One of the most essential pillars of culture is food

– Written by Mimoza IRTEM, Prospect Youth Representative of The Light Millennium Global to the United Nations Department of Global Communications

[LMGlobal.Org] One of the most essential pillars of culture is food, with almost every culture having a specific cuisine and special traditions centered around food. While some cultures praise vegetarianism or limiting the intake of meat, some cultures promote a meat-heavy diet. Similarly, some religious holidays involve fasting to emphasize the importance of food, while other celebrations include feasts with tables full of food to celebrate abundance. Even though each culture differs in its food traditions, these practices have been around for a long time, hence the name tradition.

“Human mind is a product of evolutionary learning.”

Looking at the root of these practices, we see years of learning, conditioning, and adapting, which is also called social evolutionary learning. Years of implicit and explicit transmission of food-related practices have established food cultures worldwide, and this has affected each culture differently. This essay will examine how these food cultures come into life through social learning and how the established practices affect individuals on a personal level and society on a larger level, which shows that the human mind is a product of evolutionary learning.

In order to analyze the effects of cultural transmission on societies, it is essential to define what cultural transmission is and identify the ways in which cultural transmission occurs. Cultural transmission can be defined as the process of learning in which the values, actions, and norms of a culture are passed down to future generations. As a result, cultural transmission facilitates the spread of behaviors within social groups and may lead to the establishment of stable traditions in both human and non-human animals (Truskanov & Prat, 2018).

Furthermore, there are two ways in which these practices are transmitted: explicit and implicit learning. Explicit learning occurs through the reinforcement of cultural ideologies and the motivation to follow these ideologies through societal pressures. So, explicit learning occıurs through the efforts of older generations to keep certain traditions going. Implicit learning, on the other hand, occurs from mere exposure. The younger generation is exposed to the life of the older generation, and as time passes, they learn their way of living, which is also called automatic attitude inference (Kashima et al., 2015).

An example of cultural transmission is the taboo against pork in Islamic countries. For Muslims eating pork is a sin, and the cultural disapproval of pork is so strong that not only is it frowned upon to consume pork, it is banned by Islamic Law. The aversion toward pork has reasons, and the most important source is the several verses in the Q’uran that state eating pork is an abomination or filth. Young people living in Muslim countries may learn about pork in religious settings, such as Q’uran classes or prayers, which would make them more susceptible to not wanting to eat pork, in some more extreme cases, hating pork. This is an example of explicit learning since the religious ideologies of avoiding meat are explicitly reinforced by the younger generation. For this case, implicit learning would be the lack of pork products in restaurants, markets, and households. If kids never see their parents or their closer community consume pork, they will not crave pork products due to lack of exposure. Here, it can be seen that the cultural transmission of practices affects the minds of the younger generation since people start developing strong feelings and even aversions towards certain food groups due to evolutionary learning.

“Muslims do not consume pork is sanitary reasons.“

Moreover, another reason why Muslims do not consume pork is sanitary reasons. Pigs are known to live in close proximity to their feces, and pork can carry a variety of diseases and parasites that are difficult to kill even when cooked. This ties into another factor of evolutionary learning, which is fitness. One of the most important causes behind social learning is increasing fitness, which is the evolutionary goal of every living organism. As in the words of Professor Barrett, “If I acquire the most common cultural variant in the population, it is likely to be fitness-better than the less common variants” (2015). So, limiting the consumption of a potential disease-carrying meat variety is a way to increase evolutionary fitness. Even though in this era people do not actively think “Pigs roll around in their own feces, so if I eat pork I might get sick and my evolutionary fitness can be in danger,” the implicit effects of this kind of thinking are present. I asked my Muslim friend if they would eat a pork product that was tested to be clean and disease-free, and they told me that even in a life-or-death situation (which is the only time the Q’uran allows eating pork) they would feel uncomfortable consuming pork. I thought this was very interesting because a life-or-death situation means certain damage to one’s fitness, but consuming pork is only potentially damaging to fitness. This shows the effects of evolutionary learning on one’s cognition because my friend’s aversion toward pork is so strong that they can not even imagine consuming pork in a hypothetical situation, even though it would be beneficial for their evolutionary fitness.

Now that we have seen an example of cultural transmission and the ways in which it is learned, I want to elaborate on the effects of transmission. Cultural practices, which are how people incorporate traditions into day-to-day life, influence implicit attitudes personally, and these implicit attitudes translate into transmitted cultural traits at the macro-level. One of the best-known examples of this is the dietary restrictions of Indians. Almost 80% of Indians follow some rule concerning meat in their diet, and the most common meat aversion is beef since cows are often traditionally viewed as sacred (Corichi, 2022).

In this case, the cultural practice is not eating beef, and the practice has been so internalized that most Indians will react negatively to talk regarding eating beef. There have been many instances of fights sparked due to discussions on beef, so it can be seen that there is a huge influence of cultural practices on implicit attitudes. Interestingly, the Indian view of cows has an effect so strong that the implications transcend dietary restrictions. People are not allowed to disturb cows in any way, which has peculiar effects such as cows breaking into homes, massive traffic jams, and even injuries caused by cow attacks. While Indians have adapted these as a part of their daily lives, a person from America would never wait two hours in traffic because a cow is sleeping on the highway. The idea that the cow is sacred results in different thinking patterns and behaviors for Indians, which again shows that evolutionary learning changes one’s mind and even society’s collective mind.

To conclude, as we have learned all throughout the course, social learning mechanisms play an important role not only in the development of the human mind but also create cultural differences that also further this transmission of social learning. As the chapter dedicated to culture in the book “The Shape of Thought” describes it, humans have become downright culture-dependent, such that cultural information like food taboos feeds back on the fitness-value of the information and enables culture acquisition mechanisms to evolve (Barrette, 2015). One of the most common cultural practices we encounter in our daily life is food, which vividly illustrates a culture’s taboos and traditions. By observing a culture or religion’s food taboos, in this case, dietary restrictions of Muslims and Indians, we can examine how evolutionary learning affects the human mind and society as a whole.

Works Cited:

Barrett, H. C. (2015). The shape of thought: How mental adaptations evolve. Oxford University Press.

Corichi, M. (2022, February 9). Eight-in-ten Indians limit meat in their diets, and four-in-ten consider themselves vegetarian. Pew Research Center. Retrieved June 3, 2022, from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/08/eight-in-ten-indians-limit-meat-in-their-diets- and-four-in-ten-consider-themselves-vegetarian/

Kashima, Y., Laham, S. M., Dix, J., Levis, B., Wong, D., & Wheeler, M. (2015). Social transmission of cultural practices and implicit attitudes. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 129, 113–125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2014.05.005

Truskanov, N., & Prat, Y. (2018). Cultural transmission in an ever-changing world: Trial-and-error copying may be more robust than precise imitation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 373(1743), 20170050. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0050

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