ABSTRACT
Bertolt Brecht comments: 'A man is just the food he eats.* How human beings have found their food, clothed themselves, afforded their artifacts and entertainments and passions, and protected their relatively fragile bodies from hunger, cold, rain, tedium, and fear, has always been a subject of enormous and absorbing interest. Social scientists may forget - because most of them work in universities or other organizations which give them money on a regular basis - how much the question of getting food and warmth and tools, or money, is a recurrent question, as urgent and yet as dully repetitive as hunger, and how i t may be as elaborately symbolic a matter as i t is brutally real. In the way the ancient hunters of the Dordogne in France painted animals and hunting scenes on cave walls, and in the way Wi l ly Loman in Death of a Salesman created fictional runs of t r ium phant luck in his selling expeditions, people have necessarily always troubled themselves about goods and money, and the future, and the connection between these realities.
