. Both projects address issues of race and gender based inequality.