Anthropik Radio Interview this Thursday @ 12 PM EST
by Jason GodeskyWe’ve finally crossed the threshold of true primitivist punditry. Joy Hought of Heretic Fig is also the host of KUCI’s “The Politics of Food.” We’ll be talking about the cultural construction of food for Thursday’s program, from 9 to 10 AM if you’re listening locally in Irvine, CA, but 12 - 1 PM if you’re on Eastern time like me. Whatever position the sun is in over your head at the time, be sure to tune in–and if you’re too far away to get it on an honest-to-gods radio, KUCI has a live, online feed: 24k, 128k
Update: (13 October 2005 @ 6:02 PM EST) MP3 of the interview; transcript forthcoming.
Update:(14 October 2005 @ 12:03 AM EST) Transcript follows:
JOY HOUGHT: Okay, kids, we’re back. [cough] Ahem, just barely. I’m so glad Mike is here; otherwise, this station would be ablaze.
Anyway, we have on the line waiting patiently for us — I did have those on, right? Okay. I’m about to talk to Jason Godesky. He has degrees in computer science and also anthropology, and he is the founder and contributing writer to an online forum called “Anthropik”–which is a really cool place to visit–and I’m going to let him off hold right now.
Hi, Jason, are you there?
JASON GODESKY: Yes, hi!
JH Good morning! How are you doing?
JG: Great, good to be here.
JH: You’re in Pittsburgh, am I correct?
JG: That’s right.
JH: How’s Pittsburgh this morning? –or, it’s afternoon there….
JG: It’s starting to get a little colder, so, uh, breaking out the sweaters.
JH: Well you guys have winter out there?
JG: Yes. Winter and summer.
JH: We have summer all the time. Well, we were just talking about, um, to give you some context, we were just talking about the bird flu, which is rapidly approaching Europe, but I’ve already introduced you and told our listeners that we’d like to ask you about an anthropologist’s perspective on food.
JG: Yeah, well it’s kind of interesting because we usually think of food as anything we can eat, and it’s really not. If it were just “everything we can eat,” then Fear Factor would not have made nearly as much money.
JH: Good point.
JG: So, what it is, is the culturally constructed set of edible matter. It’s not just anything you can eat, it’s what your culture believes you can eat, and that kind of mis-match leads to some very interesting things.
JH: Well, give us some examples.
JG: So, for instance, in Collapse, Jared Diamond talks about the end of the Greenland Viking colony, and they were desperate for food. They would eat anything. We have archaeological evidence that they ate the very last of their cow herds, down to the hooves of their calves, which meant they had totally given up on the future. They ate their dogs. But, to the very end, they never ate fish. It just didn’t occur to them; it wasn’t in their culturally-constructed view of the world that fish was food. And yet, they lived in full view of the Inuit, who were living very happily on fish. Greenland is a fisherman’s paradise, and they never tapped that resource. It just never occured to them.
MIKE: Do we have any idea why they didn’t? I mean was there a cultural bias or some kind of religious conviction that would have prevented them from trying to eat that?
JG: Well, it was part of being European, and they defined themselves very much in that sense. But ultimately, it’s the same kind of construction of “food” that we all have. If we–I mean … we like to look at examples like this and think how much better we are now and how we’ve evolved past that kind of problem, but most of us, if we were left in a field full of dandelions, and no wrapped lunch meat, would starve to death, bewailing the fact that we have nothing to eat–just a bunch of dandelions, which are probably the healthiest food on the planet.
M: In terms of why we eat what we eat, are there cultural biases? Does religion play any part in some of these cultures as to why they don’t eat what they eat, or why they eat what they eat?
JG: A lot of people would argue that it’s because of religion, but I tend to take the view that religion is one of the mechanisms by which we achieve that; that we do this for entirely different reasons. So, today’s Yom Kippur, the kosher laws are a great example of this. Some of the kosher laws are very understandable in terms of hygiene. Pork opens up a whole can of worms as far as food poisoning and illness, and banning pork outright was probably a really great move, especially in a time before refridgeration and our modern cooking methods.
JH: So in some sense, pragmatic physical circumstances find their way into religion, and then into prescription.
JG: Exactly. So if you just tell somebody, “Don’t eat pork, it’s bad for you,” that’s not a very strong urge to not eat pork. We do things that are “bad for us” all the time. But if you say, “Don’t eat pork, or G-d will blast you from heaven,” that’s a lot stronger. You don’t understand why you’re not supposed to eat pork, you just know there’s some very powerful force that’s very interested in you not eating pork.
MIKE: It becomes an article of faith at that point, where you’re not sure why, but you’re being told that it will determine your immortal soul.
JG: Yes.
JH: And it sticks with you.
MIKE: And it does stay with you.
JG: Exactly.
JH: So–
JG: And beyond that…
JH: Go ahead…
JG: And beyond that, there’s also cultural identity, which, again with the kosher laws, not all of them can be understood simply in terms of hygiene. A lot of them are just, apparently, purely random, and that helps to set off a community as distinct.
JH: Right, and it helps you identify yourself.
JG: Exactly, and that means that you’ll stick with your group rather than break off on your own and die alone in the wilderness, even though you may not get along with everyone all the time. Social problems pop up all the time, so we need forces to pull us together as a society, so that we don’t simply fly apart at the seams, and food can help justify that.
JH: It helps us cohere, and make friends with each other.
MIKE: It helps us bond with one another, but we … that’s, has sort of modern life sort of blasted apart a lot of these rationales for why we eat what we eat? Or are we, would we still adhere to a lot of this…
JH: I think it’s taken on new definitions. You know, now you have people who go to great lengths to identify themselves as, say, a “vegetarian” or a “vegan” or an “omnivore.” I mean, I know people just, you know, meeting them in daily life, that that’s the first thing they tell you.
MIKE: Yeah.
JH: That’s how they identify themselves.
MIKE: Yeah.
JG: It probably is not so much a part of our past as we would like to think it is, but then again, every culture believes that they’re the ones who have the right view of what food is, and everybody else has these bizarre superstitious tabboos. But I will go out into one of the city parks near where I live and gather up some acorns and start leeching them and make a nice little candy dish out of them, and when I tell people how I spent my weekend, they give me the strangest look like, “What are you doing? Don’t you know that’s not food?”
JH: We were talking about, Mike you were mentioning about our surroundings in Irvine.
MIKE: Yeah.
JH: We, in southern California, aesthetically, it’s a lush visual environment. Everything is green, year-round, but you never think to eat any of it. But I’m sure that a lot of it is.
MIKE: That a lot of it is edible.
JH: Yes, and not just what we would think of that’s gone off in the wild, that isn’t manicured. I was actually on a camping trip a couple of years ago with my brother, and I decided to boil some grass and thought, “Well, why can’t we make tea out of this?” And it turned out to be the greatest thing. We were astounded.
MIKE: Well, let me, ah .. the reason I asked sort of about the modern world and … I would never, ever have thought to eat fish that was uncooked, and yet now, because of having gone to Japanese restaurants and sushi bars and all the rest of it, it’s one of my favorite things to eat. That’s probably a pretty basic thing, but it does, in fact–we’ve opened ourselves up to … I’m sure there are a lot of things you or I wouldn’t–I probably wouldn’t eat because of a cultural bias.
JH: So it’s not even just the food itself but how it’s prepared that’s part of the…
MIKE: And that’s another, I guess that’s another part of this, but is what I’m saying, I mean, does that make sense to you, Jason?
JG: Yeah, absolutely. That’s exactly the way it goes. The food tabboos are largely arbitrary, very often, just to set off group identity. In our own case, we’ve defined food very narrowly, in fact. I mean, try to think of something you’ve had this week that didn’t involve either wheat, rice or corn.
JH: Even in the case of those plants, there used to be thousands of varieties of wheat, and rice, and corn, and now we just use two or three strains.
JG: Exactly. It’s one of the ultimate forms of “putting all of your eggs in one basket.”
MIKE: I think that’s another whole can of worms, that you’re talking about the commercialization of food, which is–I don’t know if that’s a step beyond what we’re talking about here.
JH: But I think that commercialization is successful because we’re conceptually or mentally prepared to eat just corn and wheat and rice.
MIKE: Well, I do know, and sort of going back to my theme here, this sort of–especially in America, where there’s so many cultures that have come together–I see people eating things that I wouldn’t eat on a bet. But it is a part of their–and that’s another thing, that gets into this whole idea of cultures and resources and how wealthy a culture is. Here in America we wouldn’t think to eat the entire goat, or pig, or whatever, but in certain cultures, they eat it down to the hooves, as you said earlier, right, Jason?
JG: Yes.
MIKE: Because they have to, I mean this is all that they have. We have these luxuries that allow us to eat what we want, we can certainly be much more selective, but other cultures eat everything.
JG: Yeah.
MIKE: I’m sorry, I feel like I’m muddling up things here, but no, but I…
JH: Our other guest here is Mike….
MIKE: Yeah, but no, I don’t mean to, but I just… Yeah, it just is fascinating to me, why we eat what we eat.
JH: Well, Jason, I’m sorry we only have a few more minutes. I’d love to talk to you for a whole hour. I plugged your website before you came on, Anthropik, and I want to mention that again because one of your contributing writers, Benjamin Shender, he wrote a quick piece on food memes. Can you talk a little bit about that for us?
JG: Yeah, actually it goes right to the heart of what we were just talking about, with the wealth of food in our modern society where we’re pulling from so many different cultures and all of their beliefs about food, and in some ways we have the union of all those sets–but in other ways we only have the intersection. Even though we know that some people eat sushi, it’s very exotic for us, and if you look at what we actually eat, it tends to be an incredibly narrow range. The thing is, we have defined “food,” we’ve added another dimension of this cultural construction: not only the idea of food tabboos for hygiene, and food tabboos to define your culture, and now a food tabboo that, if it doesn’t come off of a farm, it isn’t food.
JH: Exactly. And that’s actually what he…
JG: And that’s what I run up against when I go out and gather my acorns: “It’s not food, it wasn’t farmed.”
JH: It wasn’t grown by a human being.
JG: Yeah, and once it’s farmed, that means that you can control the food. Whereas, how could you ever control where the acorns land?
JH: Exactly. Well … yeah! I wish I could talk about this for a really long time, but I would like to have you back on, would you be interested?
JG: Absolutely!
JH: Great! Thanks for coming again, and your website is–can you spell that for us?
JG: It’s anthropik.com–Anthro-P-I-K.com.
JH: And we’ve been talking to Jason Godesky. Thank you so much. Have a good day.
JG: Thank you! You too.
JH: Buh-bye.
J, could you post a transcript or recording of the program afterwards for those of us who might not be able to tune in at that time? Or will they?
Roxy
Comment by Raku — 12 October 2005 @ 1:02 PM
I’ll see what I can do.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 October 2005 @ 1:04 PM
Hey –
NICE!
But Jason, you missed your big opening… when Mike first mentioned sushi and our ‘expanding’ palate, I really expected you to ‘hit back’ with the ‘amazing similairity’ of the food memes across the modern/agricultural world. You got into it a little at the end, but I was so waiting for it on that particular opening
Janene
Comment by Janene — 13 October 2005 @ 12:40 PM
I enjoyed how you were able to start down the path (really, just lead them to the trailhead) of our reliance on just a few highly domesticated grains & animals… of food not being accepted as food unless we farmed/manipulated it… to the social ramifications of locking up of the food, both literally and culturally…
The “all our eggs in one basket” & “whole ‘nother can of worms” metaphors were flying al over!
-Jim
Comment by JCamasto — 13 October 2005 @ 1:09 PM
I wanna listen! I wanna listen!
Comment by Raku — 13 October 2005 @ 1:12 PM
Janene — Didn’t want to scare anyone off by being too radical.
Jim — Thanks.
Roxy — Give me 24 hours, and you’ll have an MP3 for download, and a transcript posted here.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 October 2005 @ 1:26 PM
Roxy: Only took me 12!
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 October 2005 @ 12:21 AM
Janene — typing up the transcript, I realize the counter-argument I should’ve come back with was that the Greenlanders knew about the Inuit, too; and the Donner party was fed pine nuts by the Paiute. Didn’t change much for them, now did it?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 October 2005 @ 12:23 AM
Woo-hoo! Thanks Jason! That was great. It never occurred to me that the reason we don’t eat our food down to the hooves is that we don’t have to. And that is an excellent control strategy, convincing people they can’t eat anything that’s not human produced. I got a similar reaction when I went foraging in Central Park. People said, “You can’t eat that stuff! It’s DIRTY!” We even got yelled at by the park police for picking wineberries, because we were “destroying the landscape.” Meaning the bush didn’t look so nice with all the berries picked off.
This “starvation amongst plenty” seems to be particularly evident in settler societies, I think mostly because they just weren’t familiar with the plants and animals of the region, having only lived there for a generation or two. It probably takes longer than that to break cultural taboos. But, as I mentioned before, those people might have had a much wider diet back in Europe, where they knew all the wild plants and animals. The Vikings survived well enough in Scandinavia without fish, so I guess it wasn’t necessary to their original cultural survival. It was only when they colonized Greenland that it became an issue. It’s interesting, I wonder how well the Paiute would have fared on a different continent, had they suddenly moved there? Although there have been cases of non-colonial cultures starving to death because of food taboos (like the Irish potato famine and the German bread crisis), they were much more rare. Then again, depends how you classify “colonial”, huh?
Roxy
Comment by Raku — 14 October 2005 @ 10:42 AM
The Paiute started off on another continent, of course–in Asia, before they crossed the land bridge. When they migrated, the relied even more heavily on meat (since even poisonous animals are rarely poisonous to eat–rattlesnake is delicious, for example), until they learned the plants in the new environment.
The Vikings even fared well in Greenland for a time–until the weather got colder.
With all of this, we’re not talking about anything that’s always and intrinsically bad–we’re always talking about taking something that’s perfectly fine in one context, and putting it into a new context where it’s maladaptive.
Even cultivation has a place where it’s not suicidal (horticulture and permaculture, possibly).
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 October 2005 @ 10:58 AM
Yes, but I guess what I’m saying is that while lack of knowledge about wild edibles might be a huge limiting factor in American culture, as most of the immigrants who came here never had to learn what the wildlife was, and while it will always be an issue in cities and other high pop density areas, it might not be as large a factor in other places, where people have been living in the same spot for generations. There are lots of countries where people are familiar with the wild plants and animals, even if they choose not to eat them or if it’s even illegal to eat them now, for various reasons. But if all the supermarkets suddenly closed, they’d have no problem finding food. My question would be if their populations are now too high to support them. I’m not sure, as many small towns have suffered severe DEpopulation caused by everyone moving to the cities to find work. Sure, in a crash scenario Tokyo would be an inferno. But go a couple hours out of the city and a crash would be barely a blip, because over half the population lives in Tokyo and the neighboring cities. So I’m thinking things could easily continue out there for quite a while.
Roxy
Comment by Raku — 14 October 2005 @ 11:41 AM
Hey –
Any idea when the Scandinavians started eating fish? That is a large part of Scandinavian culture in more modern times — I mean, where would the Norse be without lutefisk, pickled herring and whitefish?
Janene
Comment by Janene — 14 October 2005 @ 11:43 AM
My bad - The Norse always ate fish. It seems that fish was considered a “poor man’s food”, and the Viking settlers of Greenland seemed to be upper-class. So for them eating fish was like dumpster-diving for Donald Trump, I guess (although even he’ll do that if it means making a few bucks for a credit card commercial.:) But it still comes down to cultural taboos. Here’s my sources so far:
http://madskvalsvik.blogspot.com/2004/12/fish.html
http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/12/norse_fish_upda.html
Roxy
Comment by Raku — 14 October 2005 @ 12:21 PM
Some more stuff I scrounged up:
The number of Norwegian merchant vessels arriving in their (Greenland’s) ports, though only one or two a year in the best of times, dropped until none came at all. This meant that the islanders were cut off from the major source of iron and tools needed for the smooth running of their farms and the construction and maintenance of their boats. Norway’s long dominance of the northern sea trade withered as Germany’s Hanseatic League rose to ascendancy. Although the league’s bigger ships could carry more cargo than Norwegian vessels, they apparently never anchored in Greenland. The dangerous ocean crossing would have put them at too much risk for too little gain, especially now that elephant ivory, once difficult to obtain, could be gotten easily from Africa and replaced walrus ivory in prominence.
No iron or timber was coming in to build or maintain their boats, so eventually no fishing industry. Other than what they could catch by dropping a line off the beach, of course. But that is nowhere near what they could get by going out and using nets off shore.
http://www.plastic.com/comments.html;sid=05/01/05/05410817;cid=64
As a result of 80 years of excavations in Greenland, The Danish National Museum possesses a large collection of bones from burials in churchyards in the old Norse colonies. Stable-isotope analysis of selected parts of this bone material has enabled us to determine which kind of food each individual has eaten - or more precisely: the balance between terrestrial and marine diet (Box 3). At the same time, we have 14C dated the bones by the AMS technique (Box 1 and 2). We cannot claim to have solved the enigma of the disappearance of the Norsemen from Greenland, but we can at least exclude some hypotheses. The isotope analysis indicates that the Norsemen changed their dietary habits. The diet of the first settlers consisted of 80% agricultural products and 20% food from the surrounding sea. But seafood played an increasing role, such that the pattern was completely turned around towards the end of the period—from the 1300’s the Greenland Norse had 50-80% of their diet from the marine food chain. In simplified terms: they started out as farmers but ended up as hunters/fishers. Some archeologists have claimed that the Greenland Norsemen succumbed because they—being culturally inflexible—either could not or would not adapt to changing conditions and therefore came to a catastrophic end, triggered by deteriorating climate. This hypothesis may now be refuted.
http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/12/mmmfish.html
Also, it seems that fish bones degrade/decompose much more easily than mammal or fowl bones, which might explain their poor representation in bone remains.
Roxy
Comment by Raku — 14 October 2005 @ 12:49 PM
Cool! Thanks for posting the mp3, it’s was a great interview.
Comment by Mike — 14 October 2005 @ 4:14 PM
Well, it seems that there is quite a bit of disagreement on this particular case. It’s not that the Greenland Norse didn’t consider fish as food - many Norse back home ate fish all the time - but instead ran out of supplies to make the boats they were used to fishing in, from a combination of outstripping their resources in Greenland, and the discontinuance of ships from mainland Europe (the Plague might have had something to do with this as well). Lacking supplies, the Norse were restricted to fish they could catch from the shore, a method they probably weren’t very skilled at. The Inuit had no problems making kayaks or fishing, but The Vikings’ view of the Inuit as being inferior “wretches” probably kept them from trying to learn anything from the natives. So they died out, perhaps from ethnocentrism more than a cultural taboo against fish, although if the Greenlanders were in fact upper-class and had an existing aversion to fish as a “poor man’s food”, that certainly wouldn’t have helped.
The best article I could find on this was a publication from The Europhysics News:
C-14 Dating and the Disappearance of Norseman from Greenland
http://www.europhysicsnews.com/full/15/article1/article1.html
Comment by Raku — 14 October 2005 @ 4:59 PM
Thanks Roxy! Very interesting!
Janene
Comment by Janene — 14 October 2005 @ 6:05 PM
Well done Roxy, your summary is exhaustive and logical. I for one now consider this matter settled. Where can I find more of your writings?
Mads
Comment by Mads — 14 October 2005 @ 10:48 PM
Jason broadcasting disinformation? Never!
[i]Atari![/i]
Comment by JCamasto — 15 October 2005 @ 1:47 AM
Quite right. C’mon, now, Diamond’s a maverick sometimes, I know that. You think I’m going to go on the radio and say something like that without doing my homework first? I’m gunna dig me up some good citations and such on this in a little bit, but for now, I’ll say this. This is a question that a lot of people have looked into, and no one can believe that they wouldn’t eat fish. It’s a big controversy, and Roxy’s presented the evidence for one side of that controversy. There’s quite a bit of evidence that hasnt’ been presented here yet to refute all of that, which I’ll be marshalling in a few hours. But in the meantime, consider this … if it was because they hadn’t the resources to make fishing boats, how is it that the Inuit were able to live so happily off of fish? And again, this was Greenland we’re talking about–a fisherman’s paradise. You can still wade out to your ankles, dip your hands in the water and pick up a fish. So …. why didn’t they?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 15 October 2005 @ 11:06 AM
The Plague did have a good deal to do with the end of the Greenland colony, but not in the way you might think. As Ruddiman showed [PDF], the “Little Ice Age” was caused by the drop-off in European agricultural activity, caused by the Black Death. It was that “Little Ice Age” that tipped the precarious state of affairs in the Greenland colony from fragile, to catastrophic.
The Norse have always eaten fish, so why wouldn’t the Greenland Vikings? Couldn’t it simply be a matter of the fish not being preserved very well, or otherwise hidden from us? Diamond runs through a number of the theories proposed on this account, most of which are patently ridiculous, and comes to a very good point with this:
Yes, fish bones decompose faster, so we need to look at contemporary Norse sites for comparison, to see how much of their fish bones survived. Short answer: a lot. Even more at the Inuit sites, because Greenland isn’t just a fisherman’s paradise–it’s also an archaeologist’s dream. The soil composition and the cold means that nearly everything in Greenland is incredibly well preserved. We have preserved sheep lice and fecal pellets from the Norse colonies–both of which decay far more quickly than fish bones. As Diamond put it:
But, then, what of the fact that Norse skeletons from the latter years of the colony show that they were eating 80% seafood? This is quite true, and in fact, is part of Diamond’s own argument. This fact has been misrepresented above as if to indicate that it means a shift to 80% fish. Not so. What we find concurring with this is an increasing amount of seal bones in Norse middens. Rather than fish, we can see that the Norse began to eat primarily seals.
The idea that they would not eat “a poor man’s food” doesn’t make much sense. In effect, you’re describing a staple. Bread is such a staple for us today. Every meal includes bread, but if bread is all you have, then you are very poor, i.e., “bread and water.” Roxy, I’m sure you can confirm the same attitudes in Japan regarding rice. At the same time, even Bill Gates would be perfectly willing to eat bread to avoid starvation.
Fish was a Norse staple. It was something that was involved in nearly every meal to one degree or another, but if it was all you had to eat, then you were quite poor. Yet staples, all by themselves, are also good “starvation foods,” even among the rich. So, why no fish bones among the Greenland Norse?
Diamond proposes a theory that I find interesting, and even plausible (particularly given the small population of the Greenland colony, and the “Heroic” nature of Norse society in general). After mentioning that most food taboos concern meat and fish because of the risk of food poisoning, and describing a particularly bad bout he suffered with bad shrimp (worse than his cases of malaria, even), Diamond puts this forward:
The “Erik the Red’s Tummy-ache” hypothesis doesn’t need such active proselyzation, though. Food aversion stays with you for a long time–as it should be, it helps avoid dying from posioning. Erik’s food aversion would have meant that fish never again played a significant role in the cycle of “Heroic” redistribution that was such a key element of Norse society. The next generation would have been brought up in a fish-less society; fish would simply be absent from the trained set of “what we do.” There is no active taboo necessarily against it; it’s simply not in the conception of food, just as contemporary Americans have no active taboo necessarily against eating dandelions, but it’s just not in our conception of “food.”
But you are also correct that the wane of shipping to Greenland really put the screws to the colony–something that Diamond discusses at length. However, while this impacted every area of their economy adversely, the conclusion drawn here–that this ended their fishing for lack of boats–is certainly not the case. Firstly, we have no evidence of fishing before that time, as we do in Iceland and Norway. Secondly, we find no fishing hooks, no fish line sinkers, no net sinkers, none of the artifacts of fishing that we find so abundantly in contemporaneous Icelandic and Norwegian sites, at any time in the Greenland colony’s strata–not even in their hale and hardy younger years when, supposedly, they were doing a good deal of fishing–even though Greenland is much better for preserving such artifacts than either Iceland or Norway. Finally, this is Greenland we’re talking about. Yes, it’s easier to fish from a boat, but the Norse knew how to fish from shore, too. In Greenland, that alone could easily have provided for such a small settlement.
I like the “Erik the Red’s Tummy-ache” hypothesis for Greenland’s lack of fish through its early years, but it could also have become an active food taboo with the appearance of the Inuit. At that point, it would become an important matter of distinction. Defining oneself as “European” becomes more important when faced with an other who is “not-European.” If the Greenlanders already didn’t eat fish, then that would only have become more important–not less–with a neighboring society of “savages” who relied entirely on fish. I believe in its earlier years, the Greenland Norse may have looked at fish the way we look at dandelions; by the end, they may have looked at fish the way we look at monkey brains. Once it has become an active food taboo, it elicits a strong disgust reaction. Any attempt to eat the food may result in a physical gag reflex. It may become actually impossible to eat the food.
In short, everything Roxy’s presented is true, but there’s more to the story than just that. When we put it all together, we see that it really is about food taboos. The Arneborg study does show that the Greenland Norse were incredibly adaptive, learning to change their diet to match changing circumstances; probably a good deal more adaptive than we will prove. It does not prove that more fish was consumed, though–it proves that more seal was consumed. Based on this misinterpretation of some of the evidence, Yglesias states, “That’s about 20 minutes of Google work, and certainly not a conclusive review of the literature.”
That should always be a good tip-off. If you think you’ve solved one of the great mysteries of modern archaeology in 20 minutes on Google, then chances are very high you haven’t even scratched the surface of its complexities yet.
The Arneborg study states:
Sounds plausible, theoretically, but why does this theory only find itself reflected in reality in Greenland, and never in Norway or Iceland? This might explain the absence of fishbones in Greenland, but it opens up an even bigger mystery: why, then, do we find so many fish bones in Icelandic and Norwegian middens? Even more astounding, why do we find so many fish bones at Inuit sites in Greenland? And don’t forget, the Inuit had domesticated dogs, too!
So, there you have it. This is quite the raging archaeological debate, but I must admit that I believe Diamond has, by far, the stronger argument here. The case for a fish-eating Greenland Norse society is, I think, extraordinarily weak, and based primarily on misunderstanding a subset of the evidence available. But it is very much an open debate still, that I will readily admit.
(Sorry if this is a tad too combative, Roxy; good on you for raising the other side. But being accused of spreading disinformation on the air, especially with Mads’ comment of “consider[ing] this matter settled” really rattled my cage!)
Comment by Jason Godesky — 15 October 2005 @ 12:19 PM
Hey –
Its good to have such a rich source of information!
Kudos, both
Janene
Comment by Janene — 15 October 2005 @ 12:43 PM
Jason,
Well said. Sorry, I should have been a little more sensitive with my timing. And your research has been much more extensive than mine; Admittedly, my research amounted to about a day’s worth of Googling, snuck in around posting expenses and other mundane job duties.
I think I’m a tad confused as to the nature of the Greenlanders - they were Christian Vikings? (I don’t know much about Scandinavian history). My first reaction was to question why there would be no evidence of this food taboo, especially if it was so prevalent, but then again, one would be hard pressed to find any mention of dandelion taboos in our culture. In any case, more than the specific case of the Greenlanders, my objection to your whole “cultural food construct” presentation is that you seem to be implying (at least that’s my impression) our American situation of maladapted cultural food taboos is common across the board in civilization, citing extreme historical examples to back you up, whereas I think the American case is extreme in itself, and that while cultural taboos against food might exist across the board, they are generally not as life-threatening as ours. Yet.
Roxy
PS - You’re correct with the Japanese rice reference; Actually, white rice was considered the food of the elites until recently (it was called silver rice). Everyone else ate brown rice or barley, which was the poor man’s (although much more nutritious)
food. This might be why white rice is now so prevalent in Japanese food - it’s a carryover symbol of status.
Comment by Anonymous — 15 October 2005 @ 2:15 PM
Yes. Olav II Haraldsson or “Saint Olaf” is generally cited as most responsible for the Christianization of Norway. This is not true, as Norway had been deeply Christian for some time, and all Norwegian kings back to HÃ¥kon the Good (c. 920 – 961) had been Christians.
Iceland, the home of Erik the Red, voted to become Christian at the Althing of 1000 CE. This event is recorded in Njal’s Saga. Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland for some killings in 982 CE. Erik himself was not Christian, but his son Leif–the one who discovered Vinland–built the first Christian church in the Americas. Rumors circulate that Erik converted on his deathbed (in 1003), but regardless, we know that Greenland not only converted to Christianity shortly after Iceland’s conversion, and became deeply Christian in short order. Diamond discusses the ramifications of how lavishly the Greenlanders spent on their cathedrals and clergy, far more per capita than nearly anywhere in Europe. This makes some sense for such a remote outpost; Christianity became one of their lifelines to Europe, one of the most crucial things by which they might define themselves.
Exactly. It’s also important to remember that we don’t have all that much written material from Greenland. It was always the furthest frontier of medieval Europe. The most we usual have is ship manifests. This was an odd local abberation of Norse culture, and one that died out, so that makes it pretty difficult to find direct, positive evidence of what they thought about much of anything.
I didn’t have much time on the radio, so you should take a look at my more recent article, “Why People Starve,” where I consider this in more detail.
My conviction is this: we all have a cultural construction of food. We don’t just eat anything. Now, typically, finding food is a very easy affair. Foragers put in a grand total of about two hours a day, even in a desert, to find all their food. Horticulturalists are willing to work a little harder to have food they prefer, coming out to an average of about six hours a day. So, how do you get people to work 10-12 hours a day, for less food (and less healthy food) than they’d get if they only worked 2? You can’t control all the edible matter in the world, there’s too much of it. You need to define food–culturally–to be a very narrow range of possibilities. Specifically, a range of possibilities that can be controlled. You can only do that if you convince everyone that if it isn’t farmed, it isn’t food.
This is precisely what we have done. It’s what Daniel Quinn called “locking up the food.” Physically locking up everything that can be eaten would be impossible–but locking up our view of the possibilities, culturally, is very possible.
You and I might agree that this is a silly thing to die for, but historically, that’s exactly what we’ve always done. Every famine goes on amidst incredible abundance of things to eat–just no food. Perhaps the most extreme example is a famine in Germany in the 1800s, during which they had no bread–just a bumper crop of wheat for white bread that they were exporting to Britain and France. But no rye.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 15 October 2005 @ 4:25 PM
Jason,
What I meant to say was that this entire thread (your interview along with commentary) does a far better job at explaining the fate of the Greenland Norse than I every could. I didn’t mean to dispute your central thesis about food taboo, I think it has a lot of merit.
I’m new to this site but I’ll be checking in on a regular basis from now on!
Mads
Comment by Mads — 15 October 2005 @ 11:07 PM