Feeding
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Feeding Stephen R. Merritt University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA
Synonyms Eating; Consumption; Provisioning
sustains young individuals as they develop and grow, and values and social norms are enculturated via foodways. This entry discusses evidence from the human fossil record, archaeological traces of feeding, and behavioral ecological data from extant nonhuman primates and humans practicing diverse subsistence strategies to investigate how the evolutionary history of human feeding and dietary ecology may underlie adaptations that define humanity, notably our cognitive abilities, long childhoods, reliance on technology, and our extreme sociality.
Definition Consumption of edible resources in order to sustain an organism’s energetic and nutritional demands.
Introduction All heterotrophic organisms feed on other life; therefore, feeding is fundamentally an interaction between consumer and the consumed, and its relationships to surrounding contexts can be informative. Feeding is ecological, where agents like predator and prey interact within physical, biotic, and perhaps social contexts and exchange energy inside ecosystems. For humans, feeding intersects with our social worlds, and our foodways – the cultures surrounding food – are enmeshed in biocultural feedback loops. Feeding is essential to offspring development, particularly in humans where parental investment
Bento Boxes: A Contemporary Example of Enculturation Through Food In Japan, bento or lunch boxes full of creatively prepared and neatly organized food items prepared by mothers accompany young children as they begin nursery school, leaving the comfort of home and beginning an important journey of cultural development. Allison’s (2013) ethnographic account shows bento’s role as ideological state apparatus. In other words, the lunch box itself, but also the contexts surrounding its preparation and its consumption at school, functions to reinforce cultural values. In this case, mothers’ food preparation reifies gendered social roles, and other cultural values like discipline and obedience to authority are reflected in the social pressures that guide mothers’ bento preparation. Proper bento should attract children with interesting and cute
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. K. Shackelford, V. A. Weekes-Shackelford (eds.), Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_788-1
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shapes, prompting them to quickly eat their lunch. This behavior is reinforced by teachers who monitor the classroom and encourage proper eating behavior to instill the discipline necessary for the child’s future schooling – where success is crucial for their adult employment.
A Biocultural View of Feeding and Human Life History The previous example shows how western, industrialized ideology is delivered through food and how the biological necessity to eat is enmeshed in a cultural context. The diversity of human foodways is vast, and examining the interaction of feeding culture and biology provides an intere
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