ABSTRACT
Anthropology studies the human animal from all perspectives and is often seen as a four-field discipline encompassing cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology. Anthropology connects with food practices from all four perspectives. A physical anthropologist might emphasize diet, while a cultural anthropologist may stress cuisine and identity. An archaeologist would be concerned with diet, cuisine, and identity in prehistoric times. A linguistic anthropologist may focus more on cognition, classification, and social reproduction with respect to diet, cuisine, and social identity. Since language is implicated in most human activities, little about foodways is uninteresting to a linguistic anthropologist. Food is also of particular interest because both language about food and the cooking of food are uniquely human practices, the latter quite possibly having led to the former (Wrangham 2009; Wrangham et al. 1999).
