Food Preferences and Aversions
Date
Oct 23-30, 1983Organized by
Marvin Harris and Eric B. RossLocation
Cedar Cove Conference Center, Cedar Key, FloridaPublications
Food and Evolution:Toward a Theory of Human Food Habits (M. Harris and E.B. Ross, Eds.) Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1987.Participants
- H. Leon Abrams University of Georgia, USA
- George Armelagos University of Massachusetts, USA
- Jane Buikstra Northwestern University, USA
- Mark N. Cohen State University of New York, Plattsburgh, USA
- Marc Edelman Columbia University, USA
- Richard Franke Montclair State College, USA
- Kenneth R. Good University of Florida, USA
- Jack Goody University of Cambridge, UK
- Daniel Gross City University of New York, Hunter College, USA
- William J. Hamilton University of California, Davis, USA
- David Harris University of London, UK
- Marvin Harris University of Florida, USA
- Kristen Hawkes University of Utah, USA
- Allen Johnson University of California, Los Angeles, USA
- Solomon H. Katz University of Pennsylvania, USA
- Leslie Sue Lieberman University of Florida, USA
- Shirley Lindenbaum New School for Social Research, USA
- Katharine Milton University of California, Berkeley, USA
- K.N. Nair Center for Development Studies, India
- Carolyn Nickens University of Florida, USA
- Benjamin Orlove University of California, Davis, USA
- Peter Pellett University of Massachusetts, USA
- Gretel Pelto University of Connecticut, USA
- Anna Roosevelt Museum of the American Indian, USA
- Eric B. Ross, University of Florida, USA
- Paul Rozin University of Pennsylvania, USA
- Gary Shapiro Florida State Museum, USA
- Bruce Winterhalder University of North Carolina, USA
- David Yesner University of Southern Maine, USA
- Adrienne Zihlman University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
ORGANIZER’S STATEMENT: Food and Evolution draws on the latest evidence from the fields of primatology, biological anthropology, archaeology, nutrition, psychology, agricultural economics, and cultural anthropology to explain why humans eat what they eat.
Food and Evolution is an unprecedented inter-disciplinary effort to develop a much needed theoretical understanding of the origins of human food habits and of the wide cultural differences in contemporary human food preferences and avoidances. The essays, written by some of the world’s leading experts on human foodways, share a common commitment to an evolutionary perspective and to the view that human foodways have been established over time by biological and cultural selection LT1 relation to the costs and benefits of alternative food habits.
This book explores the interrelationships between food habits and physical, social, political, and economic aspects of human life, ranging in time from prehistory to the present, and from the most simple societies to the most complex, including South American Indian groups, African hunter-gatherers, and countries such as India, Bangladesh, Peru, and Mexico.
Several essays explore the problems caused in developing countries by the introduction of modem technologies and novel foods and explain the relationship between such changes and scarcity and malnutrition among the poorer inhabitants. Food and Evolution covers these issues and lays the bsis for the development of a general theory of human food habits, a theory that is urgently needed to orient the collection of bio-psycho-cultural data surrounding human food consumption and to guide ongoing attempts to deal with the multiple forms of human malnutrition.
Wenner-Gren Symposium #94
