Feeding, cooking, sharing: A brief social history of food

Abstract

This work addresses the food system as a complex system, connected to the environment just as living organisms. It uses the contributions from multiple fields (anthropology, nutrition, medicine, and economics, among others), establishing connections between analytically separated parts to point out their transformations over time and space. It also studies social organisation over millions of years to understand the synergy between the environment, extraction technology, economic and political structure, and the resulting cooking environments (each with their own social construction of tastes) as conditioning factors for sickness and death. In short, it delves into food anthropology relying on three main pillars: critical thinking, a relational approach, and historicity.