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Key points
- The foods we eat are based on cultural assumptions, which are notoriously hard to recognize; anthropology may help us unpack these.
- Food is also fundamentally social: The biggest shifts we've seen in the culinary world aren't technological innovations, but sociological ones.
- Language is polysemous and dynamic; the same words can mean very different things to different groups, and this symbolism is constantly changing.
Applying anthropology to business means asking the big questions. How does communication influence culture? How does language continue to evolve? And what are the hidden assumptions that shape our consumer behavior and attitudes towards food?
These are the questions that design anthropologist Adam Gamwell explores on a daily basis. They are also among the many questions he explores on his popular podcast, This Anthro Life. In this two-part interview, Adam shares this anthropological perspective. In part 1, below, he connects the dots between culture, language, social taboos, and food.
It seems that our attitudes towards the foods we eat are based on cultural views, assumptions, and taboos.
Matt Johnson: Since you have a background in cultural anthropology, sustainability, and food, I’m curious about how to see the connection between these? For example, insects may provide a perfectly nutritious, sustainable source of protein, but the (perhaps unexamined) attitudes towards them may prevent their widespread adoption. How do you see this playing out and are these hindrances things that can be overcome?
Adam Gamwell: What we commonly eat is largely dictated by culture. Insects and sustainability provide an interesting question into how and why people change their minds about what they will and won’t eat. You may ask someone why they eat what they do, and they’ll tell you they try to eat healthily and are mildly aware or feel society should eat more sustainably.
But then ask them if they would ever eat insects—given that they are a healthy and sustainable source of protein—and most people will likely say no thanks. Or sure, I’d at least try it. As anthropologist Margaret Mead put it, what people think, what people do, and what people say they do are entirely different things.
If we’re trying to change behavior, i.e., getting people to focus more on health and sustainability around food, we have to understand not just cultural attitudes today, but also what historical particularisms, as Franz Boas called them, what unique events in history shaped those attitudes. Take quinoa. The golden grain has joined the pantheon of so-called superfoods, nutrient-dense foods that carry with them connotations of health, longevity, naturalness, and maybe the environment. It turns out historically, quinoa went from being one of the sacred crops to Andean South American peoples for thousands of years to being banned and shunned by Spanish colonists and then associated as food for the rural poor. In other words, middle-class and wealthier urban Andeans came to see the food as essentially backward, low class, and socially inferior—the same characteristics they assigned to rural and poor farmers. Food tends to take on the qualities people associate with other groups.
Food is social. Over the past half-century, following cultural trends in healthier eating, sustainable and organic farming, and desires for authenticity and connectedness, quinoa (and many Andean crops that had been deemed inferior) underwent a tremendous amount of cultural reworking. Now it is the poster child of the Peruvian Gastronomy Movement, the darling of superfoodies, a point of cultural pride for rural farming communities, and one of the most important and robust crops for mitigating the effects of a changing climate. This tells us that perceptions, attitudes, and even taboos can change.
So what’s a food sustainability entrepreneur to do? Understand cultural taboos. In the case of eating insects, you can change people’s behaviors if you can successfully nudge people’s associations by 1) Removing the visible ick factor, and 2) Aligning with positive cultural notions of food—sustainability, high protein, nutritious, comfort, etc.
You don’t even need to go all the way to insects to see how this works. As consumers became warier of sugar in sodas and thus became less likely to drink soda, bottling companies started selling diet and sugar-free versions that align with (and influence) changing consumer perceptions of what is good to drink. People could continue to drink their soda without the feelings of guilt or associations of being unhealthy. They’re making the taboo acceptable by changing their form.
It’s amazing how specialized and community-specific language can be—especially when we examine how online communities speak to each other.
Matt Johnson: Each platform and the online community seems to have its own unique communication style—rich with emojis, GIFs, cultural references, and slang which “outsiders'' aren't privy to. How do you see the connection between language (broadly defined) and online culture/subcultures?
Adam Gamwell: Language is a tool for assigning, referencing, and expressing meaning. Creating insider-only language builds community and fosters intergroup cohesion. It’s really no different from any offline community, except members don’t have to be colocalized. Expressing oneself with emojis and memes is just a way to represent belonging to a group.
Why I love emojis, GIFs, and memes, in particular, is because they’re kind of like the digital equivalent to pictography, a form of writing that uses representational, pictorial drawings (think stop signs), and hieroglyphics, a form of writing that uses drawings as phonetic (pronounceable) letters. Memes, by and large, are used for humorous commentary. Emojis add more expressiveness to text. I hope the success and global adoption of these forms of communication help us realize that alphabetic writing is just one of the many creative ways humans express themselves.
The same words—or symbols—can mean radically different things to different groups. And those meanings will change over time too. Emojis were invented in Japan as a way to cut down on bandwidth issues from people sending photos on their mobile phones (sounds ironic today, right?). But they’ve inspired people all over the world and are now accessible on every smartphone. They provide another way to express ourselves beyond letters or characters. What I love about them is that they are intentionally open to interpretation.
And that interpretability is precisely what seems to be annoying so many Gen-Zers about Millennials, who supposedly have ruined emojis and use them wrong. This gets to a fundamental anthropological question—who gets to decide what is the “correct” way to use a language or system of expression and why? The answer directly highlights how we use language to draw boundaries around who belongs in a group and who doesn’t.
This is part 1 of 2 part interview with Adam Gamwell. Part 2 can be found here.
This post also appeared on the consumer psychology blog PopNeuro
