Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (17 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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If the first cooks were temperamentally like chimpanzees, life would have been absurdly difficult for females or low-status males trying to cook a meal. Cooked food would have been intensely valuable. Even the act of gathering creates value merely by assembling raw foods into a pile. Cooking only increases its attraction. Subordinate individuals cooking their own meals would have been vulnerable to petty theft or worse. If several hungry dominants were present, the weak or unprotected would have lost much or all of the food. Females would have been the losers, just as they are among chimpanzees. There are no indications that human females or their ancestors have ever been prone to forming the kinds of physical fighting alliances with one another that protect bonobo females from being bullied by males.
Consider the possibility that small groups of tough males could search for signs of a campfire as a way to feed themselves. They would be able to descend on an undefended cook and take his or her food at will—after waiting, perhaps, for the cooking to be done. If this ploy were regularly successful, the males could become professional food pirates, which in turn would mean they would not bother to feed themselves or prepare their own food, adding to their desperation to steal it. Male lions come close to doing this, regularly taking whatever meat they want from kills made by females. This scenario suggests that unless cooks somehow established a peaceful environment in which to work, cooking might not have been a viable method of preparing food at all.
Even humans steal readily in various circumstances, so our species is not inherently uncompetitive. The nervous child with a lunch box in the schoolyard knows the problem as well as the anxious late-night stroller with cash in his pocket. People who have the chance to take from members of a different social network have few qualms about doing so. Farmers living next to hunter-gatherers routinely complain of being robbed. Stealing, cheating, and bullying were prevalent among the troubled Ik in the uplands of northern Uganda observed by cultural anthropologist Colin Turnbull, whose book about them,
The Mountain People
, was said by writer Robert Ardrey to record a society without morality. The Ik were a hunting people who had been kept from their traditional hunting grounds. The result was starvation, disease, and mutual exploitation. Turnbull described an almost complete evaporation of their community spirit: “They place the individual good above all else and almost demand that each get away with as much as he can without his fellows knowing.” Turnbull’s description shows just how savage people can become when social networks break down and life is tough.
Ethnographers sometimes report cases of theft within stable hunter-gatherer communities. Turnbull described how Pepei, an Mbuti Pygmy, had to cook for himself because he was a bachelor with no female kin. As a result, he was often hungry. Several times he was caught stealing small quantities of food from another cooking pot or someone else’s hut, mostly from an old woman who had no husband to protect her. His punishment was public ridicule, receiving food fit only for animals, or a thrashing with a thorny branch. Pepei was forgiven after he ended up in tears.
Since hunter-gatherers are often hungry, one might imagine that food theft would be a daily problem. Like other people living in small-scale egalitarian societies, they have no police or any other kind of authority. A hunter-gatherer woman returns to camp in the middle of the day carrying the raw foods she has obtained. She then prepares and cooks them for the evening meal at her own individual fire. Men might return to camp at any time, alone or in a small group. Many of the foods a woman cooks are edible raw, so they could be eaten before, during, or after the cooking process. If a man returns from the bush feeling hungry and has no one to cook for him, he might be tempted to ask a woman for some food—or even simply take it—rather than doing his own cooking. He can also sneak about the camp at any other time, including night.
Yet such tactics are rare. The relaxed atmosphere Lorna Marshall described for the !Kung is due to a system that keeps the peace at mealtimes among hunter-gatherers and other small-scale societies. The system consists of strong cultural norms. Married women must provide food to their husbands, and they must cook it themselves, though other family members may help. Social anthropologists Jane Collier and Michelle Rosaldo surveyed small-scale societies worldwide. “In all cases,” they found, “a woman is obliged to provide daily food for her family.” That is why married men can count on an evening meal. As a result, they have little reason to take food from women who are not their wives.
The obligation of wives to cook for their husbands occurs regardless of how much other work each of them do, or how much food they give each other. Sometimes men produce much more than women, as among traditional Inuit of the high Arctic, where the almost wholly animal diet of sea mammals, caribou, and fish was produced entirely by men. A man would hunt all day and would come home to a dinner his wife cooked. Cooking was slow over a seal-oil lamp, and women often had to spend much of the afternoon on the task. Sometimes the whole family went hunting together, but the wife had to return early to have everything ready when her husband and others returned to camp. Even when the time of her husband’s return was uncertain, she risked punishment if there was no food available for him. But at least a wife’s obligation to cook for a husband was matched by his providing all the food.
On the other hand, in some societies women brought home almost all the food. This happened among the Tiwi hunter-gatherers of northern Australia, a polygynous people who lived in households of up to twenty wives and one man. Women foraged for long hours and still returned in the evening to cook the one meal of the day. There were few animals to hunt. Men mostly contributed occasional small animals, such as goanna lizards, and brought in such little food that they needed women’s food production for their own welfare. As one Tiwi husband said, “If I had only one or two wives, I would starve.” Men relied on their wives not only for their own food but also to feed others. The possession of surplus food was the most concrete symbol of a Tiwi man’s success, allowing him to host feasts and promote his political agenda. Women’s high food contribution did not sway the balance of power in their marriages. Despite their economic independence and key role in their husbands’ status, they were “as frequently and as brutally beaten by their husbands as wives in any other savage society.”
Among the Inuit, Tiwi, and all other small-scale societies on record, fairness in distributing labor among women and men was not the issue. Whether or not wives wanted to do so, they cooked for their husbands. As a result, married men were guaranteed adequate food whether they returned late, tired, and hungry from a day’s hunting or came home relaxed and early from discussing politics with a neighbor. The man might have eaten in a courteous manner and have had a friendly or even loving interaction with his wife, but the formal structure of their eating relationship was that he could count on her labor and take a large portion of her food—typically, it seems, the best part.
Peace in the camp is further cemented by the principle that unless a husband gave his blessing, a wife could feed no other man except her close kin. This rule applied to cooked food around the campfire, as well as to the raw food she gathered. Other than her kin and husband, no one else had any right to ask for a share, so she could trudge back to camp secure in the knowledge that she would be able to cook all the food she had obtained. In Western society, we take the principle of ownership for granted. But among hunter-gatherers, this manifestation of private ownership is noteworthy because it lies in remarkable contrast to the obligatory sharing of men’s foods in particular, and more generally to a strong ethos of communitywide cooperation.
 
 
 
So however hard a man labors to produce food, in hunter-gatherer societies his rights to the food are a matter of communal decision. A man follows the rules, even if that means he gets nothing from his labor. Sometimes he must allow others to distribute his meat. A common requirement among Native American hunters was for boys making their first kill to carry their prize back to camp and stand by while others cooked and ate it. The practice symbolized the subordination of men to the demands of the group. More often, he divided his food himself. The community might allow him to make personal choices about who to give meat to, but not necessarily. In the western desert of Australia, every large hunted animal had to be prepared in a rigidly defined fashion when it was brought to camp. The hunter’s own share of a kangaroo was the neck, head, and backbone, while his parents-in-law received a hind leg, and old men ate the tail and innards. The contrast with women’s ownership of their foods is striking. Although women forage in small groups and might help one another find good trees or digging areas, their foods belong to them. The sex difference suggests that the cultural rules that specify how women’s and men’s foods are to be shared are adapted to the society’s need to regulate competition specifically over food. The rules were not merely the result of a general moral attitude.
A woman’s right to ownership protects her from supplicants of both sexes. In Australia’s western desert, a hungry aborigine woman can sit amicably by a cook’s fire, but she will not receive any food unless she can justify it by invoking a specific kinship role. It is even more difficult for a man. A bachelor or married man who approaches someone else’s wife in search of food would be in flagrant breach of convention and an immediate cause of gossip, just as a woman would be if she gave him any food. The norm is so strong that a wife’s presence at a meal can protect even a husband from being approached. Among Mbuti Pygmies, if a family is eating together by their hearth, they will be undisturbed. But when a man is eating alone, he is likely to attract his friends, who will expect to share his food.
Under this system, an unmarried woman who offers food to a man is effectively flirting, if not offering betrothal. Male anthropologists have to be aware of this to avoid embarrassment in such societies. Cofeeding is often the only marriage ceremony, such that if an unmarried pair are seen eating together, they are henceforward regarded as married. In New Guinea, Bonerif hunter-gatherers rely on the sago palm tree for their staple food year-round. If a woman prepares her own sago meal and gives it to a man, she is considered wed to him. The interaction is public, so others take the opportunity to tease the new couple with jokes equating food and sex, such as, “If you get a lot of sago you are going to be a happy man.” The association is so ingrained that a man’s penis is symbolized by the sago fork with which he eats his meal. If a man takes his sago fork out of his hair and shows it to a woman, they both know he is inviting her for sex. In that society, for a woman to even look at a man’s feeding implement is to break the rule against her constrained food-sharing.
Because interactions occur in public, a husband’s presence is not necessary to maintain customary principles. The husband’s role is important not so much for his physical presence, but because he represents a reliable conduit to the support of the community. If a wife reported to her husband that another man had inappropriately asked her for food, the accused would be obliged to defend himself to both the husband and the community at large.
This may explain one of the reasons why marriage is important to a woman in these societies. Among the Bonerif, as among many hunter-gatherers, sexual intercourse is not tightly restricted to marriage. Wives are free to have sexual relations with several men at the same time, and may do so even when their husbands protest. Furthermore, they get little food from their husbands. But marriage means that her children will be accepted, according to anthropologist Gottfried Oosterwal. In addition, marriage gives a woman access to the only ultimate authority, which is the set of communal decisions reached by men in the men’s house. These decisions represent the “crystallized view of everyone about everything” and are accepted as the right view by the whole community. Having a husband means that when social conflict arises, a good wife has an advocate who is a member of the ultimate source of social control.
A link to the communal authority is critical, because the ability of victims to deter a bully or a persistent pest depends on their being a legitimate member of the community. Hunter-gatherers deal with braggarts, thieves, and violators of other social norms in a consistent way, according to anthropologist Christopher Boehm. They use communal sanctions. Whispers, rumors, and gossip evolve into public criticism or ridicule directed at the accused. If the offender continues to incur public anger, he or she will be severely punished or even killed. The killing is done by one or a few men but will be approved by all the elders. Capital punishment provides the sanction that most completely enforces hunter-gatherer adherence to social norms, and it is in men’s hands. Thus by virtue of being married (or, if unmarried, by virtue of being a daughter), a woman is socially protected from losing any of her food. Having a husband or father who is a legitimate member of the group, she is effectively protected by him.
In theory, cultural norms that oblige a woman to feed her husband but no other men could have arisen from a societal goal other than to protect women’s foods. Such norms might have arisen from a desire to avoid conflicts in general, or from a concern for reducing adultery in particular. But these alternative explanations are unconvincing because men needed their wives specifically to cook for them, rather than merely to behave in a way that promoted communal civility in general. Cross-cultural evidence described above shows that women’s cooking for the family is a universal pattern. From ethnographic reports it seems that this domestic service is often the most important contribution a wife makes to their partnership.

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