Why We Eat

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If the routines we have built around food are complex, it's because we have been working on them for so long. Well before we were very social creatures, we were decidedly hungry creatures, and we ate anything we could lay our hands on. Insects, worms and up to 20 kinds of game were nothing to a hunter-gatherer. As our tastes became more refined, the number of items on our menus shrank, mostly because we did a better job of intuiting what we needed. Cultures that developed a taste for rice and beans didn't know a lick about combining incomplete proteins, but that's what they were doing. People who learned to enjoy high-fiber foods didn't understand intestinal health, but they were helping ensure it nonetheless. "A co-evolutionary process unfolded between cuisines and nourishment," says Brenton. "There's nutritional wisdom behind it all."

How and when we ate became formalized too. When food was scarce, it had to be guarded, so families huddled close to eat what they had caught or picked. Somewhere in there may lie the origins of the dinner table. When food was abundant enough to share, it was passed around mostly at celebrations--harvest festivals, when the foods of autumn were eaten; Easter feasts, when the spring lamb recalled both Jesus' sacrifice and the story of Passover. "The foods became the anchor to which the rituals connected," says Brenton. "You don't see the same foods at a wedding as at a funeral as at a naming ceremony."

All these customs are more than cultural frippery, though we don't always realize it until food and tradition come uncoupled. Among immigrants, particularly those coming to the U.S., the obesity problem has become a full-blown crisis. Even the stubbornest new arrivals may find that their food practices are impossible to maintain in a new environment, where familiar ingredients aren't available, old-world holidays aren't observed and the Mediterranean tradition of the heavy lunch must yield to the less healthy practice of postponing the big meal until the end of the day. "There's a lot of food-related culture shock for new immigrants," says anthropologist David Himmelgreen of the University of South Florida in Tampa.

That discordance can do a lot of damage. Himmelgreen tracked the weight of Puerto Rican women living in the continental U.S. and found that the longer they had been here and the better their English, the more they tended to weigh. "People's food habits change dramatically when they arrive," he says. "The weight gain can happen in a very short time."

For people who have always lived in the U.S., the problem is even worse. There are a lot of reasons for America's obesity epidemic--oversize portions, overprocessed foods, too little exercise. But nutritionists and anthropologists agree that the death of the official mealtime may play the biggest role. "By the time children go to middle school," says anthropologist Marquisa LaVelle of the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, "many families have basically stopped eating together." Solitary eating can be uncontrolled eating--snacks, sweets and meals behind the wheel. "By age 10, everyone in the family can feed themselves whatever they want--and they do," says LaVelle.

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