A collection of thoughts on food sharing, Alphabetically arranged
A : altruism
Acting to help someone else at a cost to oneself. Acting out of unselfish concern for others. The opposite of egoism. Alternatively, behavior by an animal that may be to its own detriment but that benefits others of its kind, such as a warning cry that alerts the caller’s community to the presence of danger but reveals the location of the caller to a stalking predator.
B : (the) Big Man
Professor of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University Brian Douglas Hayden presents the Feasting Model, which posits that feasting in human societies is universal and invariably began as ostentatious displays of power in order to flaunt surplus and exert dominance. Agricultural technology drove social inequality, as it allowed for the accumulation of the surplus. The host of the feast, by holding the function, became the Big Man in society.
C : corvids, Crowbar, cooperation, and caching
Jean Craighead George, author of the novel Julie of the Wolves, once rescued an orphaned crow who would eat scrambled eggs with the family and walk the kids to the school bus. She named the bird Crowbar. Apparently, Crowbar would mimic George’s voice, confusing passersby by calling out “hello!” from the treetops. Studies on crows and other corvids, such as ravens and jackdaws, reveal intelligent behavior and complex social organization. Jackdaws, for example, display higher rates of donor-initiated sharing (in contrast to beggar-initiated sharing) than primates. Reliable observations of ravens collaborating with wolves describe ravens circling above weakened animals, alerting wolves to the presence of easy prey. In turn, the wolves rip open the carcasses and leave the bones to be picked by their accomplices. Corvids have great memory: they will remember where they left caches of their food and trophies of their kills, and they will remember your face too, under category of either friend or foe.
D : dolphin provisioning
In Myanmar, traditional cast-net fishermen have learned to fish in a mutually beneficial way with Irrawaddy dolphins. The practice is called cooperative fishing. In response to fishermen’s rallying calls, Irrawaddy dolphins herd fish toward boats and cue fishermen to throw their nets using calls and signals of their own. The fishermen obey and the dolphins and humans revel jointly in the catch, with the dolphins eating their fill in the confusion of the fray. Human societies in Laguna, Brazil have a similar intraspecies foraging partnership with Lahille’s bottlenose dolphins, as do the Imraguen people of coastal Mauritania with common bottlenose dolphins and Atlantic humpback dolphins. In Kombumerri Country, First Nations people cooperated with both orcas and Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins. A woman elder told us about how dolphins and orcas once knew to drive fish schools into shallow water, where human hunters would strike and spear the fish. Today, these partnerships are in danger as cultural genocide wipes out knowledge of traditional cooperative fishing and as marine mammalian behavior is altered by modern fishing practices. Dolphins are instead seen trailing industrial trawls for bycatch, and they suffer the negative impacts of the tourism and dolphin-provisioning industries: increased calf mortality and abnormal calf development, behavioral disruptions, and risk of injury by human activity.
E : explanations for sharing in human societies (functional)
mutualism
nepotism
altruism, kin selection
reciprocity, i.e.:
Thing A for Thing B
Thing Now for Thing Later
Thing for non-Thing benefits
tolerated scrounging i.e. “you’re not worth the time/energy/risk it’d take me to fight you off.”
costly signaling
gift exchange
expressing love and caring? feeling loved and cared for?
F : Friendsday Wednesday (n.)
“A Wednesday when your friends come over for dinner so your week doesn’t suck.” This is a term coined by Natasha Feldman in her book The Dinner Party Project, a “no-stress guide to food with friends.” The book has recipes and flowcharts to help make hosting dinner parties easy and fun and the type of heart-warming community gathering that leaves you feeling blissful and rejuvenated and grateful to be alive like it’s supposed to rather than a performance or an insurmountable “I really want to, but I’m just too busy!” type of thing. Feldman really sells us on this: she tells us that the one thread that connects all the best things in her life, including her husband, her dog, her closest friends, and all her favorite people, is—you guessed it—dinner parties. Feldman challenges readers to throw one dinner party a month for a year. I think I’ll give it a try sometime soon.
G : Greetings to the Natural World (Mohawk: Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen; translation into English: the words that are spoken before all others), otherwise known as the Thanksgiving Address
The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois, Six Nations) people begin every gathering by offering greetings and thanks to the elements of life that sustain us all. The Thanksgiving Address is told in many ways by many people. Mohawk food leader Chandra Maracle offers one version, in Mohawk. It begins:
Tewatatè:ken, né: wáhi thia’tewenhniserá:ke táhnon nó:nen othé:nen iorihowá:nen tewaterihwahtentià:tha, kanonhweratónhsera entitewáhtka’we. Teniethinonhweratónnion tsi naho’tèn:shon rokwatákwen táhnon roweiennentà:’on kèn:thon tsi ionhontsá:te táhnon tsi tkaronhiatátie. Né: nen’ nè:’e tewana’tónhkhwa ne Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen.
Eh káti naiohtónhake nonkwa’nikòn:ra.
Rough translation into English:
Each day, when there is an important matter at hand, we must first bring our minds together and give thanks. We will give thanks for all the natural world has created and prepared for us here on the earth and in the sky. These are the words that are spoken before all others.
Now our minds are one.
H : Harris, Marvin
Anthropologist and materialist Marvin Harris argued that food is, first and foremost, either good or bad to eat. Preferred foods are preferred simply because they have a favorable balance of practical benefits over practical costs. And that favorable balance is not shared equally by members of society, since bad foods for one person usually bring some other person, somewhere else, some bit of good. Privileged groups often do not share their benefits with others, and if they do, the sharing is more often than not conditional.
I : Instagram story
The first and only time I offered to share my baking to a wider community than my immediate friends and family was when I made earl grey lavender white chocolate madeleines while at school. I posted a flattering picture of the madeleines to my Instagram story with the following text: “I made earl grey lavender madeleines! I don’t have a ton, but if you’re at stanford and want to try one DM me <3”. The story received hundreds of views but no responses, aside from a few cheeky replies from those close friends who knew I was going to share with them anyway. I wondered if the lack of demand was caused by people being too embarrassed or too polite to ask for one, or because people simply had no desire for beautifully decorated earl grey lavender madeleines with white chocolate on them.
J : Jack and Annie
Sibling protagonists of The Magic Tree House, the children’s book series by Mary Pope Osborne. My favorite installment was #11 Lions at Lunchtime, in which Jack and Annie are transported to the African savannah to solve a riddle. They follow a native bird—a honey guide—to a beehive. They scatter the bees, knock down the hive, and treat themselves to the golden-sweet liquid inside. Angering a Maasai warrior, the children offer a peanut butter honey sandwich abomination as compensation. At lunchtime, Jack and Annie must sneak past a pride of hungry lions in order to get back to the Magic Tree House and return home. In reality, lions typically dine together at dawn and dusk after a successful hunt. Though females lead the hunt, males eat first, and only after the males have had their fill are females and cubs permitted to follow.
K : Katheryn Twiss
Feasting events can happen in different social contexts at more diverse levels than previously thought, says archaeologist at Stony Brook University Katheryn Twiss. Feasting is not purely for ceremonial, ritual, or religious purposes: families display togetherness by feasting at a small scale and in privacy, for example. In this theory, sharing food is nurturing and affiliative (a prosocial behavior).
L : Levi-Strauss, Claude
In contrast to Marvin Harris, French anthropologist and structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss once said that food is good to think with, not just good or bad to eat. What Levi-Strauss meant is that food is not just a physical need, it is a mental one. Food nourishes beyond the body to the level of the collective mind. In other words, the preparation of food is a form of language that intimately reveals a society’s structure, beliefs, dreams, and culture; it tells us about the different worlds we all inhabit.
M : missing limbs
Saltwater crocodiles, affectionately known as salties by the Australians, have been known to hunt and eat in teams and accidentally amputate each other’s limbs when attacking or sharing the same food source. Their jaws are virtually inescapable and their death roll is devastatingly violent, having the ability to sever a fellow croc’s foot in just under a couple of seconds (there are videos). Fortunately, victims have evolved to survive these accidental amputations by quickly cutting off blood flow to the trauma site. It is not uncommon to see salties with missing limbs living their lives as if nothing is out of order. There is another theory that accidental amputation is what pushed large theropods like Tyrannosaurus rex to evolve small arms, to avoid the inconvenience of losing one’s appendages to a hangry friend.
N : No Buddhist monk dislikes noodles
In the Netflix documentary Korean Cold Noodle Rhapsody, Buddhist monks take a midday break over bowls of naengmyeon, cold buckwheat noodles. Multiple monks operate a wooden press to drop fresh noodles into a vat of boiling water, while a few others prepare garnishes of wild aster and cucumber and an invigorating fuchsia broth of radish water kimchi. The monks sit side by side along the edge of the temple building to slurp noodles in unison. “No Buddhist monk dislikes noodles,” one proclaims.
O : oxytocin
When researchers tested urine samples from chimpanzees in Tai National Park after the chimps had engaged in group hunting activities, they found elevated levels of oxytocin both after the team hunt and after valued foods were shared. Oxytocin is often called the love hormone. “We know that oxytocin plays a strong role in lactation, which you could look at as an example of food sharing between mother and infant, and is generally involved in social behavior and bonding,” says Liran Samuni, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology researcher and the author of the study.
P : pistol shrimps and goby fish
See caption: https://youtu.be/deDfzIFjfm4
Q : Quarterly Charcuterie
In my junior year, I hosted a charcuterie picnic every quarter (fall, winter, and spring). Friends would gather at my dorm room and we would carefully migrate to a nearby field with the charcuterie board and beverages balanced in our hands. Each quarter the construction of the board became more elaborate. Participants Venmoed me on a sliding scale to help with the cost of ingredients. Our spring picnic was crashed by a rogue golden retriever.
R : rupture of the bladder
Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe reportedly died in 1601 after sitting through a lengthy royal banquet in Prague with a very full bladder. Brahe felt that excusing himself from the table to pee would be an unacceptable breach of etiquette. So he remained sitting despite his discomfort, continuing to consume food and drink until his poor bladder could take no more and ruptured, causing his delirium and eventual death eleven days later. Exhumations and examinations of Brahe’s body in 1901 and 2010 put to rest rumors that he had been poisoned with mercury by his assistant and pupil, Johannes Kepler. He had indeed likely died by bladder rupture and subsequent infection.
S : “Sex and food control in the ‘uncommon chimpanzee’:
How Bonobo females overcome a phylogenetic legacy of male dominance.” The title of Dr. Amy Randall Parish’s paper, before the publication of which studies of sex-for-food trading in animals focused exclusively on heterosexual interactions. Parish’s study reveals that exchanging sex for food occurs regularly between female bonobos. These interactions have the effect of reducing tension and facilitating female co-feeding, which help to create stable long-term relationships among females that result in stronger coalition formation, control of food resources, and ability to elevate their dominance status relative to males well above that of their chimpanzee counterparts. These affiliative relationships between unrelated female bonobos provide an alternative model for understanding bonding among human females.
T : The Terra Nova Expedition, 1910-1913
Robert Falcon Scott and the crew of the Terra Nova are pictured (at bottom) enjoying a celebratory dinner on Midwinter’s Day, the shortest day and longest night of the year, and the midpoint of the polar night, in Antarctica, June twenty-first, 1911. The men prepared a feast with hefty provisions that had been brought on board in 1910 at the start of the expedition, an expedition which was to cement Robert Falcon Scott and his crew as the first ever to reach the geographic South Pole. Livestock was slaughtered and hung from the rigging of the ship, where it was preserved by the elements until time for the meal (perks of living in one big, outdoor freezer). Alas, when the Terra Nova finally reached the South Pole on January seventeenth, 1912, they discovered that the crew of the Fram, a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen, had preceded them by just thirty-four days—not so Terra Nova after all. The unfulfilled crew of the Terra Nova perished on the journey home; some of their bodies, journals, and photographs were recovered by a search party eight months later. “With such a dinner,” Scott once wrote of a Midwinter Feast on a previous expedition, “we agreed that life in the Antarctic Regions was worth living.”
U : umenzi
The Yeyi word for African painted dog. Unlike lions, umenzi abide by an age-based food sharing queue where pups are given immediate and uncontested access to kills. After the smaller yearlings have had their fill, next in line are the dominant pair. Access then cascades through the pack in increasing age order, with older subdominant umenzi eating last—although they may have early access to the choicest bits of meat from the carcasses if they participate in the hunt. Umenzi are listed as an endangered species, and are said to be on an energetic knife’s-edge in their local ecology due to the impacts of losing their kills to spotted hyenas. They also live alongside lions, which are a direct cause of their mortality. However, umenzi are threatened primarily not by hyenas or lions, but by habitat fragmentation, human persecution, and outbreaks of disease. There are fewer than 1,500 mature individuals in the wild and as recently as the 1970s umenzi were consistently targeted and shot as vermin even within protected areas. Yeyi is one of the Indigenous Bantu languages spoken in Namibia and Botswana, one of the only places on Earth where umenzi remain.
V : Vesuvius
Retrieved from the ashes of Vesuvius was a circular loaf of sourdough bread with scoring marks, intended to be shared but fated never to be consumed. The loaf had been placed in a brick oven for baking on August twenty-fourth, 79 AD in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum, before the town and its inhabitants were destroyed by pyroclastic flow. “To break bread together”: a phrase nearly as old as civilization itself.
W: Willow Village Feeding Schedule: Week of [month.day.year]
The subject line of the emails I received every Sunday of winter quarter of my senior year. My name appeared under “Monday.” On Monday mornings I woke up early, packed my backpack with a liter of water and a gallon of dry cat food, and set out to Willow Village where I did my route:
Lucy at Indian Burial Grounds
Kittens Zora, Sooty, and Pierre, their mama, and Mr. Moo (their father?) at the Red Curb
Buster Brown at UPS Trailer
Princess, Gray Boy, UPS Mama, and Spot at UPS Fence Gate
