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R.B. A Comparison of Food Consumption Patterns and Family Structures in Eskimos and Post-Industrialists 1 Introduction In today’s socially and economically cutthroat post-industrial environment, just as in the harsh climes of the Arctic and sub-Arctic, the nuclear family reigns as the basic domestic unit. The similarity between the family structures of the post-industrialists and the food-foraging ice-dwellers seems to run contrary to what one may expect given the theory of cultural ecology. Cultural ecology—defined by Julian Steward as “the adaptive processes by which the nature of society and an unpredictable number of features of culture are affected by the basic adjustment through which man utilizes a given environment” (quoted in Netting 1977: 6)—posits a concrete relationship between culture and environment. In light of this theory, the family unit—whatever it may be—can be viewed as an adaptation to environmental factors. How can two societies from radically different climatologic and social contexts develop such similar family structures? Consider the following: The nuclear family is mobile, able to move to where the means to live comfortably can be found. Just as Eskimos would pack up and migrate to find the animals on which they subsisted, so too can the modern post-industrial family pack up and move across the country to find employment. Additionally, the nuclear family must fend for itself without much help from people outside of the family (Haviland et al. 2005: 243-244). Given these similarities in social structure and differences in environment, and given the barrel model of culture (Haviland et al. 2005: 39-40), are there similarities and differences in the cultural infrastructure (modes of subsistence) between these two societies as well? What sorts of food-related behavior are shared or are markedly different between our society and Eskimo society? How do these behaviors relate to group survival? 2 Methods of Data Acquisition Over the course of five days, I tracked my own food acquisition and consumption (as an indicator of our society at large), noting the dates and times of eating, a description of the food, who purchased the food (as far back as was verifiable), with whom the food was shared, and how the leftover food and serving items were dealt with after finishing. I chose five days over which I would have both typical and atypical schedules—from the morning of Tuesday, November 21 to the evening of Saturday, November 25, 2006. 3 Results My family has always been a commuter family since we moved to San Jose in 1985, so I am accustomed to waking up early and getting on the road. More often than not, this translates into food-wise into “no breakfast,” or, if lucky, “quick breakfast,” with the actual definition of “breakfast” being loose, roughly meaning “light morning snack.” The trend continues today, much to my chagrin, and if I am so lucky, I can grab something quick to eat before heading out the door to drop my sister off to school. As of late, it has become a habit to go to Starbucks after taking my sister to school to fill the void in the pit of my stomach to provide fuel for the rest of the day. When there is work to be done, organization is key, not only in thought and in physical space, but also with time. If I have class, I stay at Starbucks to do some reading prior to attending. If I have free time, then I do my work wherever I feel most comfortable doing it at that instant in time—at Starbucks, at home, in the library. This pattern holds until lunch, when the hunger takes over once more and the monster must be appeased. Usually I eat alone if I am not at home, but if my father and I are at home at the same time, we usually eat together. If my sister has a half day at school, I would pick her up and take her to lunch with me—someplace cheap, but filling. Afterwards, we would return home, where I would do more work—studying for class or for GREs, or researching graduate schools or short-term job opportunities online. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I have a class in the evenings at Foothill College. In these situations, my father would have to come home and take my sister with him to pick up my mother from work; I then would eat “dinner” (once again, a crude simulacrum of actual dinner) alone and head to class. As a result of this schedule, I am not at home when the rest of my nuclear family is at home; they usually eat dinner without me, but there is some food set aside for me upon my return. November 22 (Wednesday) deviates from my standard schedule at this point: as the day before a major holiday, I do not have class that evening. Instead, I have a chance to enjoy (real) dinner with my family. Dinner is usually the only meal of the day we have together as a family, and so it is the only chance we have to catch up on each others’ lives during the weekdays. My father prepares the meals for my family most of the time; sometimes the responsibility falls on me. We use food we bought the prior weekend from Costco or some other supermarket, but on rare occasions, we might use vegetables or fruit grown in our backyard gardens. (This did not occur during the five-day period during which this study took place.) After dinner on Wednesday, we begin to prepare for Thanksgiving. We will have a party on Thursday for our extended family at our house, and so we begin to cook more elaborate fare than that to which we are accustomed. The foodstuffs we use are all richer (and more expensive) than our day-to-day cooking materials, but Thanksgiving is a special occasion, and it is not every day that we get to see our extended family, despite the fact that many of them live in the Bay Area. The next morning is filled with anxiety over food preparation: Will the food finish cooking on time? Will the food taste good once finished? We scramble to get the house clean and to finish up the main meat dishes. Finally, the party rolls around and my extended family members arrive at my house. Some bring food that they prepared or bought with them; some do not. It does not matter since there is more than enough food for everybody. Leftovers are either taken home by family members or stored in the refrigerator. The next day, the family decides to have brunch together at a buffet since everybody has the day off and wants to spend more time together. Still stuffed from the night before, I foolishly think I will be able to refuse to eat too much. Wrong. Our family spends the next two hours talking, getting out of their chairs, piling more food on their plates, and returning. By the end of it, many of us are stuffed just as we were the night before. The rest of the day continues in typical weekend fashion—a return to the scheduled way of life untainted by holiday chaos. We have our usual family dinner that night, which consists mainly of leftovers. Saturday marks a return to the weekend morning schedule. We have brunch together as a household, and afterwards I spend my time alternating between doing my work and being lazy—very typical of weekends. My parents and sister step out to go to a party at a restaurant, leaving me home alone for the next few hours. Upon their return, I eat their leftovers from the restaurant. They inform me they will be going Christmas shopping—an activity I absolutely abhor—so I decline an invitation to come along and instead opt to stay at home and take care of my sister. That night, we order some food from the pizza place—you can only eat leftovers for so long before getting sick of them. We eat our parmesan twists while watching the Discovery Channel—a peaceful ending to a hectic Thanksgiving holiday. 4 Discussion 4.1 Enculturation and Routinization According to George Fathauer, a nutritional anthropologist, “[p]rimary socialization occurs mainly through the agency of the immediate family. Food is one of the basic mediums through which adult attitudes and sentiments are communicated to the child” (cited in Fieldhouse 1986: 4). It is possibly around the dinner table that interaction is most forced and most intimate: [M]ealtimes can become a clearing-house for the family’s news, information, and experiences…[and] are regarded by most as a privileged opportunity to catch up on the gossip and contribute to some of their own. The dinner-table is also used as an arena for parents and children to discuss matters of interest and common concern. (MacClancy 1992: 98-99) In my family, this is often the case. As it is really the only time we have to spend together given our busy schedules, dinner provides us with a set time period in which to talk about the events of the day, the latest gossip, and to discuss issues of concern. Given the lack of time that many families spend together in modern societies, any chance where there is a forced interaction becomes vitally important for enculturation and socialization, especially as children grow out of infancy and into adolescence. As a result of socialization processes, routinization occurs: “[M]any of our everyday decisions become ‘routinised’; that is they are performed as a matter of habit, without conscious deliberation” (Fieldhouse 1986: 16). This is important to the long-term stability of culture; cultural norms are ingrained into young children so that they may pass them on to their children when the time comes. Routine is especially useful in modern post-industrial society when the organization of time is crucial to day-to-day functions central to survival. My own routinized schedule attests to this. The fact that my weekday schedule lacks time for a family breakfast and lunch (a luxury only reserved for weekends in the form of brunch), combined with my family’s insistence on having dinner together when possible during the week, further underscores the shared meal time as family time used to disseminate information. This is made possible through routinization, and so a feedback loop between routinization and information dissemination, enculturation, and socialization is created. 4.2 The Delocalization of the Food Supply Food-foraging societies—like the Eskimos—obtain the bulk of their food supplies from the local environment; they gather or hunt wherever food can be found in the immediate local area in which they camp, and when the food runs out, they migrate to another place where food will be more plentiful (Pelto and Pelto 1983: 312-313). By meditating on this way of life, an interesting question arises: if a family fails to find food—either due to chronically bad luck in hunting or storing food—and it is futile to relocate because there will be no food anywhere, as is the case in the dead of winter, how is certain death avoided? The answer to this question lies in food-sharing mechanisms built into Eskimo culture, which I will explore later in the paper. Unless there is not enough money for food, families in our culture rarely have to worry about food shortages. There is always a supply of food on hand at the local supermarket. This food comes from domestic and international sources, and is the natural outgrowth of our increasingly global market economy. We thus depend on delocalized food sources. Delocalization can be defined as the “rise of increasingly complex, international food distribution networks” of “intensifying socioeconomic and political interdependency” (Pelto and Pelto 1983: 309-310). In my family, we drive to the local supermarket or wholesale warehouse store to obtain foodstuffs. In the summer, we eat fruit off the trees in the backyard, but during the winter, there is no more fruit. Where do we get fresh fruit during the winter, then? It is shipped from the southern hemisphere (which, thanks to a 23.5° tilt in the Earth’s axis, is enjoying the warmth of summer) to a food distribution center, and from there to Safeway’s produce department. It is just as Pelto and Pelto say: “[A]n increasing portion of the daily diet comes from distant places usually through commercial channels” (1983: 309). 4.3 Food-Sharing: Cultural Conditions and Reasons Food is more than merely a means for survival, it is “an item to be shared…a symbol of social relationships quite apart from any monetary value it may represent” (Fieldhouse 1986: 86). Anthropologist Yehudi A. Cohen (1968) came up with three basic modes of sharing (cited in Fieldhouse 1986: 75-76). The first of these is recurrent exchange and sharing. This type of sharing occurs in societies with highly integrated extended family groups living in close proximity to one another. Food is almost constantly moving among the nuclear families comprising the extended family group. This mode of sharing serves to underscore community solidarity. The second type of sharing is termed mutual assistance and sharing in times of need. This type of sharing is seen in Eskimos and other societies where family structures are generally nuclear in nature (creating increased physical mobility), but where kinship ties are still strong. As the name suggests, in times of economic cooperation (as in a group hunt) or of economic hardship, communal sharing occurs. The final type of sharing is narrowed and reluctant sharing, which is the mode for isolated nuclear families such as those occurring in American culture today. Food is generally only shared between members of the same nuclear family, attesting to the isolation of the modern family from the support systems of the extended family. This mode of food sharing serves to define the separateness of one family from all others. Any sharing that occurs between nuclear families is generally based on kinship ties. 4.3.1 Eskimos: ‘Mutual Assistance and Sharing in Times of Need’ Archaeologist Lewis Binford found that, among Eskimos, “much of the food obtained by producers [during either of two short periods of massive food input annually] is not generally shared outside the basic family unit” (Binford 1978: 140). When it is shared beyond the nuclear family, …sharing meat from stores is done not in terms of initial evaluations of persons relative to a kinship idiom, but in terms of perceived needs for meat. …[T]he head of [a] meatless family is given equal rights to stores considered the properties of other families [regardless of paths and degrees of kinship to the head of the disadvantaged family]. (Binford 1978: 140) Thus, in Eskimo society, sharing is done mainly for economic reasons: when a related family finds itself at a distinct disadvantage, a family steps in to share food with them. This is probably altruistically motivated—a form of social security safety net in case the same should happen to them. Sharing is also seen “when engaging in communal or cooperative endeavors,” such as during a group hunt (Binford 1978: 141). This is done during the months where food is plentiful, and is therefore an economic endeavor to maximize the acquisition of food for the group of families aligned for that purpose. To further highlight the economic basis for foodsharing, Jeremy MacClancy offers an anecdote about a European explorer who thanked a group of Eskimos he was with for giving him a piece of meat, to which an old man replied, “You must not thank for your meat; it is your right to get parts. In this country, nobody wishes to be dependent on others. Therefore, there is nobody who gives or gets gifts, for thereby you become dependent” (MacClancy 1992: 103; my emphasis). 4.3.2 Post-Industrialists: ‘Narrowed and Reluctant Sharing’ Where the Eskimos have nuclear family structures with (semi-)strong kinship ties, our society tends to lack those ties in day-to-day life. It is for this reason that despite a surface similarity between our culture’s family structure and that of the Eskimos, there is a lesser degree of sharing between families. These ties simply do not have basis in physical reality: while our nuclear families may have long-distance emotional support from other related families, rarely is there ever an instance where geography does not interfere with the sharing of physical items like food. Thus, most—if not all—food sharing occurs within a household; in my case, this included my nuclear family and my live-in cousin. Just as how food sharing is an economic consideration in Eskimo culture, so it is in ours. It is economically most feasible and advantageous to keep the food within the household than it is to share it either with unrelated neighbors or with relatives who may live across the city, across the country, or on the other side of the globe. There is an instance in which our culture readily shares food with outsiders to the nuclear family: during a feast. According to Lowenberg et al. (1979): the word ‘feast’ denotes a special occasion, commonly public, on which food is consumed of a different quality and quantity to that of everyday meals…. The foods used for feasting are: (a) scarce, (b) high quality, (c) often expensive, (d) difficult and time-consuming to prepare; i.e. they have high status. (cited in Fieldhouse 1986: 91-92) I can attest to these qualities of the foods my family prepared for the Thanksgiving holiday, a classic example of a feast in modern times. Turkey is not an easy food to prepare (for most people, myself included), and the materials we used for the stuffing of said turkey were rich and expensive. Overall, we had very elaborate (in comparison to the usual) fare for Thanksgiving. Also, we hosted a Thanksgiving party at our house for our extended family. They brought some food of their own as well. Fieldhouse tells us that the “act of eating together indicates some degree of compatibility or acceptance; food is offered as a gesture of friedship—the more elaborate the fare, the greater the implied intimacy or degree of esteem” (1986: 82). Further more, MacClancy says that a “gift of food can express many things: concern, sympathy, gratitude, affection, [and] love” (1992: 103). Thus, the Thanksgiving feast is an emblem of the strength of our social bond as extended family members, but it goes so much further beyond mere symbolism. The feast serves to reinforce social bonds between the different nuclear families within our extended family group. The holiday season is one of the only times throughout the entire year that the entire family is present. Through these large feasts and parties—in which food plays a central part—the extended family is allowed to define its own separateness from other extended families, just as nuclear families do on a daily basis by sharing food within themselves. 5 Conclusions Fieldhouse wrote that “culture is a major determinant of what we eat” and that “[f]ood habits come into being and are maintained because they are effective, practical, and meaningful behaviors in a particular culture” (1986: 1-2). In other words, food habits are adaptive parts of culture that increase survival for a society. Food habits are developed and passed down through generations because food is a major mechanism for enculturation. Moreover, whereas hunter-gatherers like the Eskimos are dependent on a local food supply, post-industrial societies depend on a delocalized food supply for survival, which is a cultural outgrowth of industrialization. Finally, food sharing mechanisms in today’s modern world depend less on survival economics and more on strengthening social bonds. By reinforcing these bonds, we create an emotional safety net consisting of friends and family members. These bonds are critical for emotional if not biological survival; hunger will not kill most people in this society, but the increased stress generated by the hectic demands of modern living might. Ironically, these bonds are reinforced over the dinner-table, which is becoming less common in our society as a whole. As of 1992, “[s]eventy-five per cent of American families no longer have breakfast together, and they only meet up for dinner three times a week, or less” (MacClancy 1992: 100). This makes every shared meal even more crucial for emotional survival. In light of these revelations, it becomes clear why our society is obsessed with parties. The social bonds forged over food and drink, and the information that flows from one mouth to all ears in range, is central to our well-being in this fast-paced life. 6 References Cited Binford, Lewis R. 1978 Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology. San Francisco, CA: Academic Press. Fieldhouse, Paul 1986 Food & Nutrition: Customs and Culture. Dover, NH: Croom Helm. Haviland, William A., Harald E. L. Prins, Dana Walrath, and Bunny McBride, eds. 2005 Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge. 11th ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. MacClancy, Jeremy 1992 Consuming Culture: Why You Eat What You Eat. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company. Netting, Robert McC. 1977 Cultural Ecology. Menlo Park, CA: Cummings Publishing Company. Pelto, Gretel H. and Pertti J. Pelto 1983 Diet and Delocalization: Dietary Changes since 1750. In Hunger and History: The Impact of Changing Food Production and Consumption Patterns on Society. Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds. Pp. 309-330. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. |