ABSTRACT
Food and eating as subjects of serious inquiry have engaged anthropology from its very beginnings. Varieties of foods and modes of preparation have always evoked the attention, sometimes horrifi ed, of observant travelers, particularly when the processing techniques (e.g., chewing and spitting to encourage fermentation) and the substances (e.g., live larvae, insects, the contents of animal intestines, rotten eggs) have been foreign to their experience and eating habits. At the same time, repeated demonstrations of the intimate relationship between ingestion and sociality among living peoples of all sorts, as well as the importance attributed to it in classic literary accounts, including the Bible, have led to active refl ection about the nature of the links that connect them. Long before students of Native America had invented “culture areas,” or students of the Old World had formulated evolutionary stages for pastoralism or semiagriculture, W. Robertson Smith had set forth elegantly the concept of commensality and had sought to explain the food prohibitions of the ancient Semites. 1 But food and eating were studies for the most part in their more unusual aspects-food prohibitions and taboos, cannibalism, the consumption of unfamiliar and distasteful items-rather than as everyday and essential features of the life of all humankind.
