December 4, 2023

Making food/making kin

I’ve been quiet the last few weeks because I’ve been (mostly) on leave, visiting family overseas. The break was refreshing and relaxing, but also it feels great to start thinking about kinship and archaeology again and to be returning to this newsletter project.

One of the things about my family, and one of the things that makes me reflect on my thinking about kinship and kin-making in past societies, is how important food is to our relationships. My kin are fundamentally food-oriented. We cook together, share recipes, argue about the ‘right’ or ‘best’ ingredients, tell stories to each other about meals we’ve eaten and food we’ve cooked (or failed to cook correctly). When my family tells holiday stories, the beads in the narrative thread are restaurants, meals, new pastries, and nice cups of coffee.

This year was the first time in nearly twenty years I spent Thanksgiving in the States with my family. I need to preface this by saying that I have a fraught relationship with Thanksgiving. It is simultaneously an odious public holiday that demands gratitude for profiting from theft and genocide, and the ultimate food-related special day. For my big, food-oriented family, Thanksgiving can be a really special, convivial, and delicious event. This year, aside from cooking, I spent most of the week around the holiday tracing how my own kin network materialised itself in both the food on the table, and the material culture mobilised to prepare and serve it.

In order to host nineteen adults, two infants, and a poodle, my mother and I spent days collecting folding tables and extra chairs from various friends, aunts, uncles, and cousins (all kin by the way – my family includes plenty of non-blood relations), as well as putting out calls on the phone tree for everything from serving spoons to a platter large enough for the turkey. One aunt even lent me her kitchen to finish two pies after an oven-crisis (thankfully resolved!) at my parents’ home. As family arrived, new plates, glasses, and utensils appeared alongside dishes of cooked food ready for reheating. At the end of the meal, all these things were packed up to be sent home (sometimes on the night, sometimes several days later), but the leftovers were also packed up and parceled out – shared among the whole family so everyone could have a bit more of their favourites. Both preparing and cleaning up are communal activities that draw on long histories of family meals (Thanksgiving or otherwise); and the dinner conversation inevitably draws on these stories, bringing to the table family not present or long deceased.

Food and diet are fundamental to most people’s sense of identity. In archaeology, we use a variety of tools to look at how people ate in the past.¹ We study the animal bones and plant remains (both macro and micro) to see what people cultivated or collected. We look at the encrustations and residues in ceramics to understand what people cooked – and sometimes how. My brilliant colleague Shinya Shoda, for example, is trying to disentangle the deep history of cooking techniques like steaming and fermentation in northeast Asia through the analysis of the earliest ceramics in the region.

We can also see traces of dietary practices in the isotopes preserved in their teeth and bones. This includes characteristic traces of social practices like breastfeeding and weaning, as well as the consumption of specific crops, and the types and proportions of meats consumed.

These techniques are well established within the field and become increasingly sophisticated (it seems) with each passing year. They tell us about dietary differences between individuals and help us understand how age, gender, community, and perhaps other aspects of identity shaped and affected the ways people ate.

Of course there are less scientific ways of studying diet as well. Sharing food is a technological system that embraces a suite of other technologies that range from food production (animal husbandry, cultivation, collection, hunting) to food preparation (pyrotechnologies, cooking and preparation techniques, gestures and habitual bodily techniques) to consumption (social factors around the service and consumption of food, rituals and ceremony, disposal or middening).

So we look at the form and distribution of cooking and serving vessels, the wear on cutting tools that speaks to their habitual uses, the distribution of different sorts of food remains or food service tools, the ways food wastes are deployed (sometimes quite monumentally), and the relation of these to the wider suite of material culture, settlement structures, and archaeological data.

And then we try to figure out what it all means – arguably the hardest part.

Anthropologists tell us the (really quite obvious) fact that food — eating it, cooking it, sharing it, disposing of it — is a powerful part of kinship.² How we make and consume food is shaped by our upbringing and develops out of traditions we learn from the people who raise us, and sharing food or eating together can create or cement bonds between people. One way of thinking about kinship is to consider it a sort of relation created through the sharing of powerful substances. These may be bodily substances, for example, blood and milk (real or metaphorical), but they can (and frequently do) also include things like foodstuffs, matter that is not of the body but makes bodily ties between individuals and their communities. My family makes itself with, among many other things, cranberry bread, turkey platters, folding tables, apple pie, stories of cooking disasters past, and recipes shouted across a table or shared over oceans.