The Food Issue: September 2007 Archives
I used to use analogies between food and sex so often I created a separate category for it. And still think each is a great analogy for the other.
Not sure why I was thinking about this yesterday while walking along the beach but I started thinking about how... cliché it is that evolutionary psychologists/sociobiologists/social-darwinists/whatever seem to focus so much attention on the evolutionary psychology of sex, constructing *elaborate* "genetic" justifications for the "evolutionary benefit" of wealthy white Anglo-american women wearing strapless evening gowns while their partners wear tight-collared tuxedos.
Oh, got it. I started out thinking about how much I didn't care to eat fish when I was growing up in Southern Appalachia, and how my midwest-raised partner feels the same because in neither area where there really very many options for fresh fish, and I was comparing that to my own children who just fall all over fish when they can get it -- smoked salmon, fried salmon skins (which is a lot like fish-flavored bacon so isn't as awful as it sounds... to me), and, especially, sushi and sashimi. Yup, that's it. That's the point where I started thinking that if you look at something *even more* fundamentally survival oriented, like food choices, you'd think evolutionary psychologists would be all over that since
a) everybody has to eat
b) we have to eat far more frequently than we have to have sex
c) we have to eat far *far* more frequently than we have to select partners
d) people in almost all cultures are far more willing to disclose what and how they eat compared to with whom and how they have sex.
Yet it's pretty much crickets on the old food front.
Anyway, one common trope of the EP crowd is to say something inane like "does date rape have evolutionary benefits? Well, there's one really, really obscure tribe in the middle of a southeastern University campus that seems to rely on it for mate selection... blah blah blah" as if what obscure groups do says much about the rest of us. And yet both they and, to a certain extent we, lap those sorts of stories up.
But outside of a couple of guesses about our early diet based on current trends in obesity (early humans liked sweets and fats too but they weren't very abundant) you don't really see a whole lot of EP theorizing about diet or eating practices when, when you think about it, our social practices around dining -- for instance who we will or won't eat with under various circumstances -- are at least as complex as our practices related to mate selection or sex.
Funny how we study one but not the other eh?
(Oddly, I think if *I* were to go into EP I'd actually spend a little time studying *that* -- our differential interests in cultures of food vs. cultures of sex. But that's a story for another day.)
