The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (16 page)

Even in democratic societies it’s not hard to find examples of the ways our feelings about sharing food are exploited. In the American South, for example, Jim Crow laws ensured that restaurants and drinking fountains were segregated for nearly a century. “By 1915, black and white textile workers in South Carolina could not use
the same water bucket, pails, cups, dippers or glasses,” writes Isabel Wilkerson in
The Warmth of Other Suns
.
¹⁴
Interestingly, racial segregation began to disintegrate when black students staged sit-ins at lunch counters in 1960. To this day, high-school students are highly territorial about who sits at which cafeteria table, and prisoners in solitary confinement eat alone, their meals pushed through a slot in a locked door.

ALONE AND WITHOUT PURPOSE

Long used in many traditional societies as the gravest form of punishment, social ostracism, recent research has shown, disrupts the ability to think rationally. Isolating someone effectively disables some aspects of cognitive functioning. And younger people are far more affected than older ones.
¹⁵
That’s one reason why adolescents who are ostracized at school are in danger of committing suicide. They experience the exclusion viscerally. If no one comes to their aid, their physical and psychological distress can preempt all rational thought. Three days before I wrote this section, a fifteen-year-old girl living in the Gaspé region of Quebec killed herself because she had been forcibly excluded from her social group: classmates bullied and isolated her while she was at school and taunted her on Facebook when she got home. Marjorie Raymond left a note for her mother saying, “Mom, I’m sorry for what I did. You are the best mom in the world,” suggesting a close bond that, tragically, couldn’t protect her from the impact of isolation from her peers.

Marjorie’s death was the fourth in a series of social ostracism and bullying–related suicides in Canadian teens between the ages of eleven and fifteen in less than a year, and it was followed by a subsequent tragedy. Amanda Todd, a tenth-grade student from British Columbia, hanged herself after being cyberbullied by a stranger who posted lurid photos and comments to her classmates each time she tried to make a fresh start in a new school. These terrible deaths prompted a public outcry in Canada for school expulsions and legal
sanctions for adolescents who cyberbully, isolate, or otherwise torment their classmates. Meanwhile, suicides of children who have been bullied in the United States and elsewhere have led to criminal charges and recent changes in school and public policy.
¹⁶

Torment is not too strong a word. Writing about the impact of solitary confinement in US prisons, physician Atul Gawande quotes John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate who spent two of his five years in a Vietnamese POW camp in a tiny isolation cell, cut off from all human contact. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment,” Gawande writes. “And this comes from a man who was beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again.” Gawande goes on to describe a study of nearly 150 US naval aviators who returned from imprisonment in Vietnam: they reported that social isolation was as agonizing as any abuse they had suffered.

But what happened to them
was
physical. “EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement,” writes Gawande. Some prisoners whose only social contact was a food tray shoved through a slot became catatonic or developed autistic features, such as rocking or “stimming” (self-stimulating). Others regressed, throwing their food or playing with their feces. Still others had panic attacks or became extraordinarily aggressive. These symptoms suggest neurological damage. Neuroimaging studies confirm that ostracism creates the same level of activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula as does physical distress; the neural signs of social pain look a lot like the signals created by physical pain.
¹⁷
Even months after they were released, MRIs of prisoners of war in the former Yugoslavia showed the gravest neurological damage in those prisoners who had been locked in solitary confinement. “Without sustained social interaction, the
human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic head injury,” Gawande concludes.
¹⁸

THE FEMALE EFFECT

If isolation damages our neural networks, social eating does the opposite: it links the physiological hit of needed calories, as well as the aromas and flavors of food, with the visceral reassurance of belonging. “Show me another pleasure like dinner which comes every day and lasts an hour,” wrote Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. An eighteenth-century French diplomat who was a bishop, advisor to Napoleon, inveterate womanizer (he took his first mistress as a seminary student and had affairs with influential women ever after), and a famously committed gourmet, Talleyrand knew that by preparing food and deciding who gets to eat it, women play a persuasive role in deciding who is part of the in-group and who stays on the outside looking in.

Consider the modern dinner party. In three out of four families, a woman’s assessment of her social relationships determines who’s invited and the quantity and quality of the food that will be served.
¹⁹
This accounting may be a legacy of our primate forebears. Female Japanese macaques, for instance, allow others to eat from their food stash according to a savvy calculus. The more closely she is related to another macaque, the more the dominant female “shares,” which in the primate world means turning a blind eye to others snagging food you could easily keep for yourself, according to anthropologist Bernard Chapais. In one experiment, Chapais and a doctoral student discovered that the length of time a female macaque tolerated others snacking from her stash of raisins depended on how closely they were related. The most generous were mothers toward their daughters. Then came grandmothers with granddaughters, then pairs of sisters, and in last place, aunt–niece pairs. A niece’s opportunities for “co-feeding” from her aunt’s portion ranked with non-kin, meaning not very high.

There may be no culture that doesn’t share food, but the way it’s shared is hardly a free-for-all, and female relationships often provide important clues as to who gets to eat what. Not only macaques but also mother–daughter and sister–sister rhesus monkey and baboon pairs play favorites when it comes to sharing food. This indicates that many nonhuman female primates can make fine-grained social distinctions and, like us, exercise their discriminatory powers when it comes to deciding who’s coming to dinner.
²⁰

I’m no Martha Stewart. But as someone who enjoys preparing elaborate meals for family and friends, I agree with anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, who thinks that the impulse to share food is hardwired. I get pleasure from watching my family and friends enjoy an autumn meal of curried squash soup, roast marinated lamb with cauliflower, and crispy potatoes, followed by a salad of bitter greens and julienned Jerusalem artichokes (last week’s menu). I like to think it’s because I have an unusually generous spirit. But the more likely reason is that the human brain—and particularly the female brain—evolved in the context of mothers investing in their offsprings’ survival via hefty donations of their own calories, whether through nursing or by offering a portion of their own food stash. Such behavior developed alongside the acute mind-reading and social skills that allow mothers to suss out their preverbal babies’ needs. And the mothers are lavishly rewarded with infusions of oxytocin, the feel-good neuropeptide that promotes incipient social behavior and also rewards it after the fact—providing the pleasurable double whammy that makes us want to do it again and again.
²¹

And while women have long known intuitively that
voluntarily
offering up food often makes them feel good, recent brain imaging studies show that the neural mechanisms activated by the act of sharing are precisely the ones that register other kinds of social pleasure. Put a woman in the scanner and ask her to share while interacting with a real human being, and those reward areas of her
brain light up. But the neural correlates of sharing don’t respond the same way if her partner is virtual.
²²

As I mentioned earlier, the reward areas I’m referring to also register social pain. Ask someone in an fMRI scanner to play a game with two other people who then proceed to exclude her, and those brain regions go wild (and the more left out the volunteer feels, the greater the neural activity). But tell her that a computer glitch interfered with the other players’ ability to include her—suggesting there’s no human agent involved—and those areas stay quiet.
²³
People, and women especially, are exquisitely wired to assess the social cues they get from real human interaction.

Despite the common assumption that all social networks are interchangeable, different types of social signals don’t have the same impact. As miraculous as Skype is, interacting with a pixelated version of my daughter eating a bowl of noodle soup at her desk in Brussels doesn’t elicit the same visceral pleasure in either of us as preparing and eating it together. Such shared experiences prompt us to perceive others as physiologically similar to ourselves, British cognitive neuroscientist Manos Tsakiris has shown. A mother–daughter pair may already look alike, of course. But doing things together synchronously—like eating that bowl of soup together in the same room—makes us think that we resemble each other even more than we do, blurring our identities further.
²⁴

LIFE IS A BOWL OF DORITOS

Interestingly, women, who are on average more sensitive to social cues than men, are also much more likely to match the amount of food they eat to how much a companion is eating.
²⁵
If two people are faced with snacks and one or both of them are women, they’ll unconsciously coordinate their snacking. Men exhibit no such synchrony. When it comes to sharing a bowl of Doritos, you might say that it’s each man for himself.
²⁶
And the more overweight the person—especially if she’s young and female—the
more her peers influence her waistline. In a study by the economist Justin Trogdon and his colleagues, teenage girls were much more susceptible to “catching” their friends’ weight increases than were teenage boys.
²⁷

Given the mechanics of social transmission, it seems you have to be there to “get the music.” Emotional synchrony—not to mention the synchrony of one’s daily schedule—can play a strong role in weight gain and weight loss. Unwittingly, my friend Florence Velly demonstrated how physical proximity to friends can affect one’s waistline. Soon after she moved from France onto my street in 2009, Florence and I happened to meet in a nearby park while she was walking her dog. It was an early morning in spring. Sparkling with dew, the grass was alive with squirrels. As our paths crossed there was flash of recognition, though we had never met. When I stopped to give her dog a friendly pat, we discovered that not only were we neighbors but she had just begun to swim with my team three times a week (along with Sylvie, whom you met in
Chapter 1
, and Lou, whom I will introduce in
Chapter 8
). Florence and I started walking her dog together in Montreal’s Mount Royal Park every Thursday morning. Her pace was brisk. Her black lab, Talia, eagerly bounded uphill no matter how icy it was, and we followed behind, chatting amiably. After several consecutive Thursdays, I noticed that a couple of pounds had dropped off.

From left, swim team members Christine Cardinal, Florence Velly, and the author, in clothes designed by Florence’s brother
. (Image and Figure Credits
4.3
)

That was a good thing, as Florence’s brother was a dress designer in Paris, and he soon sent her a box of samples. Several teammates gathered in
Florence’s living room to try on the slinky silk jersey dresses in eye-popping prints. To watch my athletic teammates slide those brilliantly colored sheaths over their heads was to know that French fashion is one thing and French fries are another. Sadly, Florence’s return to France two years later ended our casual get-togethers and Thursday walks, and I really missed her. Her departure registered on my scale too: those lost pounds reappeared. While she was my neighbor and a member of my “village,” her proximity had affected me. I not only enjoyed her company, I exercised more often and felt a subtle pressure to meet her aesthetic standard. Those influences evaporated when she was no longer close by.

FAMILIES AND GETTING FAT

Given the role of proximity, not to mention shared genetic predispositions, it makes sense that siblings also influence each other’s weight. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler discovered that if one brother in the Framingham study became obese, then, controlling for other factors, his brother’s chances of putting on weight increased by 40 percent. The siblings probably viewed each other’s creeping weight gain as a normal part of aging, providing another explanation for obesity contagion. If most everyone in your tight circle of friends, family, or co-workers has started going out regularly for margaritas and nachos and acquires love handles in the process, your standards for what a normal waist size looks like might change.