Human biology eats: Contemporary research and future directions

ABSTRACT No abstract. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 24:107–109, 2012. ' 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Human biology eats? Of course humans eat! But what,how much, where, and why—and the consequences forhuman biology both in the short and long term—are ques-tions that can be answered from a variety of perspectives.Often, these perspectives look past one another, generat-ing answers within narrow scientiﬁc or ideological boun-daries. But food is sufﬁciently important enough that weshould, as human biologists, think more deeply andbroadly about it.One way to do so is to recognize that food, eating, andrelated phenomena exist at multiple experiential levels.For example, hunger is a feeling we get when our bodiesneed food; this is an evolved hormonal, physiological, andneurological set of signals that we share with other ani-mals that motivate us to seek food. Raise the intensity abit, and add a more expansive cognitive context, and hun-ger goes from being a feeling to an emotion. Finally, hun-ger is a sociopolitical product (derived from social struc-tures and power differentials) and concept, used to distin-guish the ‘‘food secure’’ from the ‘‘food insecure.’’ All ofthese are, in turn, tied to human biological function.Historically the study of food has been, oddly enough(and despite Levi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked),marginal to anthropology. This is especially puzzling,given its potential as an outstanding domain to realize theideal of anthropological holism (Wiley, 2006). It is notablethough that one of the only early anthropological workson food dealt with hunger, Audrey Richards’ Hunger andWork in a Savage Tribe: A Functional Study of NutritionAmong the Southern Bantu (1932), described the ways inwhich this emotional and physiological state shaped somany aspects of social life, yet said almost nothing of hun-ger’s impact on nutritional status and biological function.Decades later, Sidney Mintz’s political and economic anal-ysis of sugar (Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar inModern History, 1985) highlighted both the innate desir-ability of sugar, and how our taste for it emerged at theintersection of historical forces that linked slavery, coloni-alism, industrialization, advertizing, and culinary habits.Such contributions from cultural anthropology demon-strate the power of food to shape our social lives, and yetonly hint at the ways in which it shapes our physical ones.This is where human biologists can contribute the most,by adding this piece to the complex biocultural puzzle ofhuman dietary behavior.Obtaining food is a fundamental problem for all livingorganisms, and adaptations related to diet clearly shapeboth biology and behavior. Humans are no exception. Inthe contexts of human evolutionary studies, food sharing,hunting, cooking, dietary shifts toward higher qualitydiets, and gastronomical ﬂexibility have been invoked ascontributors to our large brain, small gut, life history, ourpropensity for social cooperation, and the demographicsuccess of our species (cf., Milton, 1981; Aiello andWheeler, 1995; Kaplan et al., 2000; Cunnane et al., 2007;Kingston, 2007; Wrangham, 2009). Exposure to differentfoods such as milk has also shaped the contemporarygenetic diversity in our species. Food processing techni-ques, or culinary traditions made possible by our largebrain enhanced our ability to extract nutrients from foods,and became ever more important with the transition tofood production and its reliance on a narrower array offoodstuffs than was typical in the preagricultural period(Katz, 1987).With a focus on food, human biologists are in an excel-lent position to merge these two broad areas of investiga-tion, by considering how our food environment—includingaccess to too little or too much, different types of food-stuffs, or the cognitive concept of food—continues to shapeour biological lives. Through our concern with both theproximate and ultimate causes and consequences of par-ticular diets and patterns of eating, we can use food todemonstrate the value of a biocultural approach withinhuman biology. But furthermore, dietary behavior is cul-tural behavior, and our choices about food (or lack thereof)ramify across social life, and undoubtedly contribute tosocial and cultural change. Work in this area also clearlyhas tremendous policy relevance. If society is to ever suc-cessfully translate scientiﬁc knowledge into public healthpolicy aimed at improving diet and health, eating itself mustbe understood in the overall context of our human biology.The papers in this collection were presented in the ple-nary session at the 2011 Human Biology Association meet-ings. They each address food and eating, human biologyand human health, from diverse perspectives. The ﬁrstthree consider how the human evolutionary experiencewith food informs our present eating patterns, with a vari-ety of biological and health consequences. Lindeberg out-lines the basic premises of ‘‘evolutionary nutrition’’ andsome clinical research that provides support for adoptingdiets that are more closely aligned with those of our ances-tors (or our best approximation of what those might havebeen). Perhaps no other paradigm has really shaped ourunderstanding of the ‘‘ultimate’’ causes of contemporarychronic diseases (formerly called ‘‘western’’ diseases, butnow sadly rife among the world’s populations) than that ofevolutionary nutrition, which emphasizes the ways in