Virtuous Vegetarians

Throughout this book, we will feature research relevant to eating. We have selected eating for this treatment because human eating is relevant to both nature and culture.

On the nature side, eating is natural; all animals eat. Eating is a vital means of getting what one needs for survival, which, as we saw, was a crucial goal of biological life. Social animals are social precisely because their social interactions help them get food and thereby to survive. Like other animals, humans feel bad when they do not have enough to eat, and these bad feelings motivate people to seek food. Also like other animals, humans quickly learn to dislike and avoid foods that make them sick.

Humans resemble other animals in their need to eat regularly. But eating has been transformed by culture. Unlike all other animals, humans go on diets, have elaborate systems of etiquette and table manners, cook their food, experiment endlessly with recipes, and sometimes serve meals to total strangers.

Another uniquely human trait is the tendency to reject certain categories of food based on ideas. Many religions, for example, prescribe or forbid particular foods, especially on certain days. Based on religious views, some people will eat beef but not pork, while others eat pork but not beef.

Nature, Culture, and Money

Money is such a familiar feature of human life that we take its existence and power for granted. All countries in the world today use money, so culturally it is nearly universal by now.

Looked at from the perspective of nature, however, money is quite unusual. No species of plant or animal (other than humans) uses money. Money is thus a product of human culture, but it is estimated to be only about 3,000 years old (Davies, 2002), which means that early civilizations did not have it. It is much too recent to have shaped human nature biologically. There is no “money instinct.”

Clearly people want money, and many people work long and hard to get it. Attempting to explain this in biological terms, Lea and Webley (2005) started with the analogy of a tool. Just as animals ure tools to get what they want, people use money to get what they want. Biology has programmed humans (like other animals) to want things, so people also come to want money because it enables them to get these things. This part of the theory seems straightforward. Like any tool, money is desired not for itself but for what can be done with it.

Culture and Human Social Life: CULTURE DEFINED

Culture is thus an advanced way of being social. If we think of evolution as proceeding from simple creatures

Culture is harder to define than nature. (In fact, Boyd and Richerson, 1985, listed 164 different definitions of culture that different thinkers have used!) Th e term originally referred to a system of farming (a usage one can still see in terms like agriculture). Then it came to refer to musical and artistic achievements, such as paintings and symphonies. Social scientists eventually began to use the term to refer to what a large group of people has in common. French culture, for example, refers to everything that French people share: language, values, food preferences, a style of government, a place (France), and a shared sense of connection to the artistic and historical achievements of other French people.

For present purposes, the important thing about culture is that it is a kind of social system. Just as a pack of wolves or a school of fish is a social system, so is France. But there are obvious differences. France is much more complex than a pack of wolves. It is rich in symbols, meanings, and information. There are more different kinds of relationships among the French people than among the wolves.