Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (16 page)

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Authors: Richard Wrangham

Tags: #Cooking, #History, #Political Science, #Public Policy, #Cultural Policy, #Science, #Life Sciences, #Evolution, #Social Science, #Anthropology, #General, #Cultural, #Popular Culture, #Agriculture & Food, #Technology & Engineering, #Fire Science

BOOK: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
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Even the apparent exceptions conformed to the general rule. The three standouts reveal an important distinction between two types of cooking: cooking for the family, done by women, and cooking for the community, done by men. The three were the Samoans, Marquesans, and Trukese, all in the South Pacific. Their cultural backgrounds are different and they are located hundreds of miles apart from one another, but they have one thing in common: their staple food is breadfruit. Breadfruit trees produce fruits the size of basket-balls, yield large volumes of high-quality starch, and demand cooperative processing.
The procedure for cooking the fruit pulp is physically arduous, takes many hours, and is performed in a communal house by a group of men on days of their choice. The men build a large fire, peel the fruits, cut them into chunks, and steam them. On the Truk island group of Micronesia (now often called Chuuk), the ringing sound of sweat-soaked men pounding the fruit meat with coral pestles could be heard a hundred yards away. It was late in the day before men were done wrapping the cooled mash into leaf packages. They distributed the surplus to men who had not been cooking. At the end of the day, all the men had food packages, and sometimes they ate together in the men’s house, where women were not allowed.
Men did not need women to feed them. They could spend weeks at a time in the men’s houses with men of their lineage, receiving no assistance from women. But when men ate at home they gave the breadfruit mash to their wives, and their wives used it as the basis for the evening meal. Women rounded it out with pork or fish sauces and vegetables they cooked themselves. If there was no breadfruit, the women cooked other starchy foods such as taro roots. Men cooked the main staple when they chose to do so, but women were responsible for cooking everything else and for producing household meals.
Might there be a few societies, not sampled by Murdock and Provost, in which women are so liberated that the gendered pattern of cooking is reversed? Cultural anthropologist Maria Lepowsky studied the people of Vanatinai in the South Pacific expressly because, from the outside, this society seemed like a woman’s dream community. In many ways, life was indeed very good for women. There was no ideology of male superiority. Both sexes could host feasts, lead canoeing expeditions, raise pigs, hunt, fish, participate in warfare, own and inherit land, decide about clearing land, make shell necklaces, and trade in such valued items as greenstone ax blades. Women and men were equally capable of attaining the prestige of being “big” (important) people. Domestic violence was rare and strongly censured. There was “tremendous overlap in the roles of men and women” and a great deal of personal control over how they chose to spend their time. Women had “the same kinds of personal autonomy and control of the means of production as men.”
Yet despite the apparent escape from patriarchy, women on Vanatinai did all the domestic cooking. Cooking was regarded as a low-prestige activity. Other chores for which women were responsible included washing dishes, fetching water and firewood, sweeping, and cleaning up pig droppings. All were again regarded as low-status duties—in other words, the kind of work men did not want to do. One day as a group of women returned after walking three miles with heavy baskets of yams on their heads, they complained to Lepowsky, “We come home after working in the garden all day, and we still have to fetch water, look for firewood, do the cooking and cleaning up and look after the children while all men do is sit on the verandah and chew betel nut!” But when they asked for help with these tasks, “The men,” wrote Lepowsky, “usually retort that these are the work of women.” Why should the men help, if they can get away with not helping?
The worldwide pattern is reflected in the English language. The word
lady
is derived from the Old English
hlaefdige
, meaning “bread kneader,” whereas
lord
comes from
hlaefweard
, or “bread keeper.” Of course, men are entirely capable of cooking. In industrial societies men can be professional cooks. Spouses in urban marriages often share the cooking, or husbands can do most of it. In hunter-gatherer societies men cook for themselves on long hunting expeditions or in bachelor groups. Men cook on feast days and ritual occasions, cooperating in public somewhat like the breadfruit cooks. But even the men who cook when no women are present or on ceremonial occasions still have their home foods prepared by women. The rule that domestic cooking is women’s work is astonishingly consistent.
The classic reason suggested for this pattern is mutual convenience. Each sex gains from sharing their efforts, as many happily married couples can attest. But the explanation is superficial because it does not address the more fundamental problem of why our species has households at all, or the darker dynamic that sometimes has husbands exploiting their wives’ labor. The men on Vanatinai could have shared the cooking easily, as the women would sometimes have liked them to do, but they chose not to. Charlotte Perkins Gilman noted that humans are the only species in which “the sex-relation is also an economic relation” and compared women’s role to that of horses. Molly and Eugene Christian complained that cooking “has made of woman a slave.” In theory, among hunter-gatherers both males and females could forage for themselves, like every other animal, and then cook his or her own meal at the end of the day. So what led to a sexual division of labor in which men routinely insist that it is women’s lot to do the household cooking?
Nonhuman primates mostly pick and eat their food at once. But hunter-gatherers bring food to a camp for processing and cooking, and in the camp, labor can be offered and exchanged. This suggests that cooking might be responsible for converting individual foraging into a social economy. Archaeologist Catherine Perlès thinks so: “The culinary act is from the start a project. Cooking ends individual self-sufficiency.” Relying on cooking creates foods that can be owned, given, or stolen. Before cooking, we ate more like chimpanzees, everyone for themselves. After the advent of cooking, we assembled around the fire and shared the labor.
Perlès’s notion that, by necessity, cooking was a social activity is supported by Dutch sociologist and fire expert Joop Goudsblom, who suggests that cooking required social coordination, “if only to ensure that there would always be someone to look after the fire.” Food historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto proposed that cooking created mealtimes and thereby organized people into a community. For culinary historian Michael Symons, cooking promoted cooperation through sharing, because the cook always distributes food. Cooking, he wrote, is “the starting-place of trades.”
These ideas fit nicely with the ubiquitous social importance of cooked food. The contrast between communal and solitary eating is particularly pronounced among hunter-gatherers, for whom cooking is a highly social act, unlike eating raw food. When people are out of camp, their snacks tend to be raw foods such as ripe fruits or grubs, and these are normally collected individually and eaten without sharing. But when people cook food, they do so mostly in camp, and they share it within the family or, when feasting, with other families. Furthermore, much of the labor in preparing the meal is complementary. In a common pattern, a woman brings firewood and vegetables, prepares the vegetables, and does the cooking. A man brings meat, which either he or a woman might cook. Family members also tend to eat at roughly the same time (though the man may eat first) and often sit face to face around a fire.
But the suggestion that tending a fire, eating a meal, and sharing food require cooperation is obviously wrong. Alexander Selkirk, the real-life Robinson Crusoe, was very fit when he was rescued in 1709 after more than four years of cooking for himself in the Juan Fernandez Islands in the middle of the Pacific. Numerous solitary war survivors also have lived off the land and cooked for themselves, as Shoichi Yokoi did in Guam for almost thirty years before he was found in 1972. Hunter-gatherer women sometimes collect food and fuel, tend a fire, and do the cooking without any support from their husbands, such as Tiwi women in northern Australia. Men in societies ranging from hunter-gatherers to the United States can go on hunting expeditions for days at a time and cook for themselves. Examples of individual self-sufficiency clearly undermine the idea that the sheer mechanics of cooking require that it be practiced cooperatively.
Why, then, is the “culinary project” so often social, if it does not need to be? Relying on cooked food creates opportunities for cooperation, but just as important, it exposes cooks to being exploited. Cooking takes time, so lone cooks cannot easily guard their wares from determined thieves such as hungry males without their own food. Pair-bonds solve the problem. Having a husband ensures that a woman’s gathered foods will not be taken by others; having a wife ensures the man will have an evening meal. According to this idea, cooking created a simple marriage system; or perhaps it solidified a preexisting version of married life that could have been prompted by hunting or sexual competition. Either way, the result was a primitive protection racket in which husbands used their bonds with other men in the community to protect their wives from being robbed, and women returned the favor by preparing their husbands’ meals. The many beneficial aspects of the household, such as provisioning by males, increases in labor efficiency, and creation of a social network for child-rearing, were additions consequent to solving the more basic problem: females needed male protection, specifically because of cooking. A male used his social power both to ensure that a female did not lose her food, and to guarantee his own meal by assigning the work of cooking to the female.
 
 
 
The logic for this theory begins with the banal observation that cooking is necessarily a conspicuous and lengthy process. In the bush, the sight or smell of smoke reveals a cook’s location at a long distance, allowing hungry individuals who have no food to easily locate cooks in action. The effect among
Homo erectus
is easily imagined. Because females were smaller and physically weaker, they were vulnerable to bullying by domineering males who wanted food. Each female therefore obtained protection from other males’ wheedling, scrounging, or bullying by forming a special friendship with her own particular male. Her bond with him protected her food from other males, and he also gave her meat. These bonds were so critical for the successful feeding of both sexes that they generated a particular kind of evolutionary psychology in our ancestors that shaped female-male relationships and continues to affect us today.
The idea that cooking has influenced social relationships in this way is supported by the intense aversion to competition shown by hunter-gatherers eating their meals. Lorna Marshall’s description of the delicacy with which Nyae Nyae !Kung treat one another at mealtimes is typical of hunter-gatherers: “When a visitor comes to the fire of a family which is preparing food or eating, he should sit at a little distance, not to seem importunate, and wait to be asked to share. . . . We observed no unmannerly behavior and no cheating and no encroachment about food. . . . The polite way to receive food, or any gift, is to hold out both hands and have the food or other gift placed in them. To reach out with one hand suggests grabbing to the !Kung. I found it moving to see so much restraint about taking food among people who are all thin and often hungry, for whom food is a constant source of anxiety.”
Such spontaneous etiquette is universal within functioning hunter-gatherer societies. Nothing like it is found in any other social species. Among nonhuman animals, valuable items that cannot be eaten at once predictably induce fights. Most of the fruits eaten by chimpanzees are the size of plums or smaller, too small to be worth fighting over, but a single ripe breadfruit weighs up to eight kilograms (eighteen pounds) and can take a group two hours to eat. An individual does not have time to swallow it before others see the prize and come to compete for it. Offspring take advantage of the situation by begging from their mothers, and adults fight to possess whole fruits or large pieces. Among chimpanzees, males win. Among bonobos, females win. In each case, the winners are members of the dominant sex. Among various species of spiders, a male that cohabits on a female’s web likewise takes her food, and as a result she weighs less than if no male is there. Among savannah lions, females lose much of their prey to males.
Restraint is rare indeed in animal competition over food. Chimpanzees fight over any food that can be monopolized, but the contests are fiercest over meat, producing a fracas that can often be heard more than a kilometer (half a mile) away. Within seconds of a successful predation by a low-ranking chimpanzee, a dominant male is liable to snatch the entire carcass from the killer. In a large group, the carcass will be torn apart by screaming males desperate for a share. Meat-eating can continue for hours. Those without meat, or with only a small piece, beg hard with upturned hands and reaching mouths. The harder they beg, the more meat they get, often by simply tearing it or pulling it away. Possessors try to escape the pressure by turning their backs or climbing to an inaccessible branch. They occasionally charge at their tormentors or flail the carcass at them. Such tactics buy time but are rarely effective. Persistent begging is normally such a nuisance to the possessor that it reduces the rate at which he can eat, and for this reason he sometimes allows others to take a piece of meat. He occasionally even makes an outright donation to a pushy beggar, who immediately leaves with it. Possessing meat can thus be less rewarding than expected from its food value. Meat brings trouble because it takes time to eat.
The most subordinate individuals get little. In the mayhem of carcass division, females rarely end up with a large piece. Overall, females eat much less meat than males, and their low success rate is clearly due to their poor fighting ability. Females with close social relationships to male possessors may get some meat, but in general, meat has less nutritional impact on the lives of female and young chimpanzees than it does on males. Even sexually attractive females cannot expect meat.

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