Food Consumption

What people eat, and the practices and rituals associated with eating, have been a source of fascination and serious intellectual inquiry for centuries. We know that societies, and groups within any society, developed different ways of feeding themselves and that the explanation for their variation is complex, found in a mixture of natural-environmental, developmental, economic, religious, social, and cultural factors. Food has to be acquired, incorporated, and appreciated. We can only eat what we have access to. We are only likely to incorporate what we find acceptable; that which is acceptable food is highly variable—rats, dogs, and insects are, for example, mostly avoided in Britain and the United States. And within the category of the acceptable, some items are more appealing than others; many children ...