Feeding, cooking, sharing: A brief social history of food

Abstract

This work addresses the food system as a complex structure connected to the environment, like a living organism. It uses the contributions from multiple fields (including anthropology, nutritional, medicine, and economics) to establish connections between analytically disparate fields in order to highlight their transformations over time and space. It also studies social organisation over millions of years to understand the synergy between the environment, extraction technologies, economic and political structures, and the resulting cooking environments (each with their own social construction of tastes) as conditioning factors for sickness and death. In short, it delves into the anthropology of food by relying on three main pillars: critical thinking, a relational approach, and historicity.