EVERYONE LIKES CRISPY

An Accounting For Taste

Why does crispness appeal to palates around the world, whether the diners are crunching on Kentucky Fried Chicken or crickets?

Omnivorous Mind

By John S. Allen
(Harvard, 319 pages, $25.95)

By LEO COLEMAN

Is there an instinct for food, some kernel of common taste hidden deep within the vast array of cuisines and food cultures? Does a "theory of food" guide our choice of foods, our idea of what counts as a full meal or a desirable snack? John S. Allen, a neuroanthropologist, thinks so, and in "The Omnivorous Mind" he explores our biological equipment for taste and the ways in which each culture builds a unique cuisine upon a shared cognitive blueprint. (click below to read more)

He observes, for instance, that crispness seems to be a desirable quality of foods, whether in the crunchy crickets treated as a delicacy by some cultures or in Kentucky Fried Chicken. Such universals suggest that a deeply ingrained culinary capacity is an essential part of every human's "biocultural" equipment, comparable to the cognitive capacities for language and empathy that indisputably marked important frontiers in human evolution.

It has long been clear to theorists that the big brains of evolutionarily "modern" humans demand special nutrition. Changes in brain-size in archaeological specimens can be related to the novel forms of hunting, storing and sharing food that emerged to support new dietary needs. Meanwhile, recent neuroscientific understandings of the human brain emphasize its neural flexibility, interconnection, and openness to change and adaptation. These findings lead Mr. Allen to conclude that modern humans must have evolved a range of cognitive and biological adaptations, including language, that supported "superomnivory," or a willingness and capacity to experiment with new food substances (and the fortitude to withstand the effects of failed experiments).

Mr. Allen is very good at condensing scholarly arguments about evolutionary origins and making them relevant to his interests in food. Such evolutionary stories are, in part, a kind of moral fable: What do we picture our earliest ancestors doing, and how can this explain the social institutions we have now or those we desire in the future? But whatever allowed groups of early humans to move into new ecological niches cannot explain culinary preferences in the present.

Evolutionary advantages were no doubt won by adaptability to multiple sources of good nutrients; but our omnivorous minds draw on and use food in a range of symbolic and social activities that cannot be reduced to nutrition, reward-seeking or cognitive patterning. This stands true for early humans as much as for the fast-food consumer who is sustained not just by fat and calories but also by seductive advertising images of the good life, by promises of efficiency and reliability, and by money left over after an affordable meal. Mr. Allen aims to address an audience interested in the current politics of food, but understanding the contemporary food system requires more economic and cultural insight than is on display here. 

The way we eat now certainly represents a radical change from the food environments in which humans evolved. We have created an entire industrial ecology of food production and distribution to deliver purified forms of sugar and fat in appealing, cheap and, indeed, often crispy forms that can be consumed in high quantities with minimal effort. We are now beginning to count the costs we pay for this monotonous plenty in high rates of obesity and diet-related diseases.

Yet whatever the "cognitive buttons" pressed by fatty or crispy foods, foods whether whole or processed always convey more than such abstract qualities, and their desirability draws on much broader social meanings. Mr. Allen suggests that the very word "crispy" is an onomatopoeia based on the experience of biting into a crisp food and carries a suggestion of freshness and desirability. On the linguistic point he is almost certainly wrong. Crispy has a semantic range far beyond the merely culinary, and it comes from a Latin term meaning "curly." How this word came to refer to bacon and chips and fresh apples is another story and one worth telling, but it is not part of Mr. Allen's account.

In the book's later chapters, food, cooking and eating serve mostly as convenient pegs on which to hang wide-ranging reviews of popular themes in cognitive science. Mr. Allen thus touches on cooking as creative expression, on studies of self-control and addictive behaviors linked to obesity and anorexia, and on the role of food behaviors in sexual selection. The role is minimal, it seems, even though courtship at some point usually involves going out to dinner.

Along the way, he reveals that there is no single neural center or network devoted to collating experiences of taste but rather a dispersed "gustatory cortex" that links many brain functions. Surprisingly, given our habit of associating taste with involuntary memory, there appears to be no connection between taste centers and the neural networks of memory. Farewell, Proust! But the lack of a dedicated brain center for food processing (as it were) only means that when we are pulled into the past by a potent taste, or find ourselves taking another helping of a comfort food, we must turn for insight not to evolutionary theory but to the writers, poets and artists who, at the cost of experimental precision, manage to convey something of the quiddity and particularity of human taste.

This point is underscored by the fact that aphorisms, sayings and insights from professional chefs, historians and food writers are liberally sprinkled throughout this book—the usual suspects are all here, from Escoffier to M.F.K. Fisher. These asides lend "The Omnivorous Mind" the piquancy and interest of a well-planned menu and keep you reading to collect further anecdotes and references. The writers that Mr. Allen draws on were usually more interested in the meaningful patterns of meals than in the generic qualities or universal tastes of foods. It seems that we like to hear about the details of an exotic cricket stew or an opulent vol-au-vent more than about the qualities of crispiness they share. This may be an evolved reaction, a taste for difference, part of our superomnivory. In the end, Mr. Allen admirably conveys that our varied taste is both what makes us human and what marks each of us as an individual.

Mr. Coleman teaches comparative studies at Ohio State University.