Scattered among a wide variety of social-scientific journals and anthologies
dealing primarily with issues other than food are many valuable ethnographic
essays on food systems; we cannot begin to mention them all. We should note,
however, the debates among those who study hunter-gatherers over optimal foraging
theory, a behavioral-ecological model which posits that people adopt food
strategies maximizing their caloric intake per unit of time, with the caloric costs
of those food strategies taken into account. The theory itself has been propounded
(Kaplan & Hill 1985) and contested (Thomas 1992), as have its implications for
the study of hunters' motivations for food-sharing (Hawkes 1991, Bliege Bird &
Bird 1997, Wood & Hill 2000).
In-depth studies of food systems remind us of the pervasive role of food in
human life. Next to breathing, eating is perhaps the most essential of all human
activities, and one with which much of social life is entwined. It is hoped that
more anthropologists will accord food the central place in their ethnographies that
it occupies in human existence.