This essay started life as an inaugural lecture, at least in contemplation. That is to say, while I had little intention of delivering such a discourse, I did have a general audience in mind, one that would not only want to hear the details of a distant culture in which I had worked over many years, but would wish to know something of the general trends of recent work, including my own, and how these discussions took their place in the wider field of social anthropology and the social sciences. I took as my topic one that was receiving attention from a variety of scholars and approaches, that of food, mainly the cooked but also the raw. The subject linked up with the broad contrast between the domestic economies of Europe and Asia on the one hand and Africa on the other, which I had previously tried to examine in terms of the relationships between family systems and modes of production, as well as between oral and literate cultures, that is, in terms of modes of communication. I have tried to present this contrast in as direct a way as I can, perhaps over-simply. Today so much writing in the humanities and social sciences consists in unnecessary obfuscation that is often a way of disguising intellectual problems rather than illuminating them. Subtlety is not a function of obscurity.

The question behind the present essay can be stated in a few words.