Read Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human Online

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

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (18 page)

BOOK: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
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We have already seen that among the Tiwi a man depended on being fed by his wives, and it turns out that the Tiwi case is typical. Hunter-gatherer men suffered if they had no wives or female relatives to provide cooked meals. “An aborigine of this Colony without a female partner is a poor dejected being,” wrote G. Robinson about the Tasmanians in 1846. When an Australian aboriginal wife deserts her husband, wrote Phyllis Kaberry, he can easily replace her role as a sexual partner but he suffers because he has lost someone attending to his hearth. The loss is important because a bachelor is a sorry creature in subsistence societies, particularly if he has no close kin. As Thomas Gregor explained for the Mehinaku hunter-gardeners of Brazil, an unmarried man “cannot provide the bread and porridge that is the spirit’s food and a chief’s hospitality. . . . To his friends, he is an object of pity.” Colin Turnbull explained precisely why bachelors among Mbuti Pygmies were unhappy: “A woman is more than a mere producer of wealth; she is an essential partner in the economy. Without a wife a man cannot hunt; he has no hearth; he has nobody to build his house, gather fruits and vegetables and cook for him.” Examples like these are so widespread that according to Jane Collier and Michelle Rosaldo, in small-scale societies all men have a “strictly economic need for a wife and hearth.” Men need their personal cooks because the guarantee of an evening meal frees them to spend the day doing what they want, and allows them to entertain other men. They can find opportunities for sexual interactions more easily than they can find a food provider.
In societies with no restaurants or supermarkets, the need for a wife can lead a man to desperate measures. Among the Inuit, where a woman contributed no food calories, her cooking and production of warm, dry hunting clothes were vital: a man cannot both hunt and cook. The pressure could drive widowers or bachelors to neighboring territories in an attempt to steal a woman, even if it meant killing her husband. The problem was so pervasive that the threat of stealing women dominated relationships among Inuit strangers: unfamiliar men would normally be killed even before questions were asked. Lust was not the motivation for stealing wives. “The vital importance of a wife to perform domestic services provided the most usual motive for abduction,” according to ethnographer David Riches. Oosterwal recorded a comparable reason for wife stealing in New Guinea, where a woman’s domestic contribution was critical because of the sago meal she prepared. Men wanted to give feasts as large as possible, so they needed women to organize the food. This led them to conduct raids on neighboring groups to kidnap wives for sago production. Captured women were put to work at once. Their sexual services were an added bonus.
Another version of the same formula applied to many Tiwi marriages. In this highly polygynous culture, old men took most of the young wives, so more than 90 percent of men’s first marriages were to widows much older than themselves, sometimes as old as sixty. The old wives might have been past child-bearing age and physically unattractive, but young men delighted in the marriages because they were then fed. Among one nearby group, the Groote Eylandt Aborigines, adult bachelors were given a teenage boy to do the domestic chores. The teenager was called a boy slave, suggesting that wives may have been similarly perceived as fulfilling a slavelike role.
Although the Inuit and Tiwi offer extreme examples of how hunter-gatherer men acquired wives, the importance of marriage for a man in small-scale societies was universal. Collier and Rosaldo explained that a married man has status because once he has a wife, he need never ask for cooked food and he can invite others to his hearth. He is also likely to eat well because men typically eat before their wives and have the choice of the best food. In Michael Symons’s words, men “demand selfless generosity from women.” To favor the married man even further, small-scale societies have food taboos such that married men are allowed to eat more of the choice kinds of food than are bachelors or women. Women in these societies often dislike marriage specifically because as wives they are obliged to produce food for men, and they have to work harder than they would as unmarried women.
 
 
 
Inequitable as marriage is in certain respects for hunter-gatherer women, that women have to cook for men empowers them. “Her economic skill is not only a weapon for subsistence, but also a means of enforcing good treatment and justice,” wrote Phyllis Kaberry of Australian aboriginal women. A wife who cooks badly might be beaten, shouted at, chased, or have her possessions broken, but she can respond to abuse by refusing to cook or threatening to leave. Such disputes seem to be characteristic mostly of new marriages. Most couples easily develop a comfortable predictability, with wives doing their best to provide husbands their cooked meals and husbands appreciating the effort. Hunter-gatherer women are therefore not normally treated badly, and many ethnographers have concluded that, in comparison to most societies, married women lead lives of high status and considerable autonomy.
Catherine Perlès was right in saying that cooking ends individual self-sufficiency. Cooking need not be a social activity, but a woman needs a man to guard her food, and she needs the community to back him up. A man relies on a woman to feed him, and on other men to respect his relationship with her. Without a social network defining, supporting, and enforcing social norms, cooking would lead to chaos.
It is impossible to know how rapidly cooking would have ended individual self-sufficiency after it was first practiced, but in theory the protective pair-bond system could have evolved quickly. Admittedly, the first cooks were not modern hunter-gatherers, and we know too little about their way of life to confidently judge the effects of cooking on social organization. We do not know how linguistically skilled our ancestors were when cooking was adopted. Language is needed nowadays to enforce culturally understood rules, and because a woman’s food is made secure by her being able to report on a thief ’s activity. But at least we can say that three of the key behavioral elements found in the hunter-gatherer system—male food guards, female food suppliers, and respect for other’s possessions—are found in other animals, suggesting that a primitive version of the modern food-protection regime could have evolved rapidly among early cooks.
Gibbons illustrate the role of males as food guards. Pairs of these small tree-dwelling apes defend territories against their neighbors. When pairs meet at a tree in the border zone, males fight hard with each other, and the female of the winning male tends to eat better. While food guards are relatively common in animals, there is only one species in which females have been seen provisioning males: a tiny Australian insect called the Zeus bug. Male Zeus bugs are smaller than females and ride on the backs of their mates like jockeys. Females secrete a waxlike material on their backs that is eaten by the male and has no known purpose except to feed him. Males that have been prevented from eating the female’s secretions turn competitive: they steal the female’s fresh prey. The researchers who discovered this strange relationship hypothesize that females do better by feeding their riding males than by losing prey to them, perhaps because the waxy stuff contains nutrients that the females do not need. This system has apparently evolved to stop males from interfering with the female’s feeding. In other words, females feed males to reward them for behaving well. That is close to the system found in humans.
Male “respect for possession” is found more widely than female provisioning. Competition for mates among desert-living hamadryas baboons from around the Red Sea provides a striking example. Male hamadryas who do not know each other fight intensely over females, but among familiars a male is completely inhibited from interfering with an existing bond. Zoologist Hans Kummer demonstrated this with experiments in which he captured two wild males who came from the same group. He found out which of the males was dominant by putting food between them. He then kept the males in separate cages. While the dominant male was allowed to watch, Kummer introduced an unfamiliar female into the cage of the subordinate. The dominant saw everything, but being in a different cage, he could do nothing to stop the subordinate from interacting with the new female. Inside the pairing cage, the subordinate male approached the female and quickly mated with her. A few minutes later she showed him her approval by grooming him, and by that time a bond was formed.
At this point Kummer introduced the dominant male into the cage where the subordinate male and his new female were enjoying their honeymoon. An hour earlier the dominant had been so superior that he had taken food from his subordinate at will, but now the dominant lost all interest in competing for the female. The dominant showed complete respect for the subordinate’s possession of the female. Films of these experiments show the dominant looking anywhere but at the subordinate. The dominant develops an intense fascination with a pebble at his feet, which he rolls and twiddles with a pointed finger. He stares at the clouds as if entranced by the weather. The one direction he does not look is toward the most obvious thing in the cage: the two so recently paired baboons. When paired in equivalent circumstances with an unfamiliar male, by contrast, the dominant baboon shows no such respect. Kummer’s experiment identified male bonding as the source of respect between males.
The food guarding, provisioning by females, and respect for possession found in animals are associated with males competing over sexual access to females, but only in humans have they led to households. Something about humans is different from other species. A woman’s need to have her food supply protected is unique among primates and provides a sensible explanation for the sexual division of labor.
The proposal that the human household originated in competition over food presents a challenge to conventional thinking because it holds economics as primary and sexual relations as secondary. Anthropologists often see marriage as an exchange in which women get resources and men get a guarantee of paternity. In that view, sex is the basis of our mating system; economic considerations are an add-on. But in support of the primary importance of food in determining mating arrangements, in animal species the mating system is adapted to the feeding system, rather than the other way around. A female chimpanzee needs the support of all the males in her community to aid her in defending a large feeding territory, so she does not bond with any particular male. A female gorilla, however, has no need for a defended food territory, so she is free to become a mate for a specific male. Many such examples suggest that the mating system is constrained by the way species are socially adapted to their food supply. The feeding system is not adapted to the mating arrangement. The consequences of a man’s economic dependence takes different forms in different societies, but recall that according to Jane Collier and Michelle Rosaldo, his needing a wife to provide food is universal among hunter-gatherers. Food, it seems, routinely drives a man’s marriage decision more than the need for a sexual partner.
Furthermore, food relationships appear to be more tightly regulated than sexual relationships. Among the Bonerif, husbands disapproved of their wives having sex with bachelors, but the bachelors did it anyway. Husbands were relatively tolerant of their wives having sex with other husbands, perhaps because promiscuous sex involved less threat of losing her economic services than did promiscuous feeding. As in many other hunter-gatherer communities, Bonerif attitudes toward premarital sex are particularly open-minded. One girl had sex with every unmarried male in the community except her brother. But when a woman feeds a man, she is immediately recognized as being married to him. Western society is not alone in thinking that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.
 
 
 
Marriage in the United States affects women and men in different ways. Women tend to work longer hours after marriage, thanks to putting in extra time on household tasks, but men do no more household work than before they marry. The pattern is much the same as Jane Collier and Michelle Rosaldo found in small-scale societies, where marriage “binds specific people together in a particular, hierarchical system of obligations, requiring that women provide services for husbands.”
In Victorian England, the aesthetic writer John Ruskin argued that household labor was divided harmoniously and that women were superior to men. He credited women with greater organizational skills than men and explained that women were therefore better at managing households. But to philosopher John Stuart Mill, it was obvious that women were treated unfairly. Ruskin’s gallantry, he said, was “an empty compliment . . . since there is no other situation in life in which it is the established order, and considered quite natural and suitable, that the better should obey the worse. If this piece of talk is good for anything, it is only as an admission by men, of the corrupting influence of power.”
Mill’s accusation that Victorian British men used power to their own advantage might be applied equally well to all nonindustrial societies. The women living on Vanatinai had as much control over their lives as in any society. They were not regarded as inferior to men, and in the public realm they were not subject to male authority. But even when they were tired and men were relaxing, they still had to cook. Maria Lepowsky does not report what would have happened if a woman had refused to cook, but among hunter-gatherers who are similarly egalitarian, husbands are liable to beat wives if the evening meal is merely late or poorly cooked. When there is a conflict, most women have no choice: they have to cook, because cultural rules, ultimately enforced by men for their own benefit, demand it.
BOOK: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
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