Feature Article Human Biology Eats: Contemporary Research and Future Directions ANDREA S. WILEY, 1 * JOHN S. ALLEN, 2 AND ALEXANDRA BREWIS 3 1 Human Biology Program and Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 2 Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center and Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 3 School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona ABSTRACT No abstract. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 24:107–109, 2012. ' 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Human biology eats? Of course humans eat! But what, how much, where, and why—and the consequences for human biology both in the short and long term—are ques- tions that can be answered from a variety of perspectives. Often, these perspectives look past one another, generat- ing answers within narrow scientific or ideological boun- daries. But food is sufficiently important enough that we should, as human biologists, think more deeply and broadly about it. One way to do so is to recognize that food, eating, and related phenomena exist at multiple experiential levels. For example, hunger is a feeling we get when our bodies need food; this is an evolved hormonal, physiological, and neurological set of signals that we share with other ani- mals that motivate us to seek food. Raise the intensity a bit, and add a more expansive cognitive context, and hun- ger goes from being a feeling to an emotion. Finally, hun- ger is a sociopolitical product (derived from social struc- tures and power differentials) and concept, used to distin- guish the ‘‘food secure’’ from the ‘‘food insecure.’’ All of these are, in turn, tied to human biological function. Historically the study of food has been, oddly enough (and despite Levi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked), marginal to anthropology. This is especially puzzling, given its potential as an outstanding domain to realize the ideal of anthropological holism (Wiley, 2006). It is notable though that one of the only early anthropological works on food dealt with hunger, Audrey Richards’ Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe: A Functional Study of Nutrition Among the Southern Bantu (1932), described the ways in which this emotional and physiological state shaped so many aspects of social life, yet said almost nothing of hun- ger’s impact on nutritional status and biological function. Decades later, Sidney Mintz’s political and economic anal- ysis of sugar (Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History , 1985) highlighted both the innate desir- ability of sugar, and how our taste for it emerged at the intersection of historical forces that linked slavery, coloni- alism, industrialization, advertizing, and culinary habits. Such contributions from cultural anthropology demon- strate the power of food to shape our social lives, and yet only hint at the ways in which it shapes our physical ones. This is where human biologists can contribute the most, by adding this piece to the complex biocultural puzzle of human dietary behavior. Obtaining food is a fundamental problem for all living organisms, and adaptations related to diet clearly shape both biology and behavior. Humans are no exception. In the contexts of human evolutionary studies, food sharing, hunting, cooking, dietary shifts toward higher quality diets, and gastronomical flexibility have been invoked as contributors to our large brain, small gut, life history, our propensity for social cooperation, and the demographic success of our species (cf., Milton, 1981; Aiello and Wheeler, 1995; Kaplan et al., 2000; Cunnane et al., 2007; Kingston, 2007; Wrangham, 2009). Exposure to different foods such as milk has also shaped the contemporary genetic diversity in our species. Food processing techni- ques, or culinary traditions made possible by our large brain enhanced our ability to extract nutrients from foods, and became ever more important with the transition to food production and its reliance on a narrower array of foodstuffs than was typical in the preagricultural period (Katz, 1987). With a focus on food, human biologists are in an excel- lent position to merge these two broad areas of investiga- tion, by considering how our food environment—including access to too little or too much, different types of food- stuffs, or the cognitive concept of food—continues to shape our biological lives. Through our concern with both the proximate and ultimate causes and consequences of par- ticular diets and patterns of eating, we can use food to demonstrate the value of a biocultural approach within human biology. But furthermore, dietary behavior is cul- tural behavior, and our choices about food (or lack thereof) ramify across social life, and undoubtedly contribute to social and cultural change. Work in this area also clearly has tremendous policy relevance. If society is to ever suc- cessfully translate scientific knowledge into public health policy aimed at improving diet and health, eating itself must be understood in the overall context of our human biology. The papers in this collection were presented in the ple- nary session at the 2011 Human Biology Association meet- ings. They each address food and eating, human biology and human health, from diverse perspectives. The first three consider how the human evolutionary experience with food informs our present eating patterns, with a vari- ety of biological and health consequences. Lindeberg out- lines the basic premises of ‘‘evolutionary nutrition’’ and some clinical research that provides support for adopting diets that are more closely aligned with those of our ances- tors (or our best approximation of what those might have been). Perhaps no other paradigm has really shaped our understanding of the ‘‘ultimate’’ causes of contemporary chronic diseases (formerly called ‘‘western’’ diseases, but now sadly rife among the world’s populations) than that of evolutionary nutrition, which emphasizes the ways in *Correspondence to: Andrea S. Wiley, Human Biology Program and Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA. E-mail: wileya@indiana.edu Received 13 December 2011; Accepted 17 December 2011 DOI 10.1002/ajhb.22232 Published online 27 January 2012 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary. com). AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY 24:107–109 (2012) V V C 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.