Crowther Chapter 4 (pp. 107-111)
Cooks and Kitchens
Thinking about Cooking 1
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One of the best known discussions concerning fire takes us back to the practice of cooking our food.
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In 1969, Claude Leví-Strauss published his foundational work, The raw and the cooked: Introduction to the science of
mythology.
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Claude Lévi-Strauss, who regarded cooking as demonstrating the control of culture over nature, and within its techniques
could be found evidence of what distinguished humans from animals.
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This was at the heart of his structuralist analysis of cooking techniques, and it represents one of many attempts to try to
elucidate a pattern or structure that would help explain the deeper meaning of cooking
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In this work he makes numerous points for discussion. Here are a few:
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Both the “savage”/”primitive” mind and the “civilized” mind are the same; one is not superior to another.
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Humans often use binary oppositions to access more complex ideas.
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His work draws from a cross-cultural comparative of mythologies.
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He argued that the function of myths was to resolve the conflicts found between these binary oppositions, to explain
the conflicts.
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He formulated the culinary triangle through which raw natural ingredients are transformed into cultural food by cooking, or
become rotten through a natural transformation.
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Lévi-Strauss considered the application of heat through fire—roasting—which he believed to be the most natural; and the
mediation of water— boiling—which he deemed to be cultural, because it involved some sort of receptacle.
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To further the utility of his model to “admit other categories of cooking”, he took the triangle into a third dimension—the
culinary tetrahedron or tetrahedron of recipes—adding grilling, steaming, oven-roasting, braising, and frying.
Thinking about Cooking 2
• Anthropophagy
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Types of cannibalism anthropophagy)
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Exo-cannibalism is the eating of humans from outside your social group.
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This may be an expression of power, “I am so powerful I can eat you”.
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It may be a war tactic to scare the enemy.
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Endo-cannibalism is the eating of humans from inside your social group.
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One type is survival cannibalism; the most famous examples for Americans are the Donner Party and the Andean
soccer plain crash.
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Other groups honor their death as part of funerary rites; the most famous is the South Fore, Papua New Guinea due
to the introduction of kuru.
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Auto-cannibalism is the eating of self.
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It includes nail-biting.
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It can also be seen in the drinking of one’s own blood or similar activities.
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Paul Shankman, through a close examination of cannibalism.
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Lévi-Strauss (1997, 31) had suggested a correlation would be found between roasting and exo-cannibalism and between
boiling and endo-cannibalism. The society’s structure of oppositions between relatives and enemies should be made
apparent by the different cooking techniques.
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Shankman found 60 accounts: 29 exo-cannibalism, 26 endo-cannibalism, & 5 both.
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The specific prediction of boiling and roasting did not stand the comparative test, with too many cannibals boiling
their enemies and only one roasting (Shankman 1969, p. 63).
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The point of Shankman’s article was to test Lévi-Strauss’s sweeping hypothesis, but he was careful not to reject the
possibility of uncovering parallels between language and cooking, and between cooking and social structure.
Thinking about Cooking 3
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Examination of English cooking terms
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Adrienne Lehrer’s work (1969) reveals the usefulness of the linguistic method and offers further caution about extrapolating
the findings from one language to explain the general phenomenon of human cooking.
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It breaks down over 30 English cooking terms into more and more specialized techniques that are differentiated by the 1)
sources of heat; 2) cooking time; 3) addition of liquids; 4) types of utensils; 5) ingredients; and 6) desired outcomes.
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The general concept of cooking in English includes the following words: boil, simmer, stew, poach, braise, parboil,
steam, reduce, sauté, pan-fry, deep-fry, broil, grill, barbecue, charcoal, plank, bake, roast, shirr, scallop, brown, rissoler,
sear, parch, toast, flambé, and burn.
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As a model, Lehrer’s work reveals the dimensions of possible cooking methods and how these are then chosen by people in
different social contexts, such in a sedentary, stratified society with a differentiated cuisine.
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This table represent lexical fields or semantic domains: Collections of culturally meaningful vocabulary used to talk about an
aspect of the world.