Feast: Why Humans Share Food | 
| Author: Martin Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 244710
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0199533520
Dewey Decimal Number: 301
EAN: 9780199533527
ASIN: 0199533520
Publication Date: May 11, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new book delivered from the UK in 10-14 days. Over 1 million sold
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Product Description
The family dinner, the client luncheon, the holiday spread--the idea of people coming together for a meal seems the most natural thing in the world. But that is certainly not the case for most other members of the animal kingdom. In Feast, archeologist Martin Jones presents both historic and modern scientific evidence to illuminate how prehistoric humans first came to share food and to trace the ways in which the human meal has shaped our cultural evolution.
Jones shows that by studying the activities of our closest animal relative, the chimpanzee, and by unearthing ancient hearths, some more than 30,000 years old, scientists have been able to piece together a picture of how our ancient ancestors found, killed, cooked, and divided food. In sites uncovered all over the world, fragments of bone, remnants of charred food, pieces of stone or clay serving vessels, and the outlines of ancient halls tell the story of how we slowly developed the complex traditions of eating we recognize in our own societies today. Jones takes us on a tour of the most fascinating sites and artifacts that have been discovered, and shows us how archeologists have made many fascinating discoveries. In addition, he traces the rise of such recent phenomena as biscuits, "going out to eat," and the Thanksgiving-themed TV dinner.
From the earliest evidence of human consumption around half a million years ago to the era of the drive-through diner, this fascinating account unfolds the history of the human meal and its profound impact on human society.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Lots of interesting concepts and facts July 28, 2008
Jones has real talent as an essayist, but as a science writer he sacrifices clarity and simplicity for style. Having said that, the book has lots of interesting facts and concepts, of which a sampling follow.
Hunter gatherers suffered much less from mal-nutrition than early farmers, whose food surplus was used to support a privileged class. These hunter-gatherers took advantage of "external" digestion to greatly expand the range and nutritional value of foods, while permitting smaller, and less energy consuming, digestive systems. External digestion included fire, heat from the sun, fermentation and even rotting. Jones does not speculate on what constrained population growth among the hunter-gatherers. There was a long period of time when fixed settlements coexisted with the hunter-gatherer life, supplemented by some amount of cultivation; in more historical times, this pattern was found in areas of Europe outside of the Roman empire. Single crop cultivation over vast tracts of land permitted easier central control and tax collection while at the same time making it more necessary, in order to provide irrigation, store food against famine years, and allow for transfer of food between areas where crops flourished and floundered.
It is well known that human evolution seemed to pause for a great number of years, with no improvement in tools, before a surge in creativity. Jones believes this surge was due to better integration of the brain's various subsystems, which is an interesting idea, but speculative.
Jones attributes the extensive use of bread wheat rather than other cereals to Christian ideology. He says barley, for example, is as nutritious, hardier, and requires less water and fertilizer. Could barley or some other grains be the cereal of the future as water gets scarcer?
Jones emphasizes the social role of feasting, especially in dampening potential conflict between strangers and/or competitors, but also in establishing class or ethnic identity. He also goes into the science of "bio-archaeology", but insufficiently explains the scientific basis for one of the most important techniques: the analysis of the relative proportions of different oxygen isotopes in human remains.
Finally, Jones wonders why early man cooked mussels, decreasing their nutritional value (p.91). I have a likely explanation: to kill parasites.
more than a science class May 7, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I read the book because of my keen interest in food and history. The connection between social development gleaned from archeological digs was an unexpected surprise. At times a bit technical but the jewels of information are definitely worth it.
 Some very intriguing ideas about human behavior January 31, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book was given to me as a birthday gift from my friend Steve Haines. It presents a very intriguing concept: that sharing food has/had an important social function as well as a basic biological one and that the former was key to our evolution as a species. While I'm not certain I entirely agree with all of the author's points, I certainly think he has valid things to say about the "meaning" of food and its consumption within the context of the group.
In the first few pages of his book, Martin Jones discusses food and eating in the context of living things in general and of primates including humans and their ancestors in particular. He uses archaeological sites and the artifactual remains, particularly the micro-finds sieved from stratigraphic layers, to reconstruct what people at various periods in human history were eating and how they processed it.
Probably one of the most interesting points he made, at least to me, was the cost of our larger brains in terms of nutrition. Although I was already aware of the fact that the brain is "expensive" in its demands for oxygen and glucose (said to be anywhere from 20 to 30% of our intake), I did not immediately realize that this "cost" was "paid for" by a decrease in availability to other organ systems. The author correctly points out that the functions of certain organs are absolutely necessary and unavoidable--lungs, heart, liver, kidneys--and cannot be downsized to economize. He suggests that the human gut was reduced to accommodate the increased demands of the brain on our nutrition. Certainly considering that we started out as animals consuming fruits and vegetable matter as a mainstay, and that the gut of an animal digesting cellulose is of necessity very large--hence the size of the gut in the cow and horse--the consumption of meat and of cooked foods and the liberation of more nutrients with less "work" would allow for a reduction in energy demands by the human gut. I suspect he's probably right about it. I wonder, too, if part of our extensive hair loss has also liberated some of our nutritional intake for use by the brain; we are among the most naked of mammals, and this fact has never really been satisfactorily explained.
The author's discussion of the history of humans' use of food to make social connections of ever widening dimensions is also very interesting. I was aware that wide food sharing networks are believed to have provided a sort of insurance for ancient people--the suggested Anasazi pueblo system and roads being the most often cited example of possibe shared risk, for which see Anasazi America: Seventeen Centuries on the Road from Center Place--but the sharing of food as iconic of broader social structure had not occurred to me. In this vein, the author points out that the increase in democracy and in technology put every man at the head of his own table or hearth as "head man" or "king," which is an intriguing concept. I was alsio unaware of the conceptual changes in this same mode reflected in the development of restaurants from taverns and inns.
Professor Jones' discussion of the virtual hearth and of fast food as part of the virtual community of modern times is also interesting. Here he suggests that even in our globalized world we are following a trajectory that started around the campfire in more primitive days and our fast food and TV dinners are a natural outgrowth of human behavior brought about by technological improvements in communications. We still gather around the hearth to gossip and exchange information, it is now just a virtual technological hearth, while the "headmen" in our society who inform us are further away from us and from each other.
Interesting.
Dinner at the Jones'? September 9, 2007
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Martin Jones is a bioarchaeologist - he nearly invented the discipline. In "The Molecule Hunt" he not only explained that rather cumbersome term; he demonstrated what a fabulous array of information about our ancestors and us this new science has revealed. In this work, he utilises that data and enlarges the view to examine human societies in their environmental contexts. An insightful and comprehensive account, Jones explains the roots of our mealtime habits, along with the steps we passed through in reaching them.
He notes at the outset that humans are unique in gathering around a cooking fire or other central location and feeding together facing their fellows. For any other species, eye contact is a threat display. With us, it's a form of group bonding that extends beyond kin relations. Jones enhances his science by providing a "fictional" account of what might have been the circumstances for living people to produce the evidence he and others have uncovered. Nor is he limited to just "humans", since Neanderthal and precursor species are included in the scenarios. His careful analytical techniques, admirably explained, put these scenes well above idle speculation. They bring a true sense of humanity to a science too often typified by pots and bones alone. Jones focusses on hearths and their surroundings, providing graphic illustrations of what foodstuffs were being consumed, how they were prepared and the environments that provided them. He contrasts many of the scenes as representing "endocuisine" - foods boiled, often indoors, with "exocuisine" - broiled foods at exterior cooking sites predominated by the male hunters.
The sites examined are many and varied. He takes us to Boxgrove, a half-million-year old site on England's south coast. Neanderthal life is examined at Capellades on the Iberian Peninsula when that species was still in its prime, yet to be challenged by the invasion of modern humans. Another British dig, Hambledon Hill, shows the world of Neolithic farmers, from the cycle of their feasts, to the way they related to the local environment. Hambledon Hill proved not a living area, but the domain of the dead, with great feasts set up for large assemblages of people who dispersed after the celebrations. The rise of agriculture led to hierarchical societies forming, with storage facilities drawing from a wide area. A great palace erected at Pylos had many dedicated rooms for food stocks. Each location provides many clues for those who know how to look for them.
Jones isn't limited to ancient peoples, however. He brings his narrative down the centuries. Human feeding practices introduced a major shift in how we deal with the environment. Among our earliest ancestors, following the tempos of Nature was fundamental to survival. Knowing where foodstuffs were at any given season forced a mobility that was abandoned at later times. As society became more hierarchical and complex due to agriculture, the tempos of Nature were replaced by human ones. "Nature was subjected to neat organisation within clear partitions of space" and culture introduced different complexities. Instead of natural cycles, new ones at the whims of gods were introduced. "Tempo" became annual instead of seasonal.
The result of these changes can be seen around us. Vast stretches of land are given over to crops or grazing animals. Instead of going to food, we bring it to us, and control of Nature in those areas is nearly total. A food web that once might have encompassed a few kilometres in extent is now global. The reach brings fish across oceans and specialty foods from distant continents. He uses the "coffee house" of 18th Century Europe to explain how new ideas and theories were exchanged over cups of exotic brews and led to new forms of government. The face-to-face contact of the participants made the process simple. In a jarring spasm of modernity, he offers a photo of the first McDonald's as a symbol of the global food web. He also notes how this web, and the supportive industries derived from it have created yet another form of social science - the "dump" archaeologist.
A treasure of fresh information and innovative thinking, this is a fascinating read throughout. The historical scenes are the least speculative of many of Jones' ideas, but he provides many questions that need further resolution. Take it up to learn some carefully reasoned notions supported by a wealth of evidence. It's a rewarding read at many levels. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
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