Summoning the hunting-and-gathering spirit!

Having now completed two weeks of classes, I can confirm that I am immensely enjoying the academic substance and milieu of my course as well as the substance and aromas that emerge from our little flat's kitchen!

This week, in my Anthropology of Food core class, Food, Body, and Society, the readings and discussions have focused on humans' paleolithic food consumption patterns as hunter and gatherers and why human population shifted to food production in 8500BC. This transition, after all, is the birth of our relationship with food today. Amazingly, it turns out that hunting and gathering was a pretty good way to live: nutritional needs were met with little effort, want was little, sleep and leisure were plenty, and a seemingly harmonious balance of population and ecology existed. Sounds like utopia! So what would drive us to produce/cultivate our own food if farming involved long painstaking hours of hard work?

The transition to food production took place over thousands of years and occurred for many different reasons in different areas. It is guessed that a combination of climate change, an increase in domesticable wild plants, the cumulative development of technology, and an increase in population density could have all contributed to this complex transition. But to know exactly why a person or group chooses one means of subsistence over another seems beyond our grasp, especially 10,500 years later. I can barely understand my own decisions made at a grocery store two days ago: why did I buy Ben N Jerry's instead of

Haagen-Dazs? Or perhaps more appropriately, why did I leave a sunny, warm land abundant with avocados and peach pies, for a damp, cold island with marmite and fruitcake?

Like our hunting and gathering ancestors, (but on a much less significant scale) I too have shifted my life path without knowing the outcome and have done so, as I imagine they did, in the hope that it will lead to a more fruitful life. And in the meantime, I will enjoy the journey, as seen in a recent dinner we made: juicy hand-packed pork, onion, and mustard sausages, a mix of caramelized onions, bell peppers and savoy cabbage, broccoli with aged English Cheddar cheese, potato and leek soup, and a pint of Fuller's 1885 oak-aged ale. I am enjoying the bounty of England.