Hastorf characterizes her marvellous book as a ‘meditation on thinking about eating’ (p. xv), but it is much more. It is a richly detailed presentation of a carefully crafted approach to an archaeology of food and social life centered around five themes: materiality, social agency, the senses, economics, and taste. In Chapter 1, her introduction to the book, Hastorf explains each of these themes and how she uses them to develop an approach to food archaeology that places emphasis on cultural concerns and social life—practices and attitudes around food—rather than on food consumption, nutrition, and diet. Hastorf in her own research aims to fill in the ‘large gap between the data and the lived lives of the people’ (pp. xiv–xv); her book sets out the approach she has developed over many years of research into and thinking about the social archaeology of food.
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, ‘Laying the Groundwork’, consists of two chapters. In Chapter 2 Hastorf presents what she terms ‘food structuring principles’ (p. 51), models and social theories for framing the investigation of food: why people eat what they do, what governs food choice in terms of edibility, and how different cultures develop specific notions about nutrition. For Hastorf, food is a transformative agent that when traded or gifted binds people together through commensality, mutual obligation, and reciprocity; she notes that this is a key reason for archaeologists’ great interest in feasting. Another area of study is the crafting of taste, a culturally specific process both gustatory and aesthetic, linked to the senses as well as to the intellect and to practical knowledge. Understanding how ‘taste’ as a cultural phenomenon reflects social change and social differentiation is significant because it reflects social and political processes of control. To illustrate these processes, Hastorf presents overviews of how ‘civilized’ taste developed in Europe and in China and discusses how taste, emulation, and social positioning are inextricably linked to the culinary civilizing process. This leads into a discussion of structuralism, Lévi-Strauss's notion of the culinary triangle (i.e. the ‘raw’, the ‘rotten’, and the ‘cooked’) (Lévi-Strauss, Reference Lévi-Strauss1968) and the widespread influence of the humoral principle in Western Europe and Asia. Humoral refers to the notion of the four humors (bodily fluids) that, when in balance, insure good health; balance can be maintained by consuming the right food, prepared properly, at the right time (Meigs, Reference Meigs1988). Significantly, it is an ontology that considers food as critical in regulating the health of the body and in the formation of personhood. The flavour principle is also relevant here; it is a construct that is responsible for ways that people craft cuisines and decide what is edible and what is not (Rozin, Reference Rozin1973). While the flavour principle is a relatively recent concept of how certain flavours ‘mark dishes, cuisines, and even cultural groups today’ (p. 51), Hastorf suggests that the flavour principle was also at work in the past and that archaeologists should be able to detect the repetitive use of combinations of ingredients and seasonings used by cooks in building the core flavours of regional cuisines. Archaeological publications seldom mentioned flavours until quite recently, as the senses emerge as a new area of archaeological interpretation (Day, Reference Day2013; Hamilakis, Reference Hamilakis2013).
In Chapter 3 (‘The Practices of a Meal in Society’), Hastorf defines meals and mealtimes and the significance of preparation and serving of meals in terms of embodied everyday practice, drawing from Bourdieu's notion of habitus (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1980) and Mary Douglas's ideas about the structure and meanings of meals (Douglas, Reference Douglas1975). Hastorf notes that archaeologists readily identify food categories (e.g. starch) as well as combinations of categories of food and considers specific evidence for a variety of ‘archaeological meals’. She points out that the power of meals cannot be understood outside of the broader context in which they exist; meals are ‘embedded within a culturally constituted cuisine’ (p. 67). Here Hastorf considers the role of cuisines in social economies of taste and ways that cuisine histories are affected by social and political upheaval brought about by famine, conquest, immigration, and other factors. Archaeological cuisines develop as a result of the ‘interplay among cuisine, taste, and belief’ making it important for archaeologists to ‘look for social impacts registered in their data’ (p. 79).
Part II, ‘Food Studies in Archaeology’, is made up of three chapters on methods that archaeologists use to identify and interpret food practices, food economics, and food and politics. Chapter 4 (‘The Archaeological Study of Food Activities’) is a comprehensive overview of archaeological evidence for food practices (production, procurement, processing, storage, cooking, serving, eating, and cleanup and discard). Chapter 5 (‘Food Economics’) deals with the economics of food, in particular, ways in which archaeologists model food production and provisioning systems, the economics of desire, control over access and production, staple and wealth finance, the moral economy of food, and euergetism (public generosity). Of particular interest in the discussion of the economics of food is the recognition that the development of taste traditions and ‘comfort foods’ is not solely the purview of the wealthy but all groups, and that humble foods (e.g., fish and chips, hamburgers) can ‘become the icon not only of a class but also of a nation’ (p. 178). Chapter 6 (‘Food Politics: Power and Status’) provides an in-depth examination of food politics and how they permeate aspects of life in all human societies. This includes ways in which political agendas and ideologies are promulgated through meals; how foods served and eaten and rules governing appropriate comportment of diners foster class distinctions—Appadurai's gastro-politics (Appadurai, Reference Appadurai1981), which in everyday life plays out along gender lines. Drawing upon a combination of ethnographic and archaeological examples, Hastorf devotes considerable attention to how women are both empowered by their actions around food, which she refers to as ‘hearth power’ (p. 193), while at the same time they are often subject to restrictions on what they eat, when and where they eat, and how they behave when they eat. In this chapter she also includes a carefully nuanced discussion of feasts and feasting, types of feasts, and purposes and outcomes of feasts, with case studies of the Mississippian world and medieval Europe that illustrate how archaeologists can probe issues of power, status, decision making, and empowerment through their studies meals and feasts.
The three chapters in Part III, ‘Food and Identity: The Potentials of Food Archaeology’, delve into group identity (Chapter 7, ‘Food in the Construction of Group Identity’), personal identity (Chapter 8, ‘The Creation of Personal Identity: Food, Body, and Personhood’), and how ‘Food Creates Society’ (Chapter 9). Group identity is symbolically constructed through food practices at the scale of the family, community, and nation. Hastorf explores these through social theory around identity construction and the development and manipulation of food traditions: how through its symbolic potency food can serve to forge links among people; how food practices and rules can erect boundaries between groups; how it defines communities through signature foods (e.g. staples such as bread). Food nationalism involves culinary traditions encouraged or imposed by states; it plays an important role in both constructive and destructive ways in situations of culture contact, conquest, imperialism, and colonialism. The conflict experienced among immigrant groups over maintaining traditional foodways and cultivating a transnational cuisine is another phenomenon of contact and mobility. Family and household identity has received intense attention from food anthropologists and archaeologists; Hastorf reviews the literature and discusses her own approach to reconstructing past meals by studying ‘the tools, containers, sources of heat, preparation surfaces, and spaces that are engaged in meal preparation’ (p. 258) that allow her to understand a cook's bodily habitus. She presents a detailed case study of Maya culinary tradition as revealed through the study of family meals and feasts. Chapter 8 considers food, body, and personhood as elements in the creation of personal identities, addressing issues of body concepts, embodiment, the relationship between embodiment, corporeality, and the senses, personhood, gender, and age. Hastorf demonstrates through the clarity of her analysis of individual identity and food consumption at the Neolithic Anatolian settlement of Çatalhöyük the rich interpretation that can be achieved by bringing these many lines of thought about personhood and identity to bear upon ways that food practices intersect with and help to form personal identity.
The book closes with a discussion of how food creates society as a whole and why the study of food in a holistic way, through historical, archaeological, and anthropological perspectives, can enrich our endeavors to learn more about food, meals, and mealtimes in the past and to apply what we learn to present circumstances. Hastorf states that she did not set out to provide a universal theory of food or a manual of best methods for an archaeology of food; rather, she asserts that ‘the study of food is a perspective, an approach, a constellation of questions about the past’ (p. 309). She has demonstrated this most effectively and thoroughly, giving us much that will benefit our own ways of thinking about food and eating. One hopes that this book augurs a new direction for archaeological food studies.
