What Are the Roots of the Psychological Obsession with Culinaria?

In my last post, I jokingly considered several different diagnostic categories of food porn addiction. Although there is no doubt an eager clinical psychologist or psychiatrist somewhere who would favor a long course of treatment for people who are obsessed with cookbooks, cooks, and other things culinary, I think it’s harmless (unless you are on a diet perhaps). But there are serious questions about our common obsession, and why some of us are more obsessed with these matters.

The roots of the obsession with cookbooks are somewhat different from the roots of the obsession with famous cooks, although there is no doubt some overlap.

Let’s start with the fascination with cookbooks, which taps into interesting questions about the coevolution of genes and culture. I am currently reading Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human. Wrangham is a biological anthropologist at Harvard, and close to the center of the prototype of a distinguished university professor. I met him once in a small group meeting, along with the straight-shooting Larry Sommers, who was then Harvard president. Wrangham, with his distinguished British accent and fine Italian suit, made a contrast with Sommers, who was wearing a slightly mismatched outfit, and carried himself more like a retired chief of police.

Wrangham’s argument in Catching Fire is that cooking is not something that followed the evolution of Homo sapiens’ large brain and complex social relationships, but instead something that itself caused that evolution. He pulls together a great deal of evidence from physical anthropology and biochemistry to make the case that humans, since Homo habilis, have been eating cooked food, which in turn fed the nutritional demands of our large brains. Cooked food, he convincingly argues, has immensely more caloric value than raw food (which is why it’s so easy to become obese in a modern world with easy access to high quality prepared foods, and why people lose weight and energy on raw food diets). He also presents evidence that our jaws, teeth, and digestive systems are not well-equipped to digest either raw meat or raw vegetables in sufficient quantities to feed our large brains. Wrangham also argues, from cross-cultural data on other societies, that the economics of food preparation and storage fueled the development of pair-bonds between men and women, as well as several other features of human social groups coevolved with cooking. I found Wrangham’s arguments to be as thought-provoking as those raised in Jared Diamond’s modern classic Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Given that history, it makes eminent sense that modern humans show a fascination with food preparation. This is not to say that we have a “gene for buying cookbooks.” But it is to say that we are predisposed to pay attention to, encode, and remember information about techniques for preparing food so as to maximize “tastiness” (which generally correlates highly with caloric content and digestability—think about eating a cupful of chocolate mousse versus a cup full of uncooked carrot chunks, and of course try to put aside your moral self-restraints). Some coevolutionary theorists think of culture as a set of tools for satisfying our basic biological needs. A great deal of culturally transmitted information involves elders teaching youth how to catch the local fish, how to find and prepare the local fruits and vegetables, as well as other skills they’ve themselves learned about survival and reproduction. Evolved predispositions always interact with local culture, and the interaction is bidirectional—some norms are resisted, some are welcomed. Those involving recipes for food preparation are surely in the latter category.

Why it’s called porn

Modern society provides a number of technological tools that appeal to our predispositions, and here is where “food porn” and sexual pornography have something in common. Sexual pornography appeals to mechanisms designed to seek out attractive mating partners, and printing and photography allow access to images of mating partners that would have been out of most of our ancestors’ leagues, or at least very very costly to acquire (yet still attractive). Food porn often presents pictures and/or descriptions of food prepared in ways that would take more time to prepare than most human beings have (especially those earning enough money to purchase the exotic ingredients). There are key differences, of course, fancy cookbooks do actually give blueprints that one can follow to reach an occasionally other-worldly goal (on a long weekend, for example).

Other links between sex and food

Wrangham reviews anthropological evidence suggesting that women do most or all of the cooking across the full range of human societies, even in those where there are otherwise egalitarian norms. That helps us make sense of why women are more likely to buy cookbooks. But it raises the question of why it is that the celebrity chefs are so frequently men. The reason for that is likely linked to the fact that men are over-represented in the ranks of famous artists, poets, and musicians. It is not that men have more intrinsic talents in these domains, just that they are likely to seek out opportunities to compete for status and show off their talents. Evolutionary theorists note that competitive showing off is more commonly a male pursuit throughout the animal kingdom, and is correlated with discrepancies in parental investment. To the extent that females invest more in the offspring, they are choosier about mates; and modern males are the descendants of those who were most successful in the “Pick me! Pick me!” game. In his book Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain notes that head chefs are rewarded with rock-star like access to women wanting to mate with them (and he describes one quite memorable scene in which the bride at a wedding is so awed by the cuisine that she sneaks back into the kitchen to have sex with the chef).

Oh, treatment

At the risk of offending all of my friends who are clinical psychologists, food porn addiction is a malady requiring no treatment. It has nutritional benefits, contributes to the ailing bookstore sector of the economy, and keeps marriages together. Wrangham reviews cross-cultural data to make a serious case that cooking is more central to a marriage than is sex. I find that quite easy to swallow.

Related post:

Food porn addiction I: Diagnosis and warning signs

References

Bourdain, A. (1995). Kitchen confidential: Adventures in the culinary underbelly. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

Diamond, J. (1999). Guns, germs, and steel. New York, NY: Norton.

Wrangham, R. (2010). Catching Fire: How cooking made us human. New York: Basic Books.