Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture

Abstract

Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture. By E. N. Anderson. (New York: New York University Press, 2005). Pp. viii + 295, introduction, photographs, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00 cloth) Crusading "to improve world nutrition," (8) E. N. Anderson says his work is not a textbook or basic reference volume, but a "question raising essay" (245). Call it textbook-lite. A worthwhile, if incomplete, survey of nutritional anthropology, Everyone Eats could be useful reading for introductory courses that discuss foodways. Anderson's prose is highly readable and he includes numerous references to scholarly works. His approach to food studies is "biocultural"-considering not just biology and culture, but also "political economy, all at once" (4). Torn between gloom and doom on the one side and techno-optimism on the other, Anderson disputes himself throughout: "Time is short, ecological disaster is at hand; we have no time to lose" (8). Yet "[technology is doing quite well in solving world food problems, and even the much-maligned global marketplace is at least doing what it is supposed to do-motivating production and getting the food around" (210). Seemingly contradictory statements challenge readers in this attempt to introduce the complexities of world food systems. In the final chapter, "Feeding the World," the author announces that "we simply cannot do without genetically modified crops [GMOs] in the future" (220). But while still insisting that GMOs are essential, he writes that we are "ignorant of the real costs and benefits . . . [and] the technology is untried, uncontrolled and uncertain" (225). And finally, GMOs "will not solve the world food problem" (226). The initial chapters address nutrition and the sensory systems that affect individual perception of foods. While maintaining this biological underpinning, Anderson devotes perhaps twice as much space to sociocultural matters. Chapters on "Food and Traditional Medicine" and "Food and Religion," as well as sections on classification systems, identity and status, and the (permeable) boundaries of ethnicity and cuisines, often approximate a folkloric viewpoint. Nutritional anthropology excels in stepping outside the "ethnographic present" to embrace the history and pre-history of foodways. Anderson does well in communicating the importance of the past for understanding present-day beliefs and practices. But some of his presentation of modern foodways is less compelling. For example, he discusses "lifestyle" as the "most protean and most important of concepts" and then quickly concludes that "[i]t defines individuals and their foodways" (129). Deeper analysis would help here, and in a few other places. (The paragraph following the one just cited does make a more profound point on a different topic, using a humorous story dealing with familial transmission of foodways.) Anderson's style sometimes approaches snideness when he is dealing with modern practices. …