Cooking is Good to Think

Introduction: Why Cooking Now?

One of the things that has surely made food such a fascinating topic for scholars of multiple disciplines is its boundary-crossing aspects. Even more than sex, perhaps, food involves crossing bodily boundaries, transforming the outside into the inside, transforming its substance internally after it has been transformed externally, and literally incorporating it into the very substance of bodies. With subjects like identity, memory and embodiment on our minds, it is not surprising that food has transformed itself from a marginal to a hot topic in the past 20 years of scholarly activity (the focus of popular media on food hasn’t been completely for the same reasons, but that’s another story). That what we eat makes for who we are has been transformed from a witty quotation into scholarly common sense for many. However, while the meaning of food itself has made its way onto the menu of current interests in identity, memory, embodiment and other plats du jour, the subject of cooking remains at most a side dish. Cooking itself seems a transgressive category, lodged between production, exchange and consumption. In the field of anthropology, where everyday life has long been part of the ethnographic project, cooking surprisingly was long only given glancing mention. In early anthropology this could be laid at the feet of the tendency of male ethnographers to simply ignore activities associated with women. Western feminism’s ambivalence towards cooking—seen as simply another domestic “chore” like cleaning the bathroom, thus a source of oppression—meant that the rise of feminist anthropology in the mid-1970s didn’t lead to any noticeable growth in studies of cooking. Indeed, pioneer Michelle Rosaldo, in claiming that ‘the wives of herders, agriculturalists and businessmen lead lives that are conceptualized in remarkably similar terms’ (Rosaldo, 1974: 29 n.8) seemed to imply that ‘domestic’ activities were relatively uninteresting anthropologically speaking, and it was only when women stepped into the so-called ‘public sphere’ that they became involved in socially valued activities of ‘articulat[ing] and express[ing] social differences’ (1974: 29). ¹

The three books under review suggest that cooking’s time has perhaps finally arrived. These books all show cooking as ‘good to think’ about the problems that preoccupy us, indeed that it may be central to addressing questions of who we are, as humans, as members of different social groups, and as women and men. And they certainly show the variety of methods that can be fruitfully brought to bear even on this one piece of the larger food puzzle. Whether their methodological and theoretical diversity simply indicates that a thousand flowers now bloom in food studies, or whether they collectively add up to more than the sum of their parts was very much on my mind as I read these books.

Cooking’s Evolution, Evolution’s Cooking

The biggest divergence is no doubt between Catching Fire and the other two volumes. Catching Fire’s author Richard Wrangham is a biological anthropologist, perhaps best known outside his field for the controversy surrounding some of the claims in his earlier, co-authored book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (1996). Catching Fire is likely to spur less controversy, but it is still a big book, claiming to rewrite our understanding of human evolution, and written in an accessible format meant to attract the popular as much as the scholarly reader—it even includes a front-cover endorsement from British celebrity chef Nigella Lawson. Wrangham goes a step further than Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous claim that the transformation from raw to cooked was crucial to the development of culture. Wrangham argues that cooking, indeed, was the motor of the major evolutionary transformations from habilines to Homo erectus and onward. Wrangham argues that meat-eating may explain some of the earlier evolutionary changes (from australopithicenes to Homo habilis), but the changes that roughly 1.8 million years ago set us on the path toward what we call humanity were the result of the discovery of the benefits of cooked food.

Wrangham’s book is a model of popular science writing, combining a strong overall narrative thread with lots of interesting side stories meant to debunk much of contemporary western dietary wisdom. For example, Wrangham starts off by taking on claims about raw food being the diet adapted to human evolutionary history by showing how inefficient a diet of all raw food would be for reproductive ability (although it may indeed have many health benefits in contemporary, food-oversaturated times). Cooking may destroy some vitamins, it may even create carcinogens, but evolutionarily speaking, the gains in calories would far outweigh these deficiencies (p. 80). Cooking, he shows, unlocks huge stores of energy in food not available in raw or cold-processed forms. He notes, for example, that the protein in cooked eggs is roughly 40% more than that of raw eggs, and that hunter gatherers always prefer their eggs (and most other foods) cooked—(take that Rocky!). Even non-human primates seem to express a strong preference for cooked over raw food, as taste mechanisms seem designed to prefer higher-energy foods. But more than just increased energy, cooked foods allowed us to significantly decrease the time and energy devoted to digestion. ‘Fire does a job our bodies would otherwise have to do’ (p. 80). Less time digesting is literally more time for other activities, suggesting to me a slight revision to Marx’s classic formulation of the ideal life of humankind: ‘to hunt (and gather) in the morning, cook in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner’. ²

He then builds his case against the predominant view that meat-eating and increased hunting skill were the main motors driving evolutionary change, and that cooking came rather recently, and was a ‘valuable tradition without any biological or evolutionary significance’ (p. 11). While he agrees that meat-eating may explain the transition from australopithecines to H. habilis, it is at the next key transition—to H. erectus—that Wrangham offers his explanation of cooking. Although there is no archaeological evidence for fire use beyond around 700,000 years ago—indeed, no such evidence would be likely to have survived—Wrangham suggests several key physiological changes in H. erectus that indicate the control of fire and the use of it for cooking. Along with a larger cranial capacity, H. erectus has both smaller teeth and a smaller ribcage and pelvis than its ancestors, indicating a smaller gut for digesting and the fact that it was softer, indeed, cooked food that was being consumed. H. erectus also seemed to lose the climbing ability of H. habilis; according to Wrangham this argues for the fact that H. erectus was sleeping on the ground rather than in trees. From this he adduces that H. erectus controlled fire as protection against predators. At the same time, controlling fire to cook food made the food available in the tops of trees less important. From there Wrangham argues that advances in cooking, rather than advances in hunting (or even the need for larger brains to plan warfare as some have suggested) led to further brain development and more recent evolution:

Although the breakthrough of using fire at all would have been the biggest culinary leap, the subsequent discovery of better ways to prepare the food would have led to continual increases in digestive efficiency, leaving more energy for brain growth. (p. 127)

All this extra brain growth, of course, provided the platform for language and complex social relations. Wrangham considers what cooking might have meant in particular for gender relations, drawing on anthropological studies of contemporary hunter gatherer food preparation. Fortunately Wrangham exercises some due caution here, unlike many in the field of evolutionary psychology ready to make up stories to read contemporary gendered behaviors, such as the supposed female preference for shopping, back into the African Savannah of our ancestors. Wrangham recognizes that contemporary hunter gatherers are indeed contemporary, not windows into the ancient past. And he is familiar with the literature on hunter gatherer societies from cultural anthropology. Indeed, while diversity and plasticity of gender roles is a staple of cultural anthropology, Wrangham correctly notes that the anthropological literature reveals almost no cases of societies in which men take primary responsibility for the task of everyday cooking; this is a job almost universally apportioned to women. ³ Thus it doesn’t seem inherently unreasonable to speculate on what social relations might have led to this familiar division of labor. Wrangham argues first that cooking freed human males (as opposed to other primates such as chimpanzees) to devote larger amounts of time to hunting. While women were imagined to gather food in the morning and spend the rest of the day processing and cooking it, men could then spend their days on hunting expeditions (or other activities), with the possibility of a cooked meal come success or failure at the end of the day. Cooked is crucial here: if gathered food was raw, the amount of time involved in chewing and then digesting it would have severely curtailed other activities. ⁴ Why would women participate in such a system? Wrangham asks. Cooking does not inherently require male–female cooperation, but by its nature it does make the cook vulnerable because it takes time and produces smells that might lure those intent on theft. Thus, ‘having a husband ensures that a woman’s gathered foods will not be taken by others; having a wife ensures the man will have an evening meal’ (p. 154). Wrangham refers to this system as a ‘primitive protection racket’ (p. 154), but one that for him holds the key to marriage. Not only marriage, but the origins of society writ large, since husbands could not be there all the time, and thus ‘needed to use their bonds with other men in the community to protect their wives from being robbed’ (p. 154).

While Wrangham does hedge this idea with caveats, it rests on a few assumptions that are worth disentangling. First, it is premised on the old Hobbesian idea that life before society was a ‘war of all against all’. Not that Wrangham suggests the prevalence of warfare, a recent invention to be sure, but rather a general state of mistrust and potential violence. Wrangham admits that there is considerable etiquette in hunter gatherer societies, where stealing is the rare exception. He takes this, however, as proof that society is at work, since among chimpanzees, stealing food from weaker rivals is the norm. The underlying idea here is that greed and selfishness are somehow natural, whereas sharing and cooperation are only the product of culture. Even if we except this Hobbesian premise, Wrangham seems to only be able to imagine social relations in terms of pair bonds. Why couldn’t his first cooks establish relations among siblings as primary kin, as we find in many contemporary small-scale societies? For that matter, if protection was key, why not female cooks bonding together to protect each other and share food? They would already have fire to defend themselves with. But as many anthropologists, most recently David Graeber (2011), have shown, there is nothing more primordial about competition than cooperation, it is only our contemporary capitalist ideology that finds the ‘truth’ of humanity in the former rather than the latter. Thus such early groupings as Wrangham envisions could have just as likely been large groups that did not privilege any particular kinship relations, but shared among the entire group. As a food scholar, I find that it is certainly attractive to think of cooking as responsible for the origins of our species. I am hesitant, however, to go along with the idea that cooking (everywhere and in every form?) led to the same type of social relations and relations of dominance.

Conflicting Values, Conflicting Practices

While not framed as such, questions of gender identity, cooperation and dominance are central to the other volumes under consideration. Jean-Claude Kaufmann’s The Meaning of Cooking traces a somewhat different history of the relationship of cooking to the origins of society. The Meaning of Cooking is based on the author’s 22 in-depth interviews with French women (and two men). Himself a sociologist, he draws from other recent studies of everyday cooking by French scholars from a number of disciplines, and on a longer history of anthropological speculations on the role of cooking and on the development of table manners (Norbert Elias’s work is a touchstone). Kaufmann’s main goal is to give a nuanced account of recent changes in cooking practices, which popular media tend to refer to in terms such as ‘the breakdown of the family meal’ or ‘the death of cooking.’ While Kaufmann does argue for deep changes in cooking, society and identity—he dubs contemporary society ‘fridge culture’ to suggest the focus on individualization and choice in recent times—he paints a complex picture of what this means for gender relations and relations between the generations.

While Wrangham sees the social relations surrounding cooking as a template for male dominance, Kaufmann sees these original social relations in much more structuralist terms, positing the need for society to regulate the flows of people and food, just as it regulated procreation through the incest taboo. Indeed dietary taboos were more basic, Kaufmann suggests, than the incest taboo because of greater daily concern. Thus the point, in early society, was to find ways to make sure that ‘those who had sex together did not share food’ (p. 52). ⁵ Less about the origins of the pair-bond, Kaufmann’s argument is that cooking in early human society (no dates are specified) was about separating men and women either literally or symbolically (through totemic practices or practices of eating separately that can be found in many societies today). These thoughts on the original human society give way to an account of the development of meals in the West, which Kaufmann argues show a slow transition from sacred (dining with the Gods) to secular, and only in recent times become a celebration of the now sacred concept of ‘the family’. Kaufmann suggests that this history is important because survivals of these earlier practices are still part of the contemporary landscape even if they are now largely unconscious: the importance of the family table is a reflection of the original importance of the altar table in sacrificial practices. Thus he argues that the much discussed contemporary ‘family meal’ is part of our longue durée quest for ‘communion’ with higher values through food.

Kaufmann’s interview subjects are more interested in what they see as the recent history of family meals, particularly the ‘traditional’ patriarchal and disciplinary meal against which contemporary practices are compared, contrasted and judged. Kaufmann draws on Anthony Giddens’s ‘reflexive modernity’ thesis to suggest the importance of the appearance of ‘choice’ in contemporary identities. It is in ‘deciding’ that family meals should be more egalitarian, reflecting what each member ‘wants’ rather than what is imagined as a rigid imposition of tradition that families hash out the contours of identity. The model of discipline and gender and generational hierarchy as the basis of the family meal is now replaced by an ideal of communication, as family members debate whether allowing television at dinner is an aid or a hindrance to healthy family life: ‘The fact that we talk to each other is living proof that we are indeed a family. Prune and Candy dream of having real conversations and that is why they dislike television so much’ (p. 104).

When it comes to cooking itself, Kaufmann captures with amazing subtlety how his almost exclusively female informants negotiate the contradictory injunctions ‘something quick, something good’ (p. 85), and all of the dynamics that go into their practices. Kaufmann shows that despite changes, and claims that 20 minutes is the average daily time spent cooking, the ‘death’ of cooking has, in fact, been greatly exaggerated. What we see instead is diversification of cooking purposes: everyday cooking may be losing out, with women in his study whipping up quick meals on weekdays, but leisure cooking for friends or for Sunday dinners on weekends may involve hours of planning and preparation. This is an essential way, Kaufmann argues, that the competing demands of love, communication, individualization and time-management are balanced:

The increase in the number of tables is simply the most visible aspect of the even greater increase in the number of modes of dietary sociability. Practices are becoming more individualized but we also want to enjoy the experience of being part of a group. Freedom coexists alongside discipline.… The amount of time spent on meals varies enormously. We spend a long time making special meals but we also rely upon the fridge system … (p. 88)

Kaufmann does an excellent job of drawing from his interviews to show all the minute negotiations and internal dialogues that go into the daily cooking process. He notes that the women in his sample were still expected to do the great majority of the cooking, but the overall picture portrayed is not one of oppression and resistance, even if sometimes framed in a language of strategies and tactics that recalls de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life (1984). ⁶ Indeed, it is perhaps here that Kaufmann makes his most important contribution, in showing the ways that all kinds of injunctions or ‘values’ related to food, family, health and taste are constantly mediated by semi-conscious habits or practices, some of them with long histories, as noted above. These habits, ways of using time in the kitchen, complex planning of daily and weekly meal cycles, memory traces from childhood, belie his informants’ attempts to use the categories available to them—‘natural’, ‘light’, ‘simple’, “self-sacrificing"—themselves full of contradictions as well. For example, an informant who is revolted by foods that are not ‘fresh and natural’ later admits that she loves canned green beans ‘because they remind her of her family’s garden’. Another rejects frozen foods, but fish is OK ‘because it is frozen at sea’ (p. 22), a justification that Kaufmann sees as hiding a need for convenience. ‘The categories get more and more complicated.… No matter how powerful and correct they may be, ideas usually have only a limited power to influence something that is, in anthropological terms, so complex’ (p. 23).

One of the strategies that Kaufmann himself employs is making a bold claim with a sharp contrast, and then slowly suggesting that things are more complicated. For example, Kaufmann introduces the ‘reflexive modernity’ idea in claiming that the transmission of cooking knowledge no longer takes place from one generation to the next, as young people ‘are now primarily individuals who learn to construct their own lives and who are attempting to turn their dreams into projects’ (p. 209). But after making this claim that there has been a major shift, Kaufmann suggests that, in fact, the transmission of cooking knowledge in the past was not by any means smooth or uncontested, as older women held on to their secrets so as not to have their centrality in the family usurped (p. 203). At the same time Kaufmann also suggests that, despite the explicit demands of reflexive modernity to form one’s own identity, in fact much knowledge still does get passed unwittingly through all kinds of unconscious schemata and simply through proximity. ‘Usually, children watch and learn without realizing what they are doing’ (p. 204). Here, as elsewhere, Kaufmann amends Giddens’s view of modernity with more attention to emotion, the senses and the unconscious.

Kaufmann is at his best in drawing a rich store of insights from seemingly mundane, everyday activities. However, his account is oddly lacking a sense of placement or specificity. Instead, he uses ‘we’ throughout to talk about changing attitudes and practices. There is no sense that there might be different class, ethnic/racial, regional or urban/rural distinctions cross-cutting these almost ideal-typical depictions of a new meal regime (with unspecified variations). And given the history of the meal that occupies the first section of the book, it doesn’t seem that this tale is even particularly French, but rather part of a modern condition that ‘we’, presumably, all share. This is a shame, given the fact that there is a particular politics of the meal in contemporary France that might be explored (indeed, in the fall of 2010 the official application of ‘the French meal’ was accepted as part of Unesco’s World Intangible Heritage).

Emplacing Cooking

Emplacement and particularity is certainly not lacking in the third volume under review, Carole Counihan’s A Tortilla is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. Counihan’s book makes for interesting juxtaposition with The Meaning of Food: she too is methodologically focused on in-depth interviews which she conducted with 19 middle-aged and older women, raising questions of food provisioning, planning, preparation and the family meal. Counihan’s study is set in the majority ‘Mexicano’ town of roughly 900 people in Southern Colorado. The community doesn’t think of itself as ‘Mexican-American’, but as the descendants of those Spanish and Mexican populations that inhabited the region which was then considered “Greater Mexico" in the middle of the 19th century. Counihan provides the reader with a quite nuanced sense of the shifting boundaries of identity, as the community struggles with its sense of self in relation to Anglos and, since the late 1960s, to Chicano identities. But it is clear that a strong sense of community identity remains, as expressed in one informant’s claim:

Everybody goes to bed at the same time, and everybody gets up at the same time, and there’s hardly anybody going against the grain. We all eat the same things at the same time, and we all go to the store and buy the same specials. Sameness is important, sameness is so important. (p. 23)

Counihan, like Kaufmann, is interested in parsing out such claims and showing the considerable diversity beneath seeming homogeneity, diversity in identities and daily practices within a distinct set of community foodways.

Counihan uses her interviews to sketch out a ‘traditional’ set of foodways embedded in various kinds of subsistence practices of raising animals, fishing, farming, and gardening and gathering. It is very much embedded in the particularities of the San Luis Valley, where access to water for raising animals and growing crops was at a premium. Throughout the book, Counihan tends to take an interpretive back seat to the words of her informants. While providing framing and occasional commentary throughout the book, Counihan lets her informants have the dominant voice. This writing style gives a strong sense of individual personalities and how they put together reflections on foodways with the many personal, social and political issues that make up their ‘food-centered life histories’ (p. 1). This allows the reader to actually see the process of remembering at work, as the women make connections in the process of recollection: ‘We made a lot of sausage and morcillas. Oh, my goodness, I forgot about that’ (p. 79). As the mostly older informants remember the practices of their childhood, they draw out some of the interrelations between the environment, the social and the sensory, accessed not only in memories, but also in a few dreams that Counihan records, one of which:

showed the links between commensality and family by describing the fish caught in the river, the smells of wood smoke and potatoes frying, the birthday cake for Jesus, and the set table. Her dream described a common scene in Antonito. (p. 53)

Unfortunately, the relationship of food to land and landscape has been attenuated by an almost complete abandonment of local, small-scale production (p. 90). As Counihan summarizes: ‘Over the past sixty years, local horticulture and gathering have declined to almost zero in Antonito, and, like most Americans, people purchased almost all of their food. I knew only one person who had a vegetable garden in Antonito’ (p. 196).

In looking at the realm of consumption practices, however, a more complex picture of continuity and change emerges. Counihan, for example, paints a strong correlation between cooking and women’s power and/or agency, but also shows how several women whom she interviewed were able to negotiate the right not to cook, but to have cooking responsibility undertaken by sisters or husbands. She also shows how women’s food-related work, in producing and preserving crops, raising chickens or cooking, translated into their ability to earn separate incomes through direct sales or through going into food work in the public sphere, all of which translated into more egalitarian marriages. Like Kaufmann, Counihan shows how women’s experience of cooking was split between what one woman describes as a sense of ‘drudgery when it was routine and compulsory but a great satisfaction when she had time and could be creative’ (p. 121). Janet DeHerrera reflects insightfully on her experience of the creative process:

On occasion, if I’m allowed to be creative—my mind changes from one slot to another, my brain, totally creative, I’m really into it, and I’m getting pleasure. It’s something chemical almost, because I’m creating, it has to be something I thought up. Something I didn’t get from anybody else. I’m trying this out. Then we unveil and then see the reaction. So I do see it as an artist; I’m an artist then, and that’s when I get a lot of satisfaction and happiness from creating. (p. 121)

One of the main differences between Counihan’s and Kaufmann’s views of the meaning of cooking is the extent in Antonito that food practices extend beyond the household into such community activities as sharing with friends and neighbors, extended family gatherings, and funeral food practices (as well as the association of food with witchcraft and envy). Women’s control of cooking here becomes an important way of redistributing resources along various networks of kin and friends. It is in this sense that cooking breaks down any notion of public and private, and it clearly shows the significance of women’s control over food in exerting agency over life’s challenges, even if many women also found their responsibility for cooking a burden. Counihan presents, for example, the story of Monica Taylor at age 17 being inducted into cooking by her grandmother and aunts. In this case learning did indeed follow what Kaufmann calls the old regime, in which knowledge is explicitly passed from one generation to the next. Still, even here things are more complex as different aunts compete to transmit their distinct versions of family recipes. In the end, she becomes the exclusive carrier of the recipe of her great-grandmother from Spain for biscochito for future generations:

every other grandchild had always asked for that recipe and I am still the only one who has it. They all asked Grandma for it, but Grandma said, ‘No, you can’t have it. … I’ll pick one person when I get ready to croak to have it.’ That was Grandma’s deal. She said, ‘You don’t hand this to anybody until you feel it’s time.’ (p. 128)

Monica Taylor also notes her great aunts’ advice that Counihan refers to as ‘a recipe for agency’:

Nothing is ever going to be exactly the way you want it to be. However life is, that is how your tortilla comes out. So however you rolled out your tortilla, maybe it wasn’t quite round, but you ate it because you made it. (p. 128)

Counihan sees major changes coming not only from the fact that the community of Antonito no longer self-provisions but depends on the global food supply, but also because, much like in Kaufmann’s account, young Antonitans are less attached to the more time-consuming ‘traditional’ foodways of their parents and grandparents. Unfortunately, there are none of the younger generation among Counihan’s voices (her youngest interviewee was born in 1968) who might confirm or dispute the sense of loss depicted by the older generation. Counihan emphasizes that the community still eats on a continuum between Mexicano and ‘American’, though she suggests that it is the older generation that is invested in the Mexicano side of the continuum, with its values of family and community, and the younger generation that is embracing fast food and the potential loss of community identity and autonomy that goes with it (p. 199).

Conclusion: Cooking’s Secrets

The centrality that Wrangham has given to cooking in the story of human evolution provides an ideal frame for the cooking-centered explorations of Counihan and Kaufmann. Both ethnographies challenge, however, any simple assignment of cooking to a ‘primitive protection racket’ while still exploring the unequal distribution of gendered power implicit in the notion that domestic cooking is women’s duty. It is interesting to compare and contrast Counihan's and Kaufmann’s approaches as perhaps reflecting the difference in anthropological and sociological approaches to these issues. Both authors base their studies around in-depth interviews rather than observations, which might provide a different perspective on some of the ways that cooking relates to gendered power. ⁷ And both see major changes in cooking practices associated with “modernity" or simply contemporary times and changes in the kind of food systems that affect people’s lives, though Counihan’s study, because of its retrospective, life-history approach, is situated more avant la déluge, while Kaufmann’s is in the midst of change. Counihan, as noted, contextualizes her interviews within the complex specificities of a particular place shaped by a specific history, landscape and political economy. By contrast, Kaufmann situates his interviews within a much more generalized narrative of historical shifts from the ‘old regime’ to contemporary times. Kaufmann’s interview materials are all quoted and cited in service of his argument, while Counihan, by contrast, is more committed to presenting the complexities of life histories, whether or not they serve to make more general points. Thus while both authors present ‘diversity’ within the beliefs and practices of their interview subjects, Kaufmann’s diversity is also in the service of the general—a model and its alternatives—whereas Counihan’s allows the reader to take her materials in multiple directions not already mapped out by the author. Kaufmann provides richness by moving more into the subject: by looking at cooking from the point of view of timing dishes, planning shopping, use of recipes, etc. Counihan provides richness by presenting interviews that move outward, from food provisioning and cooking to community celebrations and interrelations, to her informants’ thoughts on the environment, gender and ethnic/racial identities. Without overemphasizing the point, Counihan’s ethnography, by providing voices of women who negotiated cooking with men and other family members, suggests some of the subtle trade-offs involved for women in embracing the identity of a good cook in the family and in the community. In contrast to this light touch, Kaufmann often wants to reveal the contradictions in statements of his informants, such as women’s claims of self-sacrifice that mask ‘manipulative tactics’ to ‘exploit their family’s likes and dislikes in order to make their own lives easier’ (p. 229). Analyses such as these raise questions about Kaufmann’s positionality—both as part of the ‘we’, in claims that ‘We have, for better or worse, entered the modern world of freedom and uncertainty, and that influences the way we eat’, while at the same time able to stand outside and view such contradictions. While Counihan’s discussion might at times have benefited from more comparative anthropological discussion (for example, of notions of ‘envy’ in the community), Kaufmann’s claims to understand contradictions that exist inside the heads of his informants cry out for some discussion of reflexivity and the positionality of the researcher. Finally, Wrangham’s claims for the centrality of food to who we are, as humans and as men and women, becomes more nuanced when cooking moves beyond ‘primitive protection racket’, and into the complex domains of value, practices, power and agency. Taken together, the similiarities and differences of these three volumes, and the many convergences and divergences of their analyses, suggest that cooking—like the grandmother with her recipes and special ingredients—has only begun to reveal its secrets.