Susan Allport. 2000. Harmony Books, New York. 260 pages, clothbound. $23.
I
read Susan Allport’s fascinating book about food, The
Primal Feast, at the same time I was reading a quirky
tome called An Intimate History of Humanity** by social
historian Theodore Zeldin. I was attracted to the latter by
the title of a single chapter: "Why there has been more
progress in cooking than in sex." In this chapter, I
found much to complement Allport’s delightful survey
of how food shapes animal and human lives.
Zeldin defined gastronomy as "the art of using food to create happiness." And, the study of gastronomy, he wrote, is an exploration of the whole of nature, as cooking involves an interest in all that is alive. A science writer, Allport by this definition is also a serious gastronome.
She clearly cherishes planning and making and sharing meals with her family and friends--she uses food to create happiness. This instinct inspired The Primal Feast. It was over a "wine-dark stew" that her husband asked what role she would play in a subsistence society. She knew she would be a forager--a finder of food. And then she wondered what exactly this meant. So she went on a quest to learn about food and feeding in the natural world. This book is the result. If not an exploration of the whole feast of nature, it is a tasty excursion through some of its most intriguing dishes. It will make happy any reader interested in the menu of items in the subtitle: food, sex, foraging, and love--and who isn’t interested in at least one of these?
A few examples of the delicious subjects she treats provide a taste of what’s in store.
Some of her findings may at least be vaguely familiar to many readers. For instance, Allport relates that our modern love affair with sugar, salt, and fat stems from our ancient past on the African savanna, where these were rare commodities, and important to a balanced human diet. Ripe fruits, honey, and salt were seasonal or patchy; game meat was, and is, very lean. So when someone found sweets or fats, they filled up. Unfortunately, we still like to fill up on sugar and fat, and we do it all the time. The eminently quotable Zeldin says the amount of sugar available to us, which was once a "rare and wonderful medicine," is "the culinary expression of democracy."
Others morsels of information are more surprising. Why, she asks, don’t most of us eat insects, many of which are highly nutritious and, reputedly, quite tasty? Drawing on years of scientific research on foraging in species from bugs to birds to bears, Allport explains that it was rarely worth our while to seek and catch such small food packets; simply put, the prize must repay the effort to obtain it. In this case, the exceptional insect-eaters prove the rule. For instance, an Australian aboriginal group is known as "the moth hunters," because they are seasonally dependent on eating bogong moths, which occur in clumps large enough to make collecting them worthwhile. Amerindians in the western U.S. also ate abundant grasshoppers and locusts. Grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem also eat their way through seasonal aggregations of army cutworm moths--items that, taken singly, wouldn’t be worth a bear’s while.
Allport provides a thoughtful discussion of food sharing. Among other things, this very human behavior shaped relationships between men and women, among the members of a group, and between groups. In several higher primates, including chimpanzees, males are the primary hunters and swap scarce meat with females for sex. However, chimp females do not share vegetable food with males, unlike human females in traditional hunter-gatherer societies. This reciprocal food sharing may be the root of marriage. In almost every culture known, marriage is in part defined by food sharing between a man and a woman. As Allport puts it, ". . . food, not just sex, binds human males and human females together." Food sharing also binds families together.
We identify people by what they eat. Food preferences unite those who share the same tastes, or have access to the same foods, and divide those who don’t. Think about how distinctive cuisines define all of the various "hyphenated" Americans? That we increasingly eat the traditional food of ethnic groups not our own reflects, in part, American’s increasing acceptance of diversity. In sharing food, we share other experiences as well. As Zeldin wrote, "Forks and spoons have probably done more to reconcile people who cannot agree than guns and bombs ever did."
Allport looks to the animal world to answer many other culinary questions. Why do we cook? Why do we generally eat so few things--a few dozen species of plants and animals out of the hundreds or thousands of edibles? How has hunting for food contributed to the biodiversity crisis? Why do we hate to eat alone?
It’s all food for thought. Read The Primal Feast in the kitchen while dinner cooks, and share the juicy tidbits with someone you love.
--Susan Lumpkin
**An Intimate History of Humanity. Theodore Zeldin. 1996. HarperPerennial, New York. 488 pages, paper. $16.
ZooGoer 29(3) 2000. Copyright 2000 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
