ABSTRACT
Margaret Visser (1991) in her book The Rituals of Dinner speculates that food is at the basis of much human behaviour. Kinship systems may be interpreted as those groups which share food without question; language originated as a means of planning the acquisition and distribution of food; technology developed in order to improve the efficiency of hunting and food preparation; and morality and politics at first dealt with the fair division of food resources. From our own perspective we would add that much of the earth’s surface has been made over into humanized landscapes through the efforts of farmers (Atkins, Simmons and Roberts 1998), and that agriculture was the basis of all economies until relatively recently in human history.
