Studying Meals Beyond the Nature/Culture Dichotomy; or, Why Commensality Cannot Be Reduced to “Veneer Theory” Analysis

• This presentation introduces ideas that have been growing for about five years, finally leading to a submitted manuscript during the summer of 2022. The paper is an in-depth analysis of the social biology of why humans seem to have a more or less universal appeal to eat in groups. I call this “commensal attraction”, drawing on the sociological concept of commensality: the practice of eating together (Jönsson, Michaud, and Neuman 2021).The basics of the paper will be outlined, followed by an argument about what Frans de Waal famously called “veneer theory” in his discussion about human morality (de Waal, 2006). In short, veneer theory refers to a theoretical analysis that reduces human behaviors, preferences, values and so forth to no more than a sociocultural furnace with no foundation (at least not explicitly) in human evolution. For de Waal, the criticism was directed at moral philosophy that, to him, overlooked how the human capacity for moral judgment is a product of evolution, not a just a veneer of an exclusively human capacity for reason that allows us to depart from our “bad nature”.My argument is that the same holds for how we approach meals. If I am correct in thinking that commensal attraction is due, in part, to how shared meals manifest evolved human traits such as social learning, cooperation, ritualized behavior, and symbolic thinking, then veneer theory analyses are clearly insufficient. Eating in groups and generously sharing food is not a cultural taming of naturally egoistic urges to grab it for yourself and run. Both are equally natural and cultural aspects of what it is to be human.Referencesde Waal, Frans. 2006. Morally evolved: primate social instincts, human morality, and the riseand fall of “veneer theory”." In Primates and philosophers: how morality evolved.Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober, eds. Pp. 1-58. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress.Jönsson, Håkan, Maxime Michaud, and Nicklas Neuman. 2021. What is commensality?: acritical discussion of an expanding research field. International Journal ofEnvironmental Research and Public Health 18 (12):6235.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Biologi -- Evolutionsbiologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Biological Sciences -- Evolutionary Biology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Kostvetenskap

Food, Nutrition and Dietetics

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)